BACKGROUND Maternal mortality can be particularly high in conflict and chronic emergency settings, partly due to inaccessible maternal care. This paper examines associations of refugee-led health education, formal education, age, and parity on maternal knowledge, attitudes, and practices among reproductive-age women in refugee camps in Guinea. METHODS Data comes from a 1999 cross-sectional su...

Th e aim of study was to investigate diff erent models for the evaluation of dairy bulls for male fertility. A dataset containing single insemination records performed on Brown Swiss cows and heifers reared in Eastern Italian Alps was used. Th e outcome variable (successful/ unsuccessful) was analyzed as binary trait. In the fi rst step raw conception rate was computed for each service sire, as...

A study was conducted to estimate heritabilities of, and genetic correlations among, body weight (WT) and testicular measurements - scrotal circumference (SC), testicular diameter (TD), testicular length (TL) and epididymal diameter (ED) - in ram lambs between 6, 9 and 12 months old, and relationship of the testicular traits with age at puberty in ewe lambs (AP). Two fat-tailed sheep breeds, th...

Because of difficulties in data collection and analysis, in most breeds there have been limited ways to evaluate fertility in females on a between-herd basis. The objective of this study was to determine the heritabilities (direct and maternal) for CD (calving day) and AFC (age at first calving) in American Angus heifers and to evaluate the potential for using these traits in genetic improvemen...

Binary variables arising from an underlying normal distribution with a fixed threshold were simulated in a two-stage selection scheme with a sire model. The model had herd-year-seasons and groups as fixed effects and sires as random variables; a heritability of .25 was used in the simulation. The "best" 20% of the sires were allowed to have additional progeny in the second stage. The criteria u...

Sire genetic evaluations for protein yield, productive life, and selected type traits from the US were correlated with sire evaluations for disease from Denmark and Sweden and were then adjusted to approximate genetic correlations. Disease categories from Denmark included reproductive diseases, foot and leg diseases, metabolic and digestive diseases, and all diseases other than mastitis. Geneti...

This study was conducted to compare carcass EPD predicted using yearling live animal data and/or progeny carcass data, and to quantify the association between the carcass phenotype of progeny and the sire EPD. The live data model (L) included scan weight, ultrasound fat thickness, longissimus muscle area, and percentage of intramuscular fat from yearling (369 d of age) Simmental bulls and heife...

in this study, the effect of maternal additive genetic and environment on body weight at 6 weeks (bwt6w), breast width (hbrs), carcass weight (carcwt), breast weight (brswt), blood hematocrit value (hem), residual feed intake (rfi), daily feed intake (dfi) and average daily gain (adg) were investigated in a commercial broiler dam line. with and without maternal effects, six different animal mod...