Background: Intestinal obstruction is the most common surgical emergency worldwide. Intestinal obstruction continues to remain a challenge to surgeons despite advances in the field of medicine, surgical technique and accounts for high mortality ranges from 3% to 30% all over the world. Objective: The study aimed to assess management outcome and its associated factors among surgically treated intestinal obstruction cases, at Dilla University Referral Hospital 2020 GC. Method: Hospital-based cross-sectional study was conducted on all cases surgically managed for intestinal obstruction, at Dilla University Referral Hospital from November, 1/2016 up to November, 30/2019. Data were collected using a structured questionnaire by trained data collectors. The collected data was checked for its completeness and entered into epidata version 3.1 then exported to SPSS version 26 for cleaning and analysis. The odds ratio along with 95%CI was estimated to measure the strength of the association. Statistical significance was declared at p-value < 0.05. Result: 258 cases were included in this study. From these, 223 (86.4%) cases have favorable surgical management outcomes of intestinal obstruction. Of 35 cases with unfavorable outcome, the most common postoperative complication occurred was surgical site Infection followed by post-operative pneumonia. A total of 4.7% of postoperative deaths were documented as unfavorable surgical management outcomes. Fever, length of illness, comorbidity, intraoperative bowel condition, bowel resection was done and length of hospital stay after operation were independent significantly associated factors with the surgical management outcome of intestinal obstruction. Conclusion: The unfavorable management outcome of patients with IO who treated surgically at the study area was high. Assessing co-morbidity, fluid resuscitation, administration of prophylactic antibiotics before operation and properly applying infection prevention protocol are some of the activities that need emphasis in intestinal obstruction management. Highlights

Spices are invaluable crops in Ethiopia and research. Just like coffee, their production started many years ago. Availability of diverse agro ecology allowed the country to cultivate different spices. Lowland (ginger, turmeric, black pepper, cardamom, and vanilla) and highland seed spices (black cumin and white cumin, fenugreek, and coriander) were some of the target in research. Appropriate crop management practices, next to varieties are very mandatory to improve productivity and production of spices. Suitable field management recommendations of the released spices varieties have been effected and because of that, productivity and production increased significantly. Spices such as korarima and long pepper are indigenous and special attention is needed to prepare their production packages. Cultural practices such as appropriate planting material preparation, planting time, propagation method, nursery and field management practices (shade/support management, pruning practices, and fertility requirement on some of the spices) have been conducted and important information is available for users. In addition, multiplication and distribution of planting materials has been underway for the released varieties. Also, attention has been given to the multiplication and dissemination of disease-free planting materials of ginger. This review paper summarizes the status of crop management practices, achievements, challenges and future prospects of spices.

Many research works have been done on black cumin focusing on its nutritional and medicinal properties. But, there is inadequate information on the association of yield and yield-constituting traits of black cumin to improve its production. Therefore, correlation analysis was made on thirty-six black cumin accessions evaluated at Jimma in simple lattice design during 2016, to quantify the relationship between traits. The result of the analysis showed that seed yield ha−1 had positive and highly significant correlation with number of effective capsules (0.88), secondary branches (0.73), plant height (0.72), total branches (0.71), steam thickness (0.58), primary branches (0.52), tertiary branches (0.52), harvesting index (0.47), and biological yield (0.43). Path coefficient analysis revealed that harvesting index, biological yield, and number of effective capsules exerted high and favorable direct contribution to seed yield at phenotypic level, whereas harvesting index, biological yield, primary and tertiary branches, number of effective capsules, and stem thickness showed positive direct effect at genotypic level. The favorable direct effects of these traits on grain yield indicate that keeping other variables constant, improvement of these traits will increase black cumin yield. Therefore, these traits should be kept in mind in the future breeding program of black cumin.