Background Varicella during pregnancy can lead to serious maternal and fetal consequences. Although an effective vaccine is available it is not incorporated in to the routine vaccination programs in most of the Asian countries. Objectives of the study were to determine the susceptibility to varicella and factors associated with immunity, among a group of pregnant women attending to a tertiary care hospital in Sri Lanka. Methods A hospital based descriptive cross sectional study was carried out at De Soyza maternity Hospital, Colombo. A sample of 385 pregnant women was selected. Data were collected through an interviewer administered questionnaire; presence of varicella IgG in blood was assessed by a validated commercial ELISA (Enzyme Linked Immunosorbant Assay. Results The sample had a mean age of 28.5 years and majority was educated beyond General Certificate of Education (GCE) Ordinary Level. We found that 34% of study population was susceptible for the infection. A past history of varicella had a 89.5% positive predictive value and 53.1% negative predictive value for varicella immunity. Varicella sero-positivity was only associated with a lower educational level and number of childhood household members more than four. There was no association of sero-positivity with age. Conclusion This study demonstrates that a significant proportion of pregnant women of the study population are varicella-susceptible. Pre-pregnancy screening and preventive strategies including vaccination should be evaluated. History of past varicella infection could be a useful screening tool to exclude patients for vaccination. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12879-019-3996-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Background: Multimodal stroke imaging (Non-contrast CT, CT perfusion and CT angiogram) is essential to acute stroke assessment, there is currently no benchmark for this key process from real world data. Methods: Retrospective review of the turnaround time of consecutive multimodal imaging performed for acute stroke assessment at two high volume stroke centers in Australasia from July to September 2019.Results: 252 imaging studies were included from both sites. The overall median time from acquisition to imaging availability was 13 minutes (IQR 11- 16). The median for Christchurch and Box Hill were 11 minutes (IQR 10 – 12) and 15 minutes (IQR 13 – 19) respectively. Conclusions: Multimodal stroke imaging turnaround time of 11 minutes is a reasonable benchmark.