Suchergebnisse

SummaryA study in Bangladesh showed that couples who lost a child often stopped practising contraception in order to have another child. Logistic regression analysis revealed that contraceptive continuation was related to maternal age, parity, husband's education and the sex of the last child.

SummaryThis paper discusses polygynous marriages in rural Bangladesh, using marital status and birth registration data from the Demographic Surveillance System of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, for the period 1975–79. Of all the marriages recorded during this period about 5% were polygynous. To identify the women polygynously married, 1974 census data of the DSS area were used. The difference in age at marriage between the polygynous groom and his subsequent wife was 15 years on average. The socioeconomic indicators studied were education, occupation and area of dwelling space. In general, these indicators differentially influence polygynous marriage. The fertility differentials between women in monogamous marriages were significantly higher than between the women in polygynous unions.

An integrated water supply, sanitation and hygiene (WSH) education intervention project was run by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh, over the period 1983-87. In the intervention area the project provided handpumps, pit latrines, and hygiene education to about 800 households. The control population did not receive any interventions, but had access to the usual government and private WSH facilities. After 1987 no external support was provided to maintain these provisions. A cross-sectional follow-up survey, which was carried out in 1992, involved about 500 randomly selected households from the intervention and control areas. In 1992 about 82% of the pumps were still in good functional condition and of these, 94% had been functioning well in 1987. Fewer latrines were functional in 1992 (64%) than at the end of 1987 (93%). In the former intervention area about 84% of the adults were using sanitary latrines in 1992 compared with only 7% in the control area. Knowledge related to disease transmission, however, was poor and similar in both areas. People claimed that they used the WSH facilities to improve the quality of their lives. The prevalence of diarrhoeal diseases in the 1992 survey among the control population was about twice that among those in the intervention area.