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Summary: Background: The high rate of infections among patients admitted to critical care units (CCUs) is associated with high rate of antibiotic consumption, especially broad-spectrum antibiotics. This study is to describe the antibiotics use in CCUs in primary and secondary hospitals in Vietnam, a setting with high burden of antibiotic resistance. Methods: This was a 7-day observational study in 51 CCUs in hospitals from 5 provinces in Vietnam from March to July 2019. Patients aged ≥ 18 years admitted to the participating CCUs was enrolled consecutively. We collected data on patient's demographics, initial diagnosis and antibiotic therapy within the first 24 hours. Antibiotic therapy was classified by the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) Index and the 2019 WHO Access, Watch, Reserve (AWaRe) groups. Findings: Out of 1747 enrolled patients, empirical antibiotic treatments were initiated in 1112 (63.6%) patients. The most frequently prescribed antibiotics were cefotaxime (22.3%), levofloxacin (19%) and ceftazidime (10.8%). Antibiotics were given in 31.5% of patients without diagnosis of infection. Watch and/or Reserve group antibiotic were given in 87.3% of patients and associated with patient's age (aOR 1.01 per 1-year increment, 95%CI 1.00-1.02) and the presence of SIRS on admission (aOR 2.1, 95%CI 1.38-3.2). Interpretation: We observed a high frequency use and a substantial variation in patterns of empirical antibiotic use in the CCUs in Vietnam. It highlights the importance of continuous monitoring antibiotic consumption in CCUs. Funding: None.

This study aimed to isolate and evaluate the probiotic potential of lactic acid bacteria (LAB) from Chinese cabbage (Brassica rapa subsp. pekinensis) that is typically used in Kimchi, a Korean fermented product. Lactococcus lactis VLC.1 and VLC.2, and Lactococcus garvieae VLC.3 were identified and further assessed for their probiotic properties. These strains exhibited biological activity such as antioxidant capabilities, antimicrobial activity against pathogenic bacteria, hydrophobicity, and co-aggregation. These findings suggest their potential as probiotics to alleviate oxidative stress and maintain gastrointestinal flora balance. Significantly, the cell-free supernatants derived from LAB isolates exhibited synergistic antimicrobial activity with effectiveness against Escherichia coli, providing novel strategies to address antibiotic resistance challenges. The LAB isolates showed no antibiotic resistance and lacked hemolytic activity, underscoring their safety and efficacy as probiotics. In summary, our findings contribute valuable insights into the biological and safety properties of LAB strains isolated from Chinese cabbage, highlighting their functional benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document provides an overview of the COVID-19 response in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC), Vietnam. During the fourth wave of the pandemic, HCMC implemented a flexible and integrated care pathway that utilized multiple levels of healthcare, including home care and intermediate care facilities. The government and society demonstrated a strong commitment to combating COVID-19 and disseminated updated guidance in a timely manner. The ability to make timely adjustments to the care pathway, along with multisectoral engagement and high-level commitment, contributed to Vietnam's successful pandemic response without overwhelming the healthcare system. [Extracted from the article]

Over the past few years, peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have rapidly grown in popularity and have become a dominant means for sharing resources. In these systems, load balancing is a key challenge because nodes are often heterogeneous. While several load-balancing schemes have been proposed in the literature, these solutions are typically ad hoc, heuristic based, and localized. In this paper, we present a general framework, HiGLOB, for global load balancing in structured P2P systems. Each node in HiGLOB has two key components: 1) a histogram manager maintains a histogram that reflects a global view of the distribution of the load in the system, and 2) a load-balancing manager that redistributes the load whenever the node becomes overloaded or underloaded. We exploit the routing metadata to partition the P2P network into nonoverlapping regions corresponding to the histogram buckets. We propose mechanisms to keep the cost of constructing and maintaining the histograms low. We further show that our scheme can control and bound the amount of load imbalance across the system. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of HiGLOB by instantiating it over three existing structured P2P systems: Skip Graph, BATON, and Chord. Our experimental results indicate that our approach works well in practice. Index Terms--Peer-to-peer, framework, load balancing, histogram, DHT, overlay network.