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ProblemWith limited global supplies of oral cholera vaccine, countries need to identify priority areas for vaccination while longer-term solutions, such as water and sanitation infrastructure, are being developed.ApproachIn 2017, Malawi integrated oral cholera vaccine into its national cholera control plan. The process started with a desk review and analysis of previous surveillance and risk factor data. At a consultative meeting, researchers, national health and water officials and representatives from nongovernmental and international organizations reviewed the data and local epidemiological knowledge to determine priority districts for oral cholera vaccination. The final stage was preparation of an application to the global oral cholera vaccine stockpile for non-emergency use.Local settingMalawi collects annual data on cholera and most districts have reported cases at least once since the 1970s.Relevant changesThe government’s application for 3.2 million doses of vaccine to be provided over 20 months in 12 districts was accepted in April 2017. By April 2018, over 1 million doses had been administered in five districts. Continuing surveillance in districts showed that cholera outbreaks were notably absent in vaccinated high-risk areas, despite a national outbreak in 2017–2018.Lessons learntAugmenting advanced mapping techniques with local information helped us extend priority areas beyond those identified as high-risk based on cholera incidence reported at the district level. Involvement of the water, sanitation and hygiene sectors is key to ensuring that short-term gains from cholera vaccine are backed by longer-term progress in reducing cholera transmission.

We report two cases of microvillus inclusion disease and these are the first cases in Korea. The two babies (one baby had a sibling who died of diarrhea in the neonatal period) had excreted their stools up to 200 ml/kg per day since several days after birth. Workup's included extensive infectious, immunologic, hormonal and rheumatologic studies, all of which were negative or normal. Diagnosis rested on the ultrastructural finding of intracytoplasmic inclusions that contained intact microvilli on electron microscopy. We tried somatostatin analogue (octreotide, 4 micrograms/kg/day), cholestyramine (up to 4g t.i.d.), steroid (prednisone, 2 mg/kg/day) and intravenous epidermal growth factor (100 ng/kg/hr for 2 weeks), but there was mild improvement with cholestyramine (decrease stool volume) and epidermal growth factor (increase the number of microvilli per cell) but no improvement was noted with the other treatments. Although it is a rare disorder and the prognosis of microvillus inclusion disease is poor, it must be considered if an infant has chronic secretory diarrhea.

Correlation coefficient estimates are often attenuated for truncated samples in the sense that the estimates are biased towards zero. Motivated by real data collected in South Sudan, we consider correlation coefficient estimation with singly truncated bivariate data. By considering a linear regression model in which a truncated variable is used as an explanatory variable, a consistent estimator for the regression slope can be obtained from the ordinary least squares method. A consistent estimator of the correlation coefficient is then obtained by multiplying the regression slope estimator by the variance ratio of the two variables. Results from two limited simulation studies confirm the validity and robustness of the proposed method. The proposed method is applied to the South Sudanese children's anthropometric and nutritional data collected by World Vision. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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