Abstract:During the dry season of 2015-2016, the Mekong Delta had suffered the worst historic drought and salinity intrusion occurrence on record, causing heavy damages to nine coastal provinces (in total 13 provinces) of the Mekong River Delta. Just after the drought and salinity intrusion occurred, the media offered some different opinions suggesting possible solution which offer effective responses and stable development to coastal regions. The author suggests that in order to have sustainable development for the Mekong Delta in general and for the coastal zones in particular, Vietnam needs to have some basic short-term and long-term solutions, for each region as well as the whole delta, including drought-salinity intrusion and flooding programs, structural and non-structural works, and coverage for both the Mekong Delta and the whole Mekong River Basin.

Engineering works in river basins that explicitly take into account floodplain hydraulic processes and dynamics, demonstrate a move towards more sustainable development in riparian areas. In this paper, this concept is applied to road planning and design in floodplains. The paper suggests that although a resilience strategy might require higher initial investments than a resistance strategy, in the longer term it will result in lower costs in terms of road damage and ecological damage. Results are presented from four cases in the Mekong floodplains where different strategies towards road planning, varying in resilience, have been assessed for their hydraulic, ecological, social and economic impacts based on a combination of modelling results, expert judgement and secondary data sources. The study finds that, with the exception of extreme cases, the impact of roads has a limited impact on the floodplain hydraulics. However, even small changes in flood dynamics (arrival of the peak, duration) may have large ecological impacts, especially if cumulative impacts of more road developments are taken into account. The results illustrate that road planning and design in floodplains is a complicated task that requires an integrated approach.

Though cryopreservation of cell fractions is widely used in flow cytometry studies, whole blood cryopreservation is more challenging due to the presence of erythrocytes and effects of fixatives commonly used for preservation. Here, we evaluated and compared head‐to‐head the performance of four commercial whole blood cryopreservation kits; (1) Cytodelics, (2) Stable‐Lyse V2 and Stable‐Store V2 (SLSS‐V2), (3) Proteomic stabilizer (PROT‐1), and (4) Transfix. We found that PROT‐1, Transfix, and Cytodelics maintained the distribution of major leukocyte subsets—granulocytes, T cells, natural killer cells, and B cells, on a comparable level to unpreserved samples, despite the attenuation of fluorescence intensities in flow cytometric assays. Moreover, these three stabilizers also maintained the activated phenotypes of neutrophils upon stimulation with N‐formylmethionyl‐leucyl‐phenylalanine and lipopolysaccharides. The upregulation of adhesion molecules (CD11b), Fc receptors (CD16), and granule proteins (CD66b), as well as the shedding of surface L‐selectin (CD62L), was conserved most efficiently in PROT‐1 and Cytodelics when compared to samples only treated with erythrocyte lysing. However, none of the stabilizers provided a reliable detection of CCR7 for accurate quantification of T cell maturation stages. We also evaluated the performance of Cytodelics in longitudinal clinical samples obtained from acute COVID‐19 patients, where it allowed reliable detection of lymphopenia and granulocyte expansion. These results support the feasibility of whole blood cryopreservation for immunophenotyping by flow cytometry, particularly in longitudinal studies. In conclusion, the performance of different stabilizers is variable and therefore the choice of stabilizers should depend on cell type of interest, as well as antibody clones and experimental design of each study.

The economic reform started in 1986 has transformed Vietnam from one of the world’s poorest countries 35 years ago to a lower middle-income country (MIC) in 2010. Poverty rates dropped from 70% in 1986 to below 2% in 2021. The transition from a central planning system to a socialist market economy is the fundamental underlying factor of Vietnam's success. Using the historical institutional framework that Lee (2018) [1] developed, this study aims to explore the country’s transition from a central planning system to a socialist market economy over the past three decades. The findings demonstrate that the country’s transition to a socialist market economy has been taking a gradualism and dualism path like China. In addition, the study also illustrates how the economic reform and globalization processes pushed the institutional transformation in Vietnam to meet the demands of multiple economic sectors and ownerships as well as accommodate international commitments that the country entered. Finally, Vietnam has been cautious in its political reform over the past few decades. Yet, this is inevitable as a result of the country’s socio-economic development process as well as the global and regional rapid changing context. The implications for Vietnam include: (i) Vietnam needs to transform its growth model toward a knowledge-based, higher-added-value, and more environmentally-friendly pattern; (ii) while there is significant progress in institutional transformation, bottlenecks and challenges remain. This should be addressed effectively to unlock the country’s potential; (iii) political system reform is inevitable as conditions are mature. Domestic demands and international requirements are putting increasing pressure on the changes. However, this process will likely move forward and take place within the political system rather than by civil society or outsiders. Doi: 10.28991/ESJ-2022-06-05-03 Full Text: PDF

Rivers and coastlines are considered to be living organisms. The living organisms always move. One of those movements results in siltation and erosion, generally known as the river metamorphosis. In addition, for living organisms, the metamorphosis is intermittent, rapid or slow, and strong or weak, from both the inside and outside elements. In the scope of this research, we would discuss the river bed and the coastal erosion sequences during the recent years in the Mekong delta. some major natural principles of river sequences in the Mekong delta The Mekong delta river bed sequence principles by time and space are very diversified and complicated. The following are some of the typical principles: Divided/incorporated rivers: right after entering the delta, both the Mekong and Bassac rivers start the division/ incorporation process by forming a series of consecutive divided/incorporated nodes and end in all the distributaries that flow into the sea. The phenomenon of river shortcuts might have occurred several times in the past, on the segment from Phnom Penh to the Vietnam-Cambodia border and in the dead river segments that had formed in the current natural swamps and lakes (such as Bung Binh Thien and An Giang province). With tens of instances of river division and incorporation, the Mekong river might be laid on a less stable geological foundation. After many consecutive divided or incorporated nodes, from the Vinh Long province, the river starts its division process to constitute four separate distributaries flowing directly into the sea, namely, Cua Dai, Ba Lai, Ham Luong, and Co Chien. This process also happens at two other distributaries to separate the Cua Dai into Cua Dai and Cua Tieu, and the Co Chien into Co Chien and Cung Hau river mouths. Located on the quite stable geological foundation and flowing parallel to the Mesozoic folds in the deep layer, the phenomenon of division/incorporation is fewer in the Bassac river. While approaching the sea, the river also splits into two mouths (formerly, the Bassac river had three mouths, but the middle one, namely, Bat That, the last in the nine mouths, disappeared about 100 years ago by sedimentation). Generally speaking, the continuous division/incorporation and formation of the distributaries when approaching the sea are the typical characteristics of the Mekong river system. This phenomenon can be assembled from various reasons, such as a sudden increase or decrease in the water flow velocity in the alternate wide or narrow river segments, which bring material sedimentation and form the alluvial grounds (in the middle of the Mekong and Bassac segments), or due to the non-coincidental dynamic axis of the flood/low-flow seasons, creating the slack velocity zones and the gradual sedimentation (in the upper Mekong and Bassac segments). In the strongly tide-affected zones, the river division process is formed by many combined elements. There exists a close relationship between the sediment/flow distribution and the cross-sectional area of each distributary. This...