Healthcare use for diarrhoea and dysentery in actual and hypothetical cases, Nha Trang, Viet Nam.

To better understand healthcare use for diarrhoea and dysentery in Nha Trang, Viet Nam, qualitative interviews with community residents and dysentery case studies were conducted. Findings were supplemented by a quantitative survey which asked respondents which healthcare provider their household members would use for diarrhoea or dysentery. A clear pattern of healthcare-seeking behaviours among 433 respondents emerged. More than half of the respondents self-treated initially. Medication for initial treatment was purchased from a pharmacy or with medication stored at home. Traditional home treatments were also widely used. If no improvement occurred or the symptoms were perceived to be severe, individuals would visit a healthcare facility. Private medical practitioners are playing a steadily increasing role in the Vietnamese healthcare system. Less than a quarter of diarrhoea patients initially used government healthcare providers at commune health centres, polyclinics, and hospitals, which are the only sources of data for routine public-health statistics. Given these healthcare-use patterns, reported rates could significantly underestimate the real disease burden of dysentery and diarrhoea

Building Legal Case Retrieval Systems with Lexical Matching and Summarization using A Pre-Trained Phrase Scoring Model

We present our method for tackling the legal case retrieval task of the Competition on Legal Information Extraction/Entailment 2019. Our approach is based on the idea that summarization is important for retrieval. On one hand, we adopt a summarization based model called encoded summarization which encodes a given document into continuous vector space which embeds the summary properties of the document. We utilize the resource of COLIEE 2018 on which we train the document representation model. On the other hand, we extract lexical features on different parts of a given query and its candidates. We observe that by comparing different parts of the query and its candidates, we can achieve better performance. Furthermore, the combination of the lexical features with latent features by the summarization-based method achieves even better performance. We have achieved the state-of-the-art result for the task on the benchmark of the competition

S3: Syntax- and semantic-guided repair synthesis via programming by examples

National Science Foundatio

AGN Emission Line Diagnostics and the Mass-Metallicity Relation up to Redshift z~2: the Impact of Selection Effects and Evolution

Emission line diagnostic diagrams probing the ionization sources in galaxies, such as the Baldwin-Phillips-Terlevich (BPT) diagram, have been used extensively to distinguish AGN from purely star-forming galaxies. Yet, they remain poorly understood at higher redshifts. We shed light on this issue with an empirical approach based on a z~0 reference sample built from ~300,000 SDSS galaxies, from which we mimic selection effects due to typical emission line detection limits at higher redshift. We combine this low-redshift reference sample with a simple prescription for luminosity evolution of the global galaxy population to predict the loci of high-redshift galaxies on the BPT and Mass-Excitation (MEx) diagnostic diagrams. The predicted bivariate distributions agree remarkably well with direct observations of galaxies out to z~1.5, including the observed stellar mass-metallicity (MZ) relation evolution. As a result, we infer that high-redshift star-forming galaxies are consistent with having "normal" ISM properties out to z~1.5, after accounting for selection effects and line luminosity evolution. Namely, their optical line ratios and gas-phase metallicities are comparable to that of low-redshift galaxies with equivalent emission-line luminosities. In contrast, AGN narrow-line regions may show a shift toward lower metallicities at higher redshift. While a physical evolution of the ISM conditions is not ruled out for purely star-forming galaxies, and may be more important starting at z>2, we find that reliably quantifying this evolution is hindered by selections effects. The recipes provided here may serve as a basis for future studies toward this goal. Code to predict the loci of galaxies on the BPT and MEx diagnostic diagrams, and the MZ relation as a function of emission line luminosity limits, is made publicly available.Comment: Main article: 15 pages, 7 figures; Appendix: 13 pages, 11 figures. Revisions: Paper now accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal (same scientific content as previous arXiv version). IDL routines to make empirical predictions on the BPT, MEx, and M-Z plane are now released at https://sites.google.com/site/agndiagnostics/home/me

Assessment of the Effectiveness of Ich Tam Khang as a Supportive Therapy for Chronic Heart Failure

Background: Heart failure is a chronic disease needing lifelong management. Despite the advances that have been made in the treatment of the disease, both the longevity and quality of life for those with chronic heart failure remain impaired. A more effective therapeutic approach with less negative side effects is still needed. In this study, we evaluate Ich Tam Khang (ITK), the poly-ingredient herbal and nutritional preparation with multiple physiological actions, as a supportive therapy for patients with chronic heart failure.Aims of Study: To evaluate the effectiveness and safety of Ich Tam Khang as an adjunctive treatment of chronic heart failure.Methods: A total of 60 patients with chronic congestive heart failure were enrolled in this open label, cross-sectional and prospective study. All patients were treated with a conventional regimen (digoxin, diuretics, angiotensin-converting-enzyme (ACE) inhibitors or angiotensin II receptor blockers (ARBs), beta blockers) for at least 4 weeks before being divided into two equal groups. In the treated patients with ITK, patients received conventional therapy plus 4 tablets ITK per day added in two divided doses. In the control patients, all patients kept the same conventional regimen without ITK. All patients were followed up for 3 months for clinical and para-clinical outcomes.Result: The symptoms of heart failure (dyspnea, palpitation, peripheral edema, neck vein distention, heptojugular reflex) decreased. Heart rate and blood pressure stabilized during treatment in the treated patients with ITK. Additionally, total cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol normalized in the patients treated with ITK. Most of echocardiography parameters in the ITK treated patients were superior to the control patients. ITK is safe and it has no side effects.Conclusion: ITK as a combination of herbal and nutritional preparation is effective in reducing heart failure symptoms, improving patient's quality of life for the patients with decompensated heart failure and reducing total cholesterol and LDL-C

Estimation of methane emissions from local and crossbreed beef cattle in Daklak province of Vietnam

Objective: This study was aimed at evaluating effects of cattle breed resources and alternative mixed-feeding practices on meat productivity and emission intensities from household farming systems (HFS) in Daklak Province, Vietnam. Methods: Records from Local Yellow×Red Sindhi (Bos indicus; Lai Sind) and 1/2 Limousin, 1/2 Drought Master, and 1/2 Red Angus cattle during the growth (0 to 21 months) and fattening (22 to 25 months) periods were used to better understand variations on meat productivity and enteric methane emissions. Parameters were determined by the ruminant model. Four scenarios were developed: (HFS1) grazing from birth to slaughter on native grasses for approximately 10 h plus 1.5 kg dry matter/d (0.8% live weight [LW]) of a mixture of Guinea grass (19%), cassava (43%) powder, cotton (23%) seed, and rice (15%) straw; (HFS2) growth period fed with elephant grass (1% of LW) plus supplementation (1.5% of LW) of rice bran (36%), maize (33%), and cassava (31%) meals; and HFS3 and HFS4 computed elephant grass, but concentrate supplementation reaching 2% and 1% of LW, respectively. Results: Results show that compared to HFS1, emissions (72.3±0.96 kg CH 4 /animal/life; least squares means± standard error of the mean) were 15%, 6%, and 23% lower (p < 0.01) for the HFS2, HFS3, and HFS4, respectively. The predicted methane efficiencies (CO 2 eq) per kg of LW at slaughter (4.3±0.15), carcass weight (8.8±0.25 kg) and kg of edible protein (44.1±1.29) were also lower (p < 0.05) in the HFS4. In particular, irrespective of the HSF, feed supply and ratio changes had a more positive impact on emission intensities when crossbred 1/2 Red Angus cattle were fed than in their crossbred counterparts. Conclusion: Modest improvements on feeding practices and integrated modelling frameworks may offer potential trade-offs to respond to climate change in Vietnam