BackgroundThe irrational overuse of antibiotics should be minimized as it drives the development of antibiotic resistance, but changing these practices is challenging. A better understanding is needed of practices and economic incentives for antibiotic dispensing in order to design effective interventions to reduce inappropriate antibiotic use. Here we report on both quantitative and qualitative aspects of antibiotic sales in private pharmacies in northern Vietnam.MethodA cross-sectional study was conducted in which all drug sales were observed and recorded for three consecutive days at thirty private pharmacies, 15 urban and 15 rural, in the Hanoi region in 2010. The proportion of antibiotics to total drug sales was assessed and the revenue was calculated for rural and urban settings. Pharmacists and drug sellers were interviewed by a semi-structured questionnaire and in-depth interviews to understand the incentive structure of antibiotic dispensing.ResultsIn total 2953 drug sale transactions (2083 urban and 870 rural) were observed. Antibiotics contributed 24% and 18% to the total revenue of pharmacies in urban and rural, respectively. Most antibiotics were sold without a prescription: 88% in urban and 91% in rural pharmacies. The most frequent reported reason for buying antibiotics was cough in the urban setting (32%) and fever in the rural area (22%). Consumers commonly requested antibiotics without having a prescription: 50% in urban and 28% in rural area. The qualitative data revealed that drug sellers and customer’s knowledge of antibiotics and antibiotic resistance were low, particularly in rural area.ConclusionOver the counter sales of antibiotic without a prescription remains a major problem in Vietnam. Suggested areas of improvement are enforcement of regulations and pricing policies and educational programs to increase the knowledge of drug sellers as well as to increase community awareness to reduce demand-side pressure for drug sellers to dispense antibiotics inappropriately.
The structure and dynamics of liquid lead silicate with a wide range of PbO ratio are done by molecular dynamics methods. The simulated result shows that the pair radial distribution functions (PRDFs) are in good agreement with the results of previous studies. Our calculated data indicates that the system exists regions of fast and slow atoms determined via the mean square displacement (MSD) in the same interval. The exhibition of dynamical heterogeneity (DH) is also found in this paper.
The structural properties of xAl2O3(1-x)SiO2 liquid systems have been investi-gated by molecular dynamics simulation in a wide range of compositions, x = 0.05–0.7 at 3000 K. The structure of liquid aluminosilicate system is clarified by analyzing the simplex and shell-core. The simulated results showed that the liquid consists of a large quantity of void-simplex, O-simplex, T-simplex, and SC-particle. Our simulation reveals that the densification of the liquid is due to the fact that the number of large simplexes and the radii of simplexes and SC-particles decrease. Besides, results also indicated that the distribution of cations in the liquid is not uniform.
The structural characteristics of liquid lead silicate xPbO(1-x)SiO2 are performed by means of molecular dynamics simulation at ambient pressure using the Born-Mayer pairwise potentials. The simulations have been performed on the systems which include different samples with a large range of PbO content ( 0.05 ⩽ x ⩽0.75). The short and intermediate range order in liquid xPbO(1-x)SiO2 have been analysed via pair radial distribution function (PRDFs), coordination distribution, angular distribution and bond length distribution. Calculations show that most of the basic structural units in liquid lead silicate network are SiO4, PbO2 and PbO3 at low ratio of PbO and SiO4, PbO3 and PbO4 at high ratio of PbO. The distribution of O-T-O bond angle and T-O bond length (T is Si or Pb) in SiO4, PbO4 and PbO5 basic structural units are slightly changed when PbO content increase. In intermediate range order, the topology structure of OTy linkages (y=2,3,4) is also investigated in detail.
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