scholarly journals Problems associated with the use of the term “antibiotics”

Author(s):  
Roland Seifert ◽  
Bastian Schirmer

AbstractThe term “antibiotics” is a broadly used misnomer to designate antibacterial drugs. In a recent article, we have proposed to replace, e.g., the term “antibiotics” by “antibacterial drugs”, “antibiosis” by “antibacterial therapy”, “antibiogram” by “antibacteriogram”, and “antibiotic stewardship” by “antibacterial stewardship” (Seifert and Schirmer Trends Microbiol, 2021). In the present article, we show that many traditional terms related to antibiotics are used much more widely in the biomedical literature than the respective scientifically precise terms. This practice should be stopped. Moreover, we provide arguments to end the use of other broadly used terms in the biomedical literature such as “narrow-spectrum antibiotics” and “reserve antibiotics”, “chemotherapeutics”, and “tuberculostatics”. Finally, we provide several examples showing that antibacterial drugs are used for non-antibacterial indications and that some non-antibacterial drugs are used for antibacterial indications now. Thus, the increasing importance of drug repurposing renders it important to drop short designations of drug classes such as “antibiotics”. Rather, the term “drug” should be explicitly used, facilitating the inclusion of newly emerging indications such as antipsychotic and anti-inflammatory. This article is part of an effort to implement a new rational nomenclature of drug classes across the entire field of pharmacology.

PMLA ◽  
1920 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-209
Author(s):  
Walter Clyde Curry

My recent article, The Secret of Chaucer's Pardoner, was the first of a series of studies advanced in support of the general thesis that Chaucer, in his choice of physical peculiarities that would fittingly correspond to the characters of his Canterbury Pilgrims, made use of, or at least was influenced by, the rules and regulations laid down in the universally popular Physiognomies of his time. More specifically, I attempted to show that the Pardoner is a typical example of what the physiognomists would call a eunuchus ex nativitate. The present article demonstrates that Chaucer's Reeve and Miller, in the exact correspondence of their respective personal appearances and characters, are also “scientifically” correct according to the specifications of physiognomical lore, and that the quarrel between these traditional and professional enemies cannot properly be understood unless scanned from the medieval point of view.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 42
Author(s):  
Baback Khodadoost

<span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 9.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 宋体; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-font-kerning: 1.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;" lang="EN-US">Observation of a multifaceted mathematical-computational structure of Quran through analysis of its letter and word frequencies and important implications of such observations have been extensively explained and discussed in a recent article: </span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 8.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 宋体; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-font-kerning: 1.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;" lang="EN-US">“Khodadoost B. (2015) The Computed Scripture: Exponentially Based Fourier Regulated Construct of Quran and its fundamentally important Consequences"</span><span style="font-size: 10pt; font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 9.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: 宋体; mso-themecolor: text1; mso-font-kerning: 1.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-language: ZH-CN; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;" lang="EN-US">. In the present article we report observation of yet another facet of this mathematical structure of Quran which is a phenomenal "parametric name-printing”. This observation has been made through a systematic compute-plot algorithm which uses the given name and chapter frequencies of letters in Quran as its input and shows in the output, calligraphic printing in Arabic of the same name. Several names of God, Major Prophets, and even some physicists are shown to clearly manifest these calligraphic effects. Sensitivities of these observations to changes in letter frequencies in Quran are so high that increase or decrease of even one letter and only in one chapter of Quran can completely demolish the calligraphic effects. These astonishing observations not only are extremely important and interesting in their own right, but also point to an immensely complicated and intricate super-intelligent mathematical design of Quran and reinforce "Mathematically Fully constrained Writing" or MFCW identity of this scripture and its consequences, as have been explained in the above article.</span>


Author(s):  
A. KOTLIAR ◽  
S. DUBROV ◽  
S. SEREDA ◽  
M. DENISYUK ◽  
G. PONYATOVSKA

IIntroduction. The COVID-19 pandemic became a major challenge for healthcare systems around the world. The development and improvement of basic treatments for coronavirus patients is important to improve public health and improve quality of life after recovery. The aim of the study: to determine the frequency and structure of prescribing antibacterial drugs in the prehospital and hospital stages, used in patients with COVID-19. Assess the relationship between irrational use of antibacterial drugs with the length of hospital stay of patients with coronavirus disease, the risk of transfer to the intensive care unit (ICU) and mortality. Materials and methods: Statistical, retrospective analysis of 400 case histories of patients with COVID-19 who were treated at the Municipal Non-Profit Enterprise «Kyiv City Clinical Hospital №17» (KNP «KMKL#17») for the period from September 2020 to November 2021 with severe coronavirus disease. Results: 400 medical charts were selected for the study, which were divided into two groups according to the purpose of antibacterial therapy. Of the group of patients who received pre-hospital antibacterial therapy (200 people), indications for its appointment had only 7 % of patients. Among the group receiving antibacterial drugs there is a prolongation of the length of stay in the hospital, the risk of transfer to ICU increases. There is also higher risk of mortality in patients of group 1 (14,5 %), compared with group 2 (8 %), whose antibacterial drugs were not prescribed at the prehospital stage. Conclusion: as a result of the study it was found that patients who were unreasonably prescribed antibacterial therapy prolongs the period of general hospitalization by 2.3 ± 0.8 days, increasing the need for transfer of patients due to deterioration to ICU by an average of 13 %, increase in the incidence of antibiotic-associated diarrhea by 7-8 %, and there is a tendency to increase mortality from COVID-19. Antibacterial drugs should be used only on the basis of indications in the case of proven bacterial co-infection (superinfection) or reasonable suspicion of it in patients with respiratory disease caused by SARS-CoV-2 and in no case should be prophylactic.


Author(s):  
William Mangione ◽  
Ram Samudrala

Drug repurposing is a valuable tool for combating the slowing rates of novel therapeutic discovery. The Computational Analysis of Novel Drug Opportunities (CANDO) platform performs shotgun repurposing of 2030 indications/diseases using 3733 drugs/compounds to predict interactions with 46,784 proteins and relating them via proteomic interaction signatures. An accuracy is calculated by comparing interaction similarities of drugs approved for the same indications. We performed a unique subset analysis by breaking down the full protein library into smaller subsets and then recombining the best performing subsets into larger supersets. Up to 14% improvement in accuracy is seen upon benchmarking the supersets, representing a 100&ndash;1000 fold reduction in the number of proteins considered relative to the full library. Further analysis revealed that libraries comprised of proteins with more equitably diverse ligand interactions are important for describing compound behavior. Using one of these libraries to generate putative drug candidates against malaria results in more drugs that could be validated in the biomedical literature than the list suggested by the full protein library. Our work elucidates the role of particular protein subsets and corresponding ligand interactions that play a role in drug repurposing, with implications for drug design and machine learning approaches to improve the CANDO platform.


10.2196/21169 ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (8) ◽  
pp. e21169
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Elaine Gates ◽  
Ahmed Abdeen Hamed

Background Driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and the dire need to discover an antiviral drug, we explored the landscape of the SARS-CoV-2 biomedical publications to identify potential treatments. Objective The aims of this study are to identify off-label drugs that may have benefits for the coronavirus disease pandemic, present a novel ranking algorithm called CovidX to recommend existing drugs for potential repurposing, and validate the literature-based outcome with drug knowledge available in clinical trials. Methods To achieve such objectives, we applied natural language processing techniques to identify drugs and linked entities (eg, disease, gene, protein, chemical compounds). When such entities are linked, they form a map that can be further explored using network science tools. The CovidX algorithm was based upon a notion that we called “diversity.” A diversity score for a given drug was calculated by measuring how “diverse” a drug is calculated using various biological entities (regardless of the cardinality of actual instances in each category). The algorithm validates the ranking and awards those drugs that are currently being investigated in open clinical trials. The rationale behind the open clinical trial is to provide a validating mechanism of the PubMed results. This ensures providing up to date evidence of the fast development of this disease. Results From the analyzed biomedical literature, the algorithm identified 30 possible drug candidates for repurposing, ranked them accordingly, and validated the ranking outcomes against evidence from clinical trials. The top 10 candidates according to our algorithm are hydroxychloroquine, azithromycin, chloroquine, ritonavir, losartan, remdesivir, favipiravir, methylprednisolone, rapamycin, and tilorone dihydrochloride. Conclusions The ranking shows both consistency and promise in identifying drugs that can be repurposed. We believe, however, the full treatment to be a multifaceted, adjuvant approach where multiple drugs may need to be taken at the same time.


Antiquity ◽  
1991 ◽  
Vol 65 (249) ◽  
pp. 822-828 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger Thomas

In a characteristically stimulating recent article in ANTIQUITY, Barry Cunliffe has touched on many of the most important issues concerning the publication of ‘rescue’ excavations in Britain in the 1990s (Cunliffe 1990). The purpose of the present article is to follow up some the points which Cunliffe has raised.Publication, and the dissemination of information, is the lifeblood of any academic discipline, and questions of what is published (and of what is read!), where, how and by whom are of central importance for archaeology. Over the past two decades in Britain, and particularly in England where the volume of work has been greatest, there has been a recurrent concern with the problem of how to publish the results of ‘rescue’ archaeology. Rescue excavations can generate very large quantities of data, collected for reasons which are often largely beyond archaeological control, and the problems (both intellectual and practical) of publishing this material are considerable. In Britain the issues have been the subject of expert examination on two occasions since 1970 -the Frere (1975) and Cunliffe (1983) reports - and now in the 1990s the topic is firmly on the archaeological agenda again. This paper is intended as a contribution to the continuing debate.


1992 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-103 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manfred Dugas ◽  
Jutta Hausen ◽  
Johnny A. Johnson

A ring R is said to be an AE-ring if every endomorphism of its additive group R+ is a ring endomorphism. Clearly, the zero ring on any abelian group is an AE-ring. In a recent article, Birkenmeier and Heatherly characterised the so-called standard AE-lings, that is, the non-trivial AE-rings whose maximal 2-subgroup is a direct summand. The present article demonstrates the existence of non-standard AE-rings. Four questions posed by Birkenmeier and Heatherly are answered in the negative.


1997 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-46
Author(s):  
David Smith

MAKING THE IDEA of spiritual development practically workable in a pluralised context faces the formidable challenge of avoiding both watered-down apathy and acrimonious dispute between rival faiths. This is the claim of Brian Hill in a recent article on the subject. The present article critiques Hill's proposed solution and suggests a broader alternative framework based on the idea of multi-faceted human response to universal basic questions, outlining ways in which this framework might more fundamentally challenge existing curricula while retaining room for spiritual diversity.


2006 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 261-267 ◽  
Author(s):  
John E. Joseph

Linguistic identities are double-edged swords because, while functioning in a positive and productive way to give people a sense of belonging, they do so by defining an “us” in opposition to a “them” that becomes all too easy to demonise. Studying the construction of identities is important precisely because it offers our best hope for helping to undo their negative impact, while at the same time providing deeper insight into the role languages play in our interpretation of who does or doesn’t belong to which particular group. Djité, in a recent article in this journal (2006), argues that, in our multilingual world, linguistic identities are not the monolithic entities which people often take them for, with the result that individuals get misinterpreted based on the way they speak, provoking prejudice and discrimination. This is also, contrary to what Djité suggests, one of the principal thrusts of Joseph’s book Language and Identity (2004). The present article summarises the relevant arguments made in this latter book and attempts to clarify points of agreement and disagreement with Djité.


Author(s):  
László Árva ◽  
Zoltán Sipos

Jelen tanulmány a posztmodern kor fogyasztási tendenciáit és a posztmodern marketing sajátos fejlődését elemzi, elsősorban a turizmus példáján. A szerzők a hazai és a nemzetközi szakirodalom, illetve saját kutatásaik és megfigyeléseik alapján ütköztetik az ismert és elfogadott elveket, elméleteket a gyakorlattal, és felhívják a figyelmet a marketingtevékenység alkalmazkodásának hazai problémáira. A Vezetéstudomány című folyóirat 2008/9. számában rendkívül érdekes tanulmány jelent meg Mitev Ariel Zoltán és Horváth Dóra tollából „A posztmodern marketing rózsaszirmai” címmel. A tanulmány előremutató, érdekfeszítő és minden tekintetben konstruktív, újszerű. Jelen tanulmány szerzőire is nagy hatást gyakorolt a cikk, nagyrészt felsorolt erényei miatt, de egyes esetekben kiegészítést kívánva. Mindenképpen inspirálta a továbblépést, az újabb adalékok megfogalmazását, amire ezúton e tanulmány szerzői kísérletet tettek. A cikk egyben szerves gondolati folytatása a szerzőpáros korábbi közös publikációinak, elsősorban a Marketing & Menedzsment folyóiratban megjelent cikknek. _______ In this article the author will analyze consumption tendencies of post-modern age, mainly using tourism marketing examples. Their analysis has been based on results of their own researches and researches published in Hungarian and international marketing literature. In this article they try to confront different theories of post-modern marketing and they will analyze problems of applicability of these theories in Hungarian marketing problem solving. An extremely interesting article was published in Vezetéstudomány (2008/9), written by Zoltán Mitev Ariel and Dóra Horváth, and this article, by its interesting, innovative and constructive aspect has largely influenced authors of present article to continue the path proposed in the abovementioned article. The article, in the same time, is an organic continuation of the earlier common publications of the authors, e.g. the recent article in Marketing & Menedzsment journal.


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