BackgroundIn many developing countries, private pharmacies play an important role in providing health information and services to local communities for common health issues. The aim of this study was to ascertain medium-term impact of educational interventions on knowledge and practice of pharmacy staff regarding management of childhood diarrhea in Vietnam.MethodsThis was a pre- and post-intervention study with 32 and 44 months difference from the time of the baseline survey to the conclusion of trainings and the time of the end-line survey, respectively. Interventions included in-class training for pharmacy staff, printed materials at the pharmacy, and supportive supervision. Knowledge/reported practice and actual practice of pharmacy staff were measured before and after interventions.ResultsAfter interventions, significant improvements (p<0.01) were observed for all indexes related to pharmacy staff's knowledge about childhood diarrhea; for instance, 31% and 60% of surveyed staff asked about weight of the child and accompanying symptoms of childhood diarrhea, respectively, an increase from 11% and 45% at the baseline. Oral rehydration solution (ORS) was the most frequently reported product recommended (97% to 99%), but probiotics and antidiarrheals were the products most frequently prescribed at pharmacies. Public health facilities remained the preferred choice for referrals from pharmacies, but the use of private clinics was increasing. Consultations and advice provided to caregivers also improved, but considerable gaps between knowledge and actual practice of staff in real pharmacy settings remained.ConclusionsEducational interventions were effective in improving pharmacy staff knowledge and practice regarding management of childhood diarrhea. Knowledge and actual practice of staff in real pharmacy settings did not always correlate; there is need for a stronger regulatory and law enforcement system. Interventions to improve pharmacy practice in developing countries should be focused, comprehensive, and evidence-based.

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Abstract:The global financial crisis of 2007-2008 had a negative impact on many countries, including Vietnam. Many policies have been applied to stabilize the macro-economic indicators. However, most of them are based on old qualitative models, which do not help policy makers understand deeply how each one affects the economy. In this paper, we investigate a quantitative macro-economic approach and use leaning against the wind policies with the Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium model (DSGE) to find a better way to understand how policies stabilize the Vietnamese economy. Based on the framework of Gerali et al., we calibrate the hyper-parameter for Vietnam financial data and do the comparison between the standard Taylor rule and the cases in which we add asset price and credit elements. The results show that the credit-augmented Taylor rule is better than the asset-price-augmented one under the technology shock and contrary to the cost-push shock. Moreover, the extended simulation result shows that combining both asset-price and credit rules on the model is not useful for Vietnam's economy in both types of shock.

Purpose Data crawling in e-commerce for market research often come with the risk of poor authenticity due to modification attacks. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel data authentication model for such systems. Design/methodology/approach The data modification problem requires careful examinations in which the data are re-collected to verify their reliability by overlapping the two datasets. This approach is to use different anomaly detection techniques to determine which data are potential for frauds and to be re-collected. The paper also proposes a data selection model using their weights of importance in addition to anomaly detection. The target is to significantly reduce the amount of data in need of verification, but still guarantee that they achieve their high authenticity. Empirical experiments are conducted with real-world datasets to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Findings The authors examine several techniques for detecting anomalies in the data of users and products, which give the accuracy of 80 per cent approximately. The integration with the weight selection model is also proved to be able to detect more than 80 per cent of the existing fraudulent ones while being careful not to accidentally include ones which are not, especially when the proportion of frauds is high. Originality/value With the rapid development of e-commerce fields, fraud detection on their data, as well as in Web crawling systems is new and necessary for research. This paper contributes a novel approach in crawling systems data authentication problem which has not been studied much.

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This paper presents a summary of our results on studies of synthesis and biomedical application of optical nanoparticles. Gold, dye-doped silica based and core-shell multifunctional multilayer (SiO 2 /Au, Fe 3 O 4 /SiO 2 , Fe 3 O 4 /SiO 2 /Au) water-monodispersed nanoparticles were synthesized by chemical route and surface modified with proteins and biocompatible chemical reagents. The particles were conjugated with antibody or aptamer for specific detecting and imaging bacteria and cancer cells. The photothermal effects of gold nanoshells (SiO 2 /Au and Fe 3 O 4 /SiO 2 /Au) on cells and tissues were investigated. The nano silver substrates were developed for surface enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) spectroscopy to detect melamine.

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