The nutritional iron absorption from a typical peruvian diet was studied by the Eakins and Brown method. The foods were breakfast: coffee and bread with butter; lunch: vegetable soup rice with cow tripe stew and lemonade; dinner: vegetable soup and bread. The results show that despite low iron content in the meals, which is not enough to meet daily iron requirements absorption was good in lunch possibly by the action of the promoters ascorbic acid (lemonade) and heme iron (cow tripe). Iron absorption in lunch was good and different from dinner and breakfast. We cannot conclude if the low iron absorption from bread is affected by coffee.

The contents of Ca, Cl, K, Mg and Na, in milk and milk with cereal, consumed by the peruvian children were determined by short irradiation INNA using RP-10 reactor, with a thermal flux of 10 13 ncm-2 s-1, and a pneumatical system. The comparative mcthod with solutions of primary standards of each element determined was used. The IAEA-A11-milk powder, IAEA-H4-Animal muscle and IAEA-V10-Hay powder, reference materials were periodically analyzed, together with the samples, in order to check the quality of analytical results.

The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence, virulence factors (stx, eae, ehxA and astA) and phylogenetic relationships [PFGE and multilocus sequence typing (MLST)] of Shiga toxinproducing Escherichia coli (STEC) strains isolated from four previous cohort studies in 2212 Peruvian children aged ,36 months. STEC prevalence was 0.4% (14/3219) in diarrhoeal and 0.6% (15/2695) in control samples. None of the infected children developed haemolytic uraemic syndrome (HUS) or other complications of STEC. stx1 was present in 83% of strains, stx2 in 17 %, eae in 72 %, ehxA in 59% and astA in 14 %. The most common serotype was O26: H11 (14%) and the most common seropathotype was B (45 %). The strains belonged mainly to phylogenetic group B1 (52 %). The distinct combinations of alleles across the seven MLST loci were used to define 13 sequence types among 19 STEC strains. PFGE typing of 20 ...