Medication is said to have a narrow or wide therapeutic index. This describes the ratio of desired effect to toxic effect. A medicine with a narrow therapeutic index (close to one) only does what people want it to do when the amount given is enough to put the organism in danger. A medicine with a wide therapeutic index (greater than five) does what people want it to do and does not necessarily put the organism in danger. Medication with a narrow margin are more difficult to dose and give to a person, and may require therapeutic drug monitoring (examples are warfarin, some antiepileptics, aminoglycoside antibiotics). Most anti-cancer drugs have a narrow therapeutic margin; toxic side-effects are almost always encountered at doses needed to kill tumours.
Drugs that are given to people to help cure them of a medical condition or help reduce the symptoms are often licensed. They can be divided into three groups: over-the-counter, where anybody can buy the drug from a shop; prescription-only medicine, where a doctor has to say that a person is allowed to take a drug; and in some countries, pharmacy medicines, where only a registered pharmacy can sell a drug. Most over-the-counter medication will not hurt a person if they take a bit more than they are meant to. Medications are often produced by pharmaceutical companies and are often patented. Drugs that are not patented are called generic drugs.
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are the world's most spoken language family.
Linguists believe they all come from a single language, Proto-Indo-European, which was originally spoken somewhere in Eurasia. They are now spoken all over the world.
The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages in Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia.
Historically, the language family was also important in Anatolia and Central Asia.
The earliest Indo-European writing is from the Bronze Age in Anatolian and Mycenaean Greek. The origin of Proto-Indo-European is after the invention of farming since some of its words have to do with farming.
Although it may have fewer languages than some other language families, it has the most native speakers, about 2.7 billion.
Of the 20 languages with the most speakers, 12 are Indo-European: English, Spanish, Hindi, Portuguese, Bengali, Russian, German, Sindhi, Punjabi, Marathi, French, and Urdu.
Four of the six official languages of the United Nations are Indo-European: English, Spanish, French, and Russian.
These are the main Indo-European language groups:
Most Indo-European languages use the Latin script, but others use the Devanagari, Cyrillic, or Arabic scripts.
The number of speakers derived from statistics or estimates (2019) and were rounded:
Suggestions of similarities between Indian and European languages began to be made by European visitors to India in the 16th century. In 1583, Thomas Stephens, an English Jesuit missionary in Goa, India, noticed similarities between the Indian languages and Greek and Latin and included them included in a letter to his brother, but it was not published until the 20th century.
The first account to mention Sanskrit is from Filippo Sassetti. Born in Florence, Italy, in 1540, he was a merchant who was among the first Europeans to study the Sanskrit. Writing in 1585, he noted some word similarities between Sanskrit and Italian such as "devaḥ"/"dio" "God", "sarpaḥ"/"serpe" "serpent", "sapta"/"sette" "seven", "aṣṭa"/"otto" "eight", "nava"/"nove" "nine"). However, neither observation led to further scholarly inquiry.
In 1647, the Dutch linguist and scholar Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn noted the similarity among Indo-European languages and supposed that they had derived from a primitive common language. He included in his hypothesis Dutch, Greek, Latin, Persian, and German, and he later added Slavic, Celtic, and Baltic languages. However, his suggestions did not become widely known and did not stimulate further research.
Gaston Coeurdoux and others had made similar observations. Coeurdoux made a thorough comparison of Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek conjugations in the late 1760s to suggest a relationship between the languages. Similarly, Mikhail Lomonosov compared different languages groups of the world, including Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, Finnish, Chinese, Hottentot and others.
The hypothesis reappeared in 1786, 20 years after Coeurdoux, when Sir William Jones lectured on the striking similarities between three of the oldest languages known in his time: Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. He later tentatively added Gothic, Celtic, and Old Persian but made some errors and omissions in his classification.
In 1813, Thomas Young was first to use the term "Indo-European". It became the standard scientific term except in Germany through Franz Bopp's "Comparative Grammar". Appearing between 1833 and 1852, it was the starting point of Indo-European studies as an academic discipline.
Some 20th-century scholars thought Indo-European languages started in Armenia or India, but most now think that it started in Eastern Europe or Anatolia.
Gulf of Mexico
The Gulf of Mexico is a round sea, called a gulf. Land in North America is around much of it. The United States of America, Mexico, and Cuba are the countries around it. The Straits of Florida connect to the Atlantic Ocean, and the Yucatán Channel connects to the Caribbean Sea.
Petroleum is found near the north and west coast of this gulf. Many hurricanes hit this area, for example, Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita hurt many of the oil wells in 2005 in the United States. There is also a big fishing industry in the gulf.
Zaire
Zaire, officially the Republic of Zaire () was the name of a country that is now called the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It used this name from 27 November 1971 to 17 May 1997. The name "Zaire" comes from a Portuguese corruption of the Kongo word "nzare", meaning "river".
Pneumonia
Pneumonia is a disease of the lungs and the respiratory system. The lung contains many small bulbs, or sacs, called alveoli. These help to take out oxygen from the air. In the case of pneumonia, these bulbs become inflamed. They fill up with a fluid which is called pus, and can no longer absorb as much oxygen as before. This makes it hard for the person with pneumonia to breathe. They may feel out of breath, or like they are drowning. They may also feel pain when they breathe. Sometimes people die of pneumonia, even when they go to a hospital and take medicine.
Pneumonia can be caused by bacteria, viruses, fungi or parasites. It can also be caused by chemical or physical damage done to the lungs. Other illnesses, like alcohol abuse or lung cancer, can also result in pneumonia.
People with pneumonia usually have difficulty breathing. They may also cough, or have pains in the chest area. The treatment of pneumonia depends on how the illness was caused. If it was caused by bacteria, antibiotics can be used to treat it.
People of all ages can have pneumonia. The disease is dangerous. Many people die from pneumonia, especially old people, or people with a weak immune system.
According to some research in 2010, in some parts of the world where people are very poor like India, Nigeria, and Pakistan, pneumonia was the cause of death for more children under the age of five than any other disease. Statistically, however, for every 2,000 children in the developing world who die of pneumonia, only one child in the developed world dies from the disease. This is because of differences in health care and because of differences in rates of breastfeeding, not because of differences in children. Breastfeeding newborn babies greatly increases their ability to survive pneumonia, but some cultures think of breastfeeding as taboo.
Encino, Los Angeles
Encino, California is a district of Los Angeles.
Winter Olympic Games