CONTEXT Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa, with substantial annual population growth. The current government seeks new policies for family limitation as a way to facilitate more sustainable development. METHODS Data from the 2005 Rwanda Demographic and Health Survey were used for a two-step analysis; binary logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with ...

BACKGROUND Hepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is a pandemic causing disease; more than 185 million people are infected worldwide. An HCV antibody (Ab) prevalence of 6.0% was estimated in Central African countries. The study aimed at providing HCV prevalence estimates among pregnant women in Rwanda. METHODS HCV surveillance through antibody screening test among pregnant women attending antenata...

BACKGROUND Accurate interpretation of lung function testing requires appropriate reference values. Unfortunately, few African countries have produced spirometric reference values for their populations. OBJECTIVES The present study was carried out in order to establish normal lung function values for subjects living in Rwanda, East Africa. METHODS The study was conducted in Kigali, capital o...

In 2005, a WHO consultation meeting on pregnancy intervals recommended a minimum interval of 6 months after a pregnancy disruption and an interval of two years after a live birth before attempting another pregnancy. Since then, studies have found contradictory evidence on the effect of shorter intervals after a pregnancy disruption. A binary regression analysis on 21532 last pregnancy outcomes ...

African highland agro-ecosystems are dominated by small-scale agricultural fields that often contain a mix of annual and perennial crops. This makes such systems difficult to map by remote sensing. We developed an expert Bayesian network model to extract the small-scale coffee fields of Rwanda from very high resolution data. The model was subsequently applied to aerial orthophotos covering more...

BACKGROUND Having a newborn infant hospitalised in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) is an unexpected and stressful event for a family. A number of potential stressors to which family members of patients in these units may be exposed have been identified, although no studies about this issue have been conducted in Rwanda. AIM The aim of this study was to describe and analyse parental pe...