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Background The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has become a major threat to human life around the world. This study aims to assess the knowledge, attitude, and practices regarding COVID-19 among people with chronic diseases at the outpatient departments in Ho Chi Minh City. Methods A cross-sectional study was carried out between February and March 2020 using a convenience sampling strategy in three hospitals in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC) via the use of a structured self-administered questionnaire. Factors relating to practices, prevalence ratio (PR), and 95% confidence interval were estimated by using the Poisson regression with robust options. P-value <0.05 was considered as statistically different. Results A total of 522 participants had a mean age of 51.5 ± 10.6 years. Most of them reported seeing information regarding the COVID-19 pandemic (93.7%) via television and social media (72.8% and 62.1%, respectively). Just over two-thirds of the participants (68.4%) answered with sufficient knowledge of COVID-19. Most respondents had a positive attitude toward COVID-19 (90.8%), although some misconceptions existed. Almost over three-fourths of them (77.2%) maintained good practices for prevention. The rate of good practices in those who had sufficient knowledge was 1.24 times greater than that among those who had insufficient knowledge (PR 1.24, 95% CI: 1.10–1.41, P<0.05). Also, the rate of good practices in males was lower than that of females (PR: 0.91, 95% CI: 0.83–0.99, P<0.05). Conclusion There still exists an amount of insufficient knowledge and negative attitude regarding COVID-19, which may be barriers to good prevention practices among chronic illness patients. Education programs need to continue via television and social media and emphasize that people with chronic diseases are more likely to experience severe symptoms, including death from COVID-19. Additionally, management authorities should prolong specific policies to protect the more vulnerable in our community.

Agonist-induced smooth muscle relaxation occurs following an increase in intracellular concentrations of cGMP or cAMP. However, the role of protein kinase G (PKG) and/or protein kinase A (PKA) in cGMP- or cAMP-mediated pulmonary vasodilation is not clearly elucidated. In this study, we examined the relaxation responses of isolated pulmonary arteries of lambs (age = 10 +/- 1 days), preconstricted with endothelin-1, to increasing concentrations of 8-bromo-cGMP (8-BrcGMP) or 8-BrcAMP (cell-permeable analogs), in the presence or absence of Rp-8-beta-phenyl-1,N(2)-etheno-bromoguanosine cyclic monosphordthioate (Rp-8-PET-BrcGMPS) or KT-5720, selective inhibitors of PKG and PKA, respectively. When examined for specificity, Rp-8-Br-PET-cGMPS abolished PKG, but not PKA, activity in pulmonary arterial extracts, whereas KT-5720 inhibited PKA activity only. 8-BrcGMP-induced relaxation was inhibited by the PKG inhibitor only, whereas 8-BrcAMP-induced relaxation was inhibited by both inhibitors. A nearly fourfold higher concentration of cAMP than cGMP was required to relax arteries by 50% and to activate PKG by 50%. Our results demonstrate that relaxation of pulmonary arteries is more sensitive to cGMP than cAMP and that PKG plays an important role in both cGMP- and cAMP-mediated relaxation.

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Gram-negative bacteria are normally resistant to the antibiotic vancomycin (VAN), which cannot significantly penetrate the outer membrane. We used Escherichia coli mutants that are partially sensitive to VAN to study synergies between VAN and 10 other antibiotics representing six different functional categories. We detected strong synergies with VAN and nitrofurantoin (NTR) and with VAN and trimethoprim (TMP) and moderate synergies with other drugs, such as aminoglycosides. These synergies are powerful enough to show the activity of VAN against wild-type E. coli at concentrations of VAN as low as 6.25 g/ml. This suggests that a very small percentage of exogenous VAN does enter E. coli but normally has insignificant effects on growth inhibition or cell killing. We used the results of pairwise interactions with VAN V ancomycin (VAN) has proved to be an effective antibiotic against certain multidrug-resistant Gram-positive pathogens, such as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). However, the large size of this glycopeptide precludes it from being useful against Gram-negative bacterial infections, since the outer membrane of Gram-negative bacteria acts as a barrier to its entry into the cell (1). Finding agents that act synergistically with VAN against Gram-negative bacteria would be valuable in treating infections caused by multidrug-resistant pathogens, such as carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae, a leading cause of hospitalacquired pneumonia in the United States (2). Certain mutants of Escherichia coli with gene knockouts that affect outer membrane assembly (surA [3] and smpA [4] mutants) display increased sensitivity to VAN. Recently, we have found that E. coli mutants lacking deoxycytidine deaminase (DCD) also are more sensitive to VAN than wild-type (WT) strains (5). In the work reported here, we have used surA and dcd mutants to study drug interactions between VAN and a series of antibiotics in E. coli. We detected strong synergies between VAN and nitrofurantoin (NTR) and between VAN and trimethoprim (TMP). We then tested different concentrations of each of these two antibiotics both alone and in combination with VAN in the wild-type background and demonstrated that wild-type cells are sensitized to relatively low concentrations of VAN in the presence of subinhibitory concentrations of either NTR or TMP. We discuss the possible implications of these results for combination drug therapy. MATERIALS AND METHODSE. coli strains. The DCD-deficient and SurA-deficient strains used here are from the Keio Collection, described by Baba et al. (6), and were made from the starting strain BW25113 (7). This starting strain (lacI q rrnB T14 ⌬lacZ WJ16 hsdR514 ⌬araBAD AH33 ⌬rhaBAD LD78 ) is used as the WT in the experiments reported here, unless otherwise stated. BW25113 is closely related to MG1655, as both are derived from the strain W1485 background (6). The dcd mutant and the surA mutant carry a complete deletion of the dcd gene and the surA gene, respectively, with a kan kanamycin resistance gene ...

Phase I of the OC6 project is focused on examining why offshore wind design tools underpredict the response (loads/motion) of the OC5-DeepCwind semisubmersible at its surge and pitch natural frequencies. Previous investigations showed that the underprediction was primarily related to nonlinear hydrodynamic loading, so two new validation campaigns were performed to separately examine the different hydrodynamic load components. In this paper, we validate a variety of tools against this new test data, focusing on the ability to accurately model the low-frequency loads on a semisubmersible floater when held fixed under wave excitation and when forced to oscillate in the surge direction. However, it is observed that models providing better load predictions in these two scenarios do not necessarily produce a more accurate motion response in a moored configuration.

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