ABSTRACT Flower farms play an important role in the horticulture industry which contributes about 10% of agricultural produce in Kenya. They create employment, earn foreign exchange through exports and improve infrastructure in the world. Despite these achievements agro-chemicals used in these farms to increase production pose a great danger to the health of the farm workers and the surrounding environment. The broad objective of this study was to perform an assessment of factors affecting l...
ABSTRACT Emerging scientific data from pharmacological and physiological studies continue to show that tea has beneficial effects on human health by boosting immunity. In vitro studies have shown that flavonoids help immune response by acting as anti-cancer, anti-viral and antibacterial agents. In this study, different types of commercial tea samples were assayed for their phenolic composition, antioxidant activity and their effect on chronic inflammation induced by Trypanosoma brucei brucei...
ABSTRACT Mosquitoes transmit devastating diseases that kill millions of people each year. The adverse effects on human health, well being and high economic losses inflicted by mosquitoes, the malaria vector, is an important stimulant for the search for new, safe and effective mosquito larvicides. The pool of natural products is an important source of such larvicidal metabolites. Fungi have extensive secondary metabolites at their disposal, and some could be active against the mosquito larvae...
ABSTRACT Cassava (Manihot esculenta Cranzt) is an important food security crop for resource poor rural communities particularly in Africa. Little is however known about variability of critical root nutritional, biochemical quality traits and molecular diversity of Kenyan cassava germplasm. This led to a study whose objective was to determine the nutritional quality traits of different genotypes of cassava cultivated in the central Rift Valley region of Kenya and to identify genetic constitut...
ABSTRACT Milk production in Kenya is dominated by smallholder dairy farmers who are faced with challenges on feeding dairy cows. This is generally due to inadequate and low quality feeds and high cost of inputs. Thus, utilization of inexpensive nutrient dense feed supplement such as liquid brewer’s yeast (LBY) is inevitable. However, LBY is rarely used due to its short shelf life and lack of technical information on effect on milk quality. This study was performed to investigate the approp...
ABSTRACT Manifolds are generalization of curves and surfaces to arbitrary higher dimensions. They are of many kinds, one of them being topological manifolds. The main feature common to manifolds is that every point of the space is in one to one correspondence with a point in another space. Hausdorff manifolds have been developed on infinite dimensional spaces such as Banach spaces and Fréchet spaces. Topological properties of non-Hausdorff manifolds have been studied and the notion of compa...
ABSTRACT Aflatoxin contamination is a major problem affecting cereal producers worldwide. Aspergillus species, which are known to produce these toxins, colonize cereals in the field, during post-harvest period through to storage. This study sought to establish variation in: (i) fungal species in maize and soil, (ii) their morphological diversity, (iii) the distribution of toxigenic Aspergillus species as well as, (iv) the seasonal variations of aflatoxins and (v) the predominant toxin type i...
ABSTRACT Tick borne diseases have severe consequences on the health of millions of cattle worldwide and cause serious economic losses. Synthetic drugs have been effective acaricideshowever they are expensive, show side effects and develop resistance.This has generated interest in the use ofplant based acaricides, which however seem to offer a reliable, cheap and cost effective methods. In this research, the acaricidal activityof Acokanthera schimperi secondarymetabolites againstRipicephalus....
Missing observations is a common occurrence in data collection. To solve this problem, researchers have developed missing value imputation techniques for some linear and nonlinear time series models with normal and stable innovations using estimating function criterion. This criterion does not take into consideration the distribution of the innovation sequence of the time series model. Therefore the aim of this study was to develop explicit optimal linear estimators of missing values for seve...
ABSTRACT Intestinal helminth infections with parasites such as Ascaris lumbricoides, Necator americanus, Ancylostoma duodenale and Trichuris trichiura, during pregnancy are associated with adverse outcomes including, poor nutritional status, growth, low birth weight and perinatal mortality. They present major public health problem in developing countries, but the prevalence, intensity and predisposing factors are not adequately documented in many areas of Kenya. The purpose of this study was...
Road traffic accidents have been a major cause of deaths in Kenya. The effort by Kenya police to enforce traffic laws has done little to salvage the situation. Although there has been other remedies towards curbing road accidents such as; improvements in vehicle design and licensing to skill the situation calls for further solution particularly targeting driver behavior since careless driving has been identified as a major cause of road accidents. The research provides a solution by designing...
ABSTRACT This study explores the use of lactic acid bacteria from fresh salad vegetables to inhibit fungal growth. The antifungal assay was done using the agar well diffusion method as reported by Schillinger and Lucke (1989). The largest zone of inhibition (25mm) was recorded by the antagonistic activity of the isolate identified to Lactobacillus plantarum against Candida albicans ATCC 90029. No activity was recorded against Candida parapsilosis ATCC 22019, C. valida UCH 1508, C. pseudotrop...
Water and Sewerage service providers in Kenya have encountered challenges in proficient collection of water billing data from customer’s meters. This necessitates the need to implement a proper data collection mechanism that can be implemented remotely, effortlessly, and accurately. Recent advances in telemetry now provide reliable water meter data. However no water utility has implemented a technology based, remote data collection strategy. A Zigbee WPAN-to-WAN solution for water meter dat...
Abstract Large area estimation has been mostly accomplished using Geoadditive Models (GM) which combines the ideas of Geostatistics and additive models. The GM relaxes the classical assumptions of traditional parametric model by simultaneously incorporating linear and nonlinear, nonparametric effects of covariates, nonlinear interactions and spatial effects into a Geoadditive predictor. In the past, estimation of GM has been based on large area as a result of insufficient information in sma...
In this work, the antimicrobial properties of fresh Buchholzia Coriacea (wonderful kola) and its extracts was investigated. The proximate composition of the fresh kola was also determined. B. coriacea was dried, milled and extracted using two different solvents of varying polarity: hexane and methanol. The effect of the fresh kola, hexane and methanol extracts was tested on some food borne pathogens. This was evaluated by measuring the zone of inhibition on nutrient agar for bacteria and malt...