Suchergebnisse

In October 2005 the seasonal wave of Al outbreaks hit Vietnam several weeks earlier than expected, raising fears of an evolution of the disease towards more deadly forms. In this emergency context the government of Vietnam, the UN and several donors, have launched the "Joint Government-UN Program for the Fight Against AI - Emergency Phase". Information, Education, and Communication (IEC) was identified as one of the most crucial components in the implementation of the emergency phase. UNICEF, thanks to its long experience in the field, was nominated as lead agency for the component. Approached as a crosscutting theme, an IEC working group gathering representatives from both technical agencies and main stakeholders was established. The first initiative of the group was to prepare a nationwide information campaign to provide the public with essential information on the occasion of the Lunar New Year or Tet celebrations when chicken transport, handling and consumption all increase dramatically. Considering that the Joint Program was launched in mid-November and that the Tet festival was starting end of January, the time constraint was the factor that deeply influenced the process. For this reason, it was agreed that the selection of target behaviours and messages would not be carried out after a formal KAP assessment but would be based on the experience of the technical agencies and of their counterparts. The material was developed among the IEC group members in a participatory fashion. Experts in disease prevention and in communication joined together in several sessions, hosted by the CHE (Center for Health Education) under the Ministry of Health, which was nominated by UNICEF as their counterpart. The parallel work of the two teams of experts permitted the completion of the preparation in a few weeks and the launch the "Pre-TET-IEC Campaign". The objective of the campaign was to promote four key preventive actions related to poultry management and handling that would minimise the risk of human infection by Al.

Meningococcal bacterium Neisseria meningitidis is one of the major causes of meningitis worldwide. Currently in Vietnam, N. meningitidis B and C are the most prevalent invasive serogroups. N. meningitidis expresses two major transmembrane proteins, PorA and PorB, of which PorA showed high levels of polymorphism among strains and has been studied as one component of vaccines against N. meningitidis B. Polymorphisms in porA gene clustered into three variable regions VR1, VR2 and VR3. In this study, we sequenced the entired porA gene of 19 N. meningitidis strains isolated from military units in northern Vietnam during the period 2008 – 2017 in order to: (1) evaluate the polymorphism of porA gene at nucleotide level and predict its immuno-reactivity from annotated amino acide sequences; and (2) compare porA variants of Vietnamese strains with known strains worldwide. Our results showed a high level of polymorphisms among Vietnamese strains, with the highest polymorphism found in VR1, followed by VR2 and VR3. Notably, 5/19 strains in this study showed novel variants at VR2 with unknown immunological reactivity. This result suggested potential novel immunological characteristics of meningococcal strains from Vietnam.