Background: During Ramadan, Muslims fast throughout daylight hours. There is a direct link between fasting and increasing incidence of infections. Antibiotic usage for treatment of infections should be based on accurate diagnosis, with the correct dose and dosing regimen for the shortest period to avoid bacterial resistance. This study aimed to evaluate the practices of physicians in prescribing suitable antibiotics for fasting patients and the compliance of the patients in using such antibiotics at regular intervals. Materials and methods: An observational study was carried out during the middle 10 days of Ramadan 2014 in two pharmacies at Baghdad. A total of 34 prescriptions (Rx) for adults who suffered from infections were examined. For each included Rx, the researchers documented the age and sex of the patient, the diagnosis of the case, and the name of the given antibiotic(s) with dose and frequency of usage. A direct interview with the patient was also done, at which each patient was asked about fasting and if he/she would like to continue fasting during the remaining period of Ramadan. The patient was also asked if the physician asked him/her about fasting before writing the Rx. Results: More than two-thirds of participating patients were fasting during Ramadan. Antibiotics were prescribed at a higher percentage by dentists and surgeons, for which a single antibiotic with a twice-daily regimen was the most commonly prescribed by physicians for patients during the Ramadan month. Conclusion: Physicians fail to take patient fasting status into consideration when prescribing antibiotics for their fasting patients. Antibiotics with a twice-daily regimen are not suitable and best to be avoided for fasting patients in Iraq during Ramadan – especially if it occurs during summer months – to avoid treatment failure and provoking bacterial resistance. Keywords: fasting, Ramadan, antibiotics, dosing regimen
This study employs evolutionary optimization and Artificial Intelligence algorithms to determine an individual’s age using a single-faced image as the basis for the identification process. Additionally, we used the WIKI dataset, widely considered the most comprehensive collection of facial images to date, including descriptions of age and gender attributes. However, estimating age from facial images is a recent topic of study, even though much research has been undertaken on establishing chronological age from facial photographs. Retrained artificial neural networks are used for classification after applying reprocessing and optimization techniques to achieve this goal. It is possible that the difficulty of determining age could be reduce
... Show MoreIt is generally accepted that there are two spectrophotometric techniques for quantifying ceftazidime (CFT) in bulk medications and pharmaceutical formulations. The methods are described as simple, sensitive, selective, accurate and efficient techniques. The first method used an alkaline medium to convert ceftazidime to its diazonium salt, which is then combined with the 1-Naphthol (1-NPT) and 2-Naphthol (2-NPT) reagents. The azo dye that was produced brown and red in color with absorption intensities of ƛmax 585 and 545nm respectively. Beer's law was followed in terms of concentration ranging from (3-40) µg .ml-1 For (CFT-1-NPT) and (CFT-2-NPT), the detection limits were 1.0096 and 0.8017 µg.ml-1, respec
... Show MoreTo observe the effect of media of the internal pressure on the equivalent stress distribution in the tube, an experimental study is done by constructing a testing rig to apply the hydraulic pressure and three dies are manufactured with different bulging configurations (square, cosine, and conical). In the other part, ANSYS APDL is generated to analyze the bulging process with hydraulic and rubber (natural and industrial) media. It was found that when the media is a rubber, the stress is decreased about 9.068% in case of cosine die and 5.4439% in case of conical die and 2.8544% in case of square die. So, it can be concluded that the internal pressure in the rubber media is much better than in hydraulic media. Also, the force needed for fo
... Show MoreThe world is currently facing a medical crisis. The epidemic has affected millions of people around the world since its appearance. This situation needs an urgent solution. Most countries have used different solutions to stop the spread of the epidemic. The World Health Organization has imposed some rules that people should adhere. The rules are such, wearing masks, quarantining infected people and social distancing. Social distancing is one of the most important solutions that have given good results to confront the emerging virus. Several systems have been developed that use artificial intelligence and deep learning to track social distancing. In this study, a system based on deep learning has been proposed. The system includes monitor
... Show MoreSansevieriatrifasciata was studied as a potential biosorbent for chromium, copper and nickel removal in batch process from electroplating and tannery effluents. Different parameters influencing the biosorption process such as pH, contact time, and amount of biosorbent were optimized while using the 80 mm sized particles of the biosorbent. As high as 91.3 % Ni and 92.7 % Cu were removed at pH of 6 and 4.5 respectively, while optimum Cr removal of 91.34 % from electroplating and 94.6 % from tannery effluents was found at pH 6.0 and 4.0 respectively. Pseudo second order model was found to best fit the kinetic data for all the metals as evidenced by their greater R2 values. FTIR characterization of biosorbent revealed the presence of carboxyl a
... Show MoreBreast cancer constitutes about one fourth of the registered cancer cases among the Iraqi population (1)
and it is the leading cause of death among Iraqi women (2)
. Each year more women are exposed to the vicious
ramifications of this disease which include death if left unmanaged or the negative sequels that they would
experience, cosmetically and psychologically, after exposure to radical mastectomy.
The World Health Organization (WHO) documented that early detection and screening, when coped
with adequate therapy, could offer a reduction in breast cancer mortality; displaying that the low survival rates
in less developed countries, including Iraq, is mainly attributed to the lack of early detection programs couple
This paper focuses on developing a self-starting numerical approach that can be used for direct integration of higher-order initial value problems of Ordinary Differential Equations. The method is derived from power series approximation with the resulting equations discretized at the selected grid and off-grid points. The method is applied in a block-by-block approach as a numerical integrator of higher-order initial value problems. The basic properties of the block method are investigated to authenticate its performance and then implemented with some tested experiments to validate the accuracy and convergence of the method.
The haplotype association analysis has been proposed to capture the collective behavior of sets of variants by testing the association of each set instead of individual variants with the disease.Such an analysis typically involves a list of unphased multiple-locus genotypes with potentially sparse frequencies in cases and controls.It starts with inferring haplotypes from genotypes followed by a haplotype co-classification and marginal screening for disease-associated haplotypes.Unfortunately,phasing uncertainty may have a strong effects on the haplotype co-classification and therefore on the accuracy of predicting risk haplotypes.Here,to address the issue,we propose an alternative approach:In Stage 1,we select potential risk genotypes inste
... Show MoreThe virtual decomposition control (VDC) is an efficient tool suitable to deal with the full-dynamics-based control problem of complex robots. However, the regressor-based adaptive control used by VDC to control every subsystem and to estimate the unknown parameters demands specific knowledge about the system physics. Therefore, in this paper, we focus on reorganizing the equation of the VDC for a serial chain manipulator using the adaptive function approximation technique (FAT) without needing specific system physics. The dynamic matrices of the dynamic equation of every subsystem (e.g. link and joint) are approximated by orthogonal functions due to the minimum approximation errors produced. The contr