Tropical medicine within the Cambodia context:Cambodian health care systems,Khmer medicine,and HIV/AIDS therapy

This paper examines the history of health care in Cambodia and focuses on the role of traditional healers and their response to the HIV/AIDS epidemic,the use of medicinal plants and their bioscientific importance in this tropical country.In conclusion,vital to the management of HIV/AIDS in tropical countries such as Cambodia is the cooperation and collaboration between traditional healers and Western trained medical doctors.Beliefs underlying the cause of HIV/AIDS,divination,cultural-emotional factors,standardization of training,and medicinal packaging and distribution are a few starting points for future discussion.

Application of Antimicrobial Bacillus subtilis Strain as a Starter Culture to Improve Qualities and Safety of Fermented Soybean (SIENG) Produced in Cambodia

Fermented foods play a very important role in Cambodian health and nutrition,as well as other developing countries where food preservation methods may be limited.SIENG,a Khmer fermented soybean product,naturally contains both beneficial and pathogenic microorganisms.Traditional fermentation that relies on natural microbial flora and environmental conditions results in variable product quality and can lead to spoilage.A starter culture such as Bacillus subtilis can ensure the safety and stability of the products.The objective of this study is to control the growth of Gram positive pathogens contaminated into traditional fermented soybean(SEING)by using antimicrobial Bacillus subtilis isolated from the same kind of food.Out of 120 SIENG samples,49 B.cereus strains were isolated,and 12 of B.cereus were positively synthesized compared with the lyophilized control enterotoxin.Two of these strains(BTM8-7 and BTM8-8)produced high levels of enterotoxin.We identified five Bacillus strains with the ability to fight against indicator pathogenic microorganisms.Among the five strains,B.CeM6-2 had the highest activity level against Lactobacillus plantrum ATCC 8014 and the largest diameter.B.CeM6-2 tolerated up to 20 h at 30℃ and 22 h at 37℃.In testing the strains with PK and PK-PMSF enzymes,bacteriocin produced by the strain B.CeM6PK untreated and B.CeM6-2PK-PMSF had a significantly stronger ability to suppress all the pathogenic indicators from 0 h to 47 h compared to the B.CeM6-2PK.Moreover,CeM6-2 outperformed the Miyagino strains,as it actively produced bacteriocin that fought against all four indicator strains of Gram positive and lactic acid groups,especially against Listeria monocytogenes,Streptococcus pyrogene,Leuconostoc mesenterids and L.plantarum,from 0 h-58 h and 0 h-40 h at 35℃.CeM6-2(1%)strain had the highest ability to fight against B.cereus at 24 h and at 34 h to 44 h incubation as well.CeM6-2(10:0 mL)and CeM6-2(9:1 mL)have the strongest ability to fight against B.cereus at room temperature(48 h and 72 h).The longer incubation and time at room temperature produce the highest level of bacteriocin.Thus,bacteriocins produced by B.CeM6-2 can be used as a preservative in food processing industries to avoid food spoilage even in higher temperatures and time.

The Research for Sustainble Poverty Reduction in Khmer Ethnic Community

The research for sustainable poverty reduction for Khmer ethnic people in Tra Vinh province was conducted by the use of statistic approach, the current situation of poor households of Khmer ethnic people in Tra Vinh province, the interview with 300 Khmer households living in seven districts and cities of Tra Vinh province. Research findings show that there are a number of factors affecting the income of Khmer households, including the career of householders, the level of education, the ratio of dependants, living experience of the householders, the land square area, people＇s participation in different festivals; the number of household members, the number of activities for income and the gender of the householders. Of all the factors, occupation, level of education, and the ratio of dependants are considered to have the biggest influence on the income of Khmer ethnic people in Tra Vinh province.

The Milestone of Cambodian First Oil Production in the Khmer Basin, Gulf of Thailand

As an ASEAN member country, Cambodia is the eighth country to produce oil from its maritime water in late 2020. The first oil was produced from Cambodian Block A (CBA) which covers most of the Khmer basin, located in the east and in the north of producing oil and gas Pattani and Malay basin respectively, in the Gulf of Thailand (GoT). Before being an oil-producing country, Cambodia has been involved in a long history of exploration activities since the 1970s with international companies including Elf-Erap, Marine Associate, Enterprise, Campex, Premier, etc. The first phase of petroleum development was initiated by Chevron Texaco in 2010 when this US company submitted the Petroleum Permit Application (PPA) to the government of Cambodia. The company failed to reach an agreement with the government on revenue sharing, then KrisEnergy bought out the working interest in 2014 and became the only operator of CBA. A justified Mini Phase 1A was operated by KrisEnergy to flow the oil from six production wells in the Apsara area where there is still a high risk of geological information and time constrain. Apsara area which covers the most prospective petroleum exploration geological trend in Cambodian water was built a minimal facility platform and used the production barge, Ingenium II, to separate the reservoir fluids. As long as the accumulative oil production reached about 300,000 bbl for about five months, the operator of CBA went into the liquidation. In the primary plan, this initial phase was expected to produce 7500 bopd at the peak, however it actually produced the oil less than double in the end. This situation indicated the underperformance of Mini Phase 1A, which resulted in a huge declination of each well capacity. This underperformance of Mini Phase 1A seemed express clearly the results of the uncertainties of petroleum formation, the complexities of the particular reservoir properties in the CBA and the inappropriate method of Mini Phase 1A. This paper synthesizes the existing literature, and the technical reports to reassess the geology, basin evolution, and reservoir characteristics of the CBA, especially the Apsara oil field. This review could be a help to disseminate of the update the CBA for the petroleum business companies and for academic in the purpose of researches.

Review and Analysis: United States Secret Wars in Cambodia: Long-Term Impacts and Consequences

The People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) decided to use conventional warfare to unify Vietnam. The United States military operation against the Ho Chi Minh Trail traffic began in 1959. The (PAVN) connected a series of old trails leading from North Vietnam to South Vietnam via Laos and Cambodia. In the 1960s the network of trails was expanded. Trail traffic was interdicted by repeated CIA (Air America) and US Air Force (Operation Ranch Hand) tactical herbicide spraying and bombing missions. During the late 1960s, the Khmer Rouge Army slowly grew in eastern Cambodia during a time when America was spraying and bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. On February 22, 1969, the PAVN launched a new offensive against American forces in South Vietnam from their sanctuaries in Cambodia. President Richard Nixon and Dr. Henry Kissinger, decided to spray and bomb Cambodia, a neutral country, to eliminate the PAVN sanctuary base camps. The damage and loss of life as a result of U.S. air campaign resulted in the insurgency (Khmer Rouge) being able to recruit civilian members. This created a dual effect of strengthening the popularity of the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot, enabling him to overthrow the Khmer Republic in 1975. The primary objectives of this study are to determine the political impacts and consequences of: 1) the 1959 United States secret war on the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Cambodia and 2) the 1969 President Nixon’s decision to destroy the PAVN bases hidden in the Cambodian jungles. These United States secret wars in Cambodia had long-lasting effects on Cambodian political, social, and economic stability.

Pretrained Models and Evaluation Data for the Khmer Language

Trained on a large corpus,pretrained models(PTMs)can capture different levels of concepts in context and hence generate universal language representations,which greatly benefit downstream natural language processing(NLP)tasks.In recent years,PTMs have been widely used in most NLP applications,especially for high-resource languages,such as English and Chinese.However,scarce resources have discouraged the progress of PTMs for low-resource languages.Transformer-based PTMs for the Khmer language are presented in this work for the first time.We evaluate our models on two downstream tasks:Part-of-speech tagging and news categorization.The dataset for the latter task is self-constructed.Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the Khmer models.In addition,we find that the current Khmer word segmentation technology does not aid performance improvement.We aim to release our models and datasets to the community in hopes of facilitating the future development of Khmer NLP applications.