Young Adults In Thailand Research Articles

Accommodation and nonaccommodation across the lifespan: Perspectives from Thailand, Japan, and the United States of America

This study investigates perceptions of intra‐ and intergenerational communication among young adults in Thailand, Japan, and the U.S.A. Interactions with older adults were reported to be generally more problematic than those with other younger people. While older people were seen as more nonaccommodative than younger people, younger adults felt more obliged to be polite to, and respectful of, the former than their peer age group. Young adults were also avoidant of communication with older people. Overall, young Americans reported their intergenerational communicative encounters to be more positive than both young Thais and Japanese. Young Thai people reported the highest levels of respect/obligation and avoidant communication among young people of the three cultures, and found older Thais to be particularly nonaccommodative. Cultural and modernity issues were invoked to account for these findings.

Prevalence of hepatitis E virus infection in Thailand.

Hepatitis E, also known as epidemic, non-A, non-B hepatitis, is an acute, enteric, infectious disease. The disease is usually mild, except in pregnant women, who suffer a high fatality rate from fulminant hepatic failure. Information on the disease in Thailand is limited. The prevalence of antibodies to the aetiological agent, hepatitis E virus (HEV), was therefore studied, in various groups of subjects from several regions of this country, using commercial ELISA for anti-HEV IgG and IgM. The prevalence of anti-HEV IgG, which was 9%-22% in the adult subjects (blood donors, pregnant women, patients with acute hepatitis and cases seen during an outbreak of hepatitis), increased with age. It was relatively low in children and adolescents from Bangkok (3.6%) and in children from the north-east (1.8%-6.2%) and south (2.3%) of the country. Five (7%) of the 68 patients with acute viral hepatitis who were tested for anti-HEV IgM were found positive. Although these five cases had jaundice (four cases), diarrhoea (three) and/or dark urine (at least four cases), all of these clinical signs were self-limiting and had no sequelae. Given the apparently high prevalence of HEV infection in young adults in Thailand, control measures, including provision of clean water supplies and better personal sanitation and food hygiene, should be implemented to prevent an epidemic of the disease.

Drug-resistant Escherichia coli and Klebsiella-Enterobacter in healthy adults in Thailand and the effect of antibiotic administration.

Antibiotic-resistant strains of Escherichia coli and, to a lesser extent, Klebsiella-Enterobacter were common in serial samples of the normal intestinal flora of healthy young adults in Thailand, and the resistance often was to multiple drugs and was transferable. Antibiotic administration promoted dominance of the flora by drug-resistant organisms regardless of the drug regimen and the predrug susceptibility pattern of the flora. The normal pattern was regained slowly after the cessation of drug administration.