The concept of a forest transition – a regional shift from deforestation to forest recovery – tends to equate forest area expansion with sustainability, assuming that more forest is good for people and the environment. To promote debate and more just and ecologically sustainable outcomes during this period of intense focus on forests (such as the United Nations’ Decade on Ecological Restoration, the Trillion Trees initiative and at the United Nations’ Climate Change Conferences), we synthesize recent nuanced and integrated research to inform forest management and restoration in the future. Our results reveal nine pitfalls to assuming forest transitions and sustainability are automatically linked. The pitfalls are as follows: (1) fixating on forest quantity instead of quality; (2) masking local diversity with large-scale trends; (3) expecting U-shaped temporal trends of forest change; (4) failing to account for irreversibility; (5) framing categories and concepts as universal/neutral; (6) diverting attention from the simplification of forestlands into single-purpose conservation forests or intensive production lands; (7) neglecting social power transitions and dispossessions; (8) neglecting productivism as the hidden driving force; and (9) ignoring local agency and sentiments. We develop and illustrate these pitfalls with local- and national-level evidence from Southeast Asia and outline forward-looking recommendations for research and policy to address them. Forest transition research that neglects these pitfalls risks legitimizing unsustainable and unjust policies and programmes of forest restoration or tree planting.

The aim of this study is to analyse the changing patterns in the transmission of COVID-19 in relation to changes in Vietnamese governmental policies, based on epidemiological data and policy actions in a large Vietnamese province, Bac Ninh, in 2021. Data on confirmed cases from January to December 2021 were collected, together with policy documents. There were three distinct periods of the COVID-19 pandemic in Bac Ninh province during 2021. During the first period, referred to as the ‘Zero-COVID’ period (01/04–07/04/2021), there was a low population vaccination rate, with less than 25% of the population receiving its first vaccine dose. Measures implemented during this period focused on domestic movement restrictions, mask mandates, and screening efforts to control the spread of the virus. The subsequent period, referred to as the ‘Transition’ period (07/05–10/22/2021), witnessed a significant increase in population vaccination coverage, with 80% of the population receiving their first vaccine dose. During this period, several days passed without any reported COVID-19 cases in the community. The local government implemented measures to manage domestic actions and reduce the time spent in quarantine, and encouraged home quarantining for the close contacts of cases with COVID-19. Finally, the ‘New-normal’ stage (10/23–12/31/2021), during which the population vaccination coverage with a second vaccine dose increased to 70%, and most of the mandates for the prevention and control of COVID-19 were reduced. In conclusion, this study highlights the importance of governmental policies in managing and controlling the transmission of COVID-19 and provides insights for developing realistic and context-specific strategies in similar settings.

Objectives: SARS-CoV-2 is a novel and highly infectious virus. An effective response requires rapid training of healthcare workers (HCWs). We measured the change in knowledge related to COVID-19 and associated factors before and after training of HCWs in Vietnam. Methods: A quasi-experimental design was used to evaluate HCW knowledge related to prevention and control of SARS-CoV-2 before and after attending a 2-day training-of-trainers course. Between June and September 2020, 963 HCWs from 194 hospitals in 21 provinces received the training. HCW knowledge was assessed using a 20-item questionnaire consisting of multiple-choice questions at the beginning and closing of the training course. A participant received 1 point for each correct answer. He or she was considered to have improved knowledge the posttest score was higher than the pretest score with a score ≥15 on the posttest. We applied the McNemar test and logistic regression model to test the level of association between demographic factors and change in knowledge of COVID-19. Results: Overall, 100% of HCWs completed both the pretest and posttest. At baseline, only 14.7% scored ≥15. Following the training, 78.4% scored ≥15 and 64.3% had improved knowledge according to the predetermined definition. Questions related to the order of PPE donning and doffing and respiratory specimen collection procedures were identified as having the greatest improvement (44.6% and 60.7%, respectively). Being female (OR, 1.5; 95% CI, 1.1–2.0), having a postgraduate degree (OR, 2.5; 95% CI, 1.4–4.4), working in a nonmanager position (OR, 1.5; 95% CI, 1.1–2.1), previous contact with a COVID-19 patient (OR, 1.5; 95% CI, 1.1–2.0), and working in northern Vietnam (OR, 2.0; 95% CI, 1.4–2.6), were associated with greater knowledge improvement. Conclusions: Most HCWs demonstrated improved knowledge of COVID-19 prevention and control after attending the training. Particular groups may benefit from additional training: those who are male, leaders and managers, those who hold an undergraduate degree, and those who work in the southern provinces.

Acute myocarditis is one of the common complications of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) with a relatively high case fatality. Here reported is a fulminant case of a 42-year-old previously healthy woman with cardiogenic shock and refractory cardiac arrest due to COVID-19-induced myocarditis who received veno-arterial (VA) extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) after 120 minutes of cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR). This is the first adult case of cardiac arrest due to COVID-19-induced myocarditis supported by ECMO that fully recovered with normal neurological functions. The success of the treatment course with full recovery emphasized the potential role of ECMO in treating these patients.

This paper introduces a formal definition of a Cyber-Physical System (CPS) in the spirit of the CPS Framework proposed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). It shows that using this definition, various problems related to concerns in a CPS can be precisely formalized and implemented using Answer Set Programming (ASP). These include problems related to the dependency or conflicts between concerns, how to mitigate an issue, and what the most suitable mitigation strategy for a given issue would be. It then shows how ASP can be used to develop an implementation that addresses the aforementioned problems. The paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials of the proposed methodologies.

In patients with β-lactam allergies, administration of non–β-lactam surgical prophylaxis is associated with increased risk of infection. Although many patients self-report β-lactam allergies, most are unconfirmed or mislabeled. A quality improvement process, utilizing a structured β-lactam allergy tool, was implemented to improve the utilization of preferred β-lactam surgical prophylaxis.

Evolutionary Biologists have long struggled with the challenge of developing analysis workflows in a flexible manner, thus facilitating the reuse of phylogenetic knowledge. An evolutionary biology workflow can be viewed as a plan which composes web services that can retrieve, manipulate, and produce phylogenetic trees. The Phylotastic project was launched two years ago as a collaboration between evolutionary biologists and computer scientists, with the goal of developing an open architecture to facilitate the creation of such analysis workflows. While composition of web services is a problem that has been extensively explored in the literature, including within the logic programming domain, the incarnation of the problem in Phylotastic provides a number of additional challenges. Along with the need to integrate preferences and formal ontologies in the description of the desired workflow, evolutionary biologists tend to construct workflows in an incremental manner, by successively refining the workflow, by indicating desired changes (e.g., exclusion of certain services, modifications of the desired output). This leads to the need of successive iterations of incremental replanning, to develop a new workflow that integrates the requested changes while minimizing the changes to the original workflow. This paper illustrates how Phylotastic has addressed the challenges of creating and refining phylogenetic analysis workflows using logic programming technology and how such solutions have been used within the general framework of the Phylotastic project.

The aims of the present study were to provide nationally representative data on fruit and vegetable consumption in Vietnam, and to assess the accuracy of the reported numbers of ‘standard servings’ consumed. Data analysed were from a multi-stage stratified cluster survey of 14 706 participants (46·5 % males, response proportion 64·1 %) aged 25−64 years in Vietnam. Measurements were made in accordance with the WHO STEPwise approach to surveillance of non-communicable diseases (STEPS) protocols. Approximately 80 % of Vietnamese people reported having less than five servings of fruit and vegetables daily in a typical week. Fruit and vegetable intake reported in ‘standard serving’ sizes was positively correlated with levels of education completed and household income (P<0·001 for trend). The correlations between summary values for each province reflect some known demographic, geographical and climatic characteristics of the country. For example, provinces at higher latitude had higher mean servings of vegetables (r 0·90), and provinces with higher proportions of urban population had higher mean servings of fruit (r 0·40). In conclusion, about eight in ten Vietnamese people aged 25–64 years did not meet WHO recommendations for daily consumption of at least five servings of fruit and vegetables. On the basis of the consistency of the data collected with other estimates and with physical and demographic characteristics of the country, the WHO STEPS instrument has construct validity for measuring fruit and vegetable intake, but with two issues identified. The issues were seasonal variation in reporting and a limitation on the usefulness of the information for associative analyses.

The combination of low areal density, high flexural rigidity, and open architecture makes metallic microsandwiching a promising candidate for structural frameworks in small-scale multifunctional devices. We demonstrate a one-step electrodeposition procedure to synthesize an aluminum–manganese (Al–Mn) microsandwich using a porous polycarbonate (PC) membrane template from room-temperature ionic liquid. Mn was added to refine the microstructure and increase the hardness of Al. A cyclic voltammogram study shows Mn codeposit with Al in an acidic chloroaluminate electrolyte. Increasing the MnCl2 concentration in the electrolyte from 0.05 to 0.25 M promoted a crystalline to amorphous phase transition of the deposited structures. Finally, mechanical properties and damage resistance of the microsandwiches were evaluated using nano- and micro-indentation tests as well as finite element methods.