Toxoplasma gondii is a unique intracellular parasite, which infect a large proportion of the world population, but uncommonly causes clinically significant disease. The present study was performed to estimate the prevalence of toxoplasmosis in 400 apparently healthy blood donor males, their ages were between 18 and 57 years using enzyme linked immunosorbent assay, and to examine the effects of infection on total testosterone, free testosterone and follicle stimulating hormone (FSH) levels in their sera. Seroprevalence showed 10 (2.5 %) and 121 (30 %) of them had IgM and IgG antibodies respectively. Both acute and chronic toxoplasmosis in males recorded higher significant (P < 0.05) mean concentration for total and free testosterone hormone,

Gender and culture are among the factors that influence the process of understanding and interpreting different types of communication, especially images. The current study, which is a part of a master’s thesis, aims at investigating the role of gender and culture in interpreting and understanding the caricatures that deal with women’s issues in Arab societies. To this end, the researchers adopted Barthes’ (1957) concepts of denotation and connotation in his theory of mythologies in addition to Langacker’s (1987) theory of (Domains). The research concludes that the female subjects have better cognitive abilities in investing the signs within the selected caricatures. The other factor the study reached to is that the respondents

Background: Cholera has been recognized as a killer disease since earliest time. The disease is caused by infection of the small intestine by Vibrio cholerae O1 and O1391 which is characterized by severe dehydrating diarrheal condition and is one disease in modern times that is epidemic, endemic and pandemic in nature. Objective: This study was carried out to detect and isolate V. cholerae from patients suffered from watery diarrhea, which may cause severe complications such as dehydration, shock followed by death. Materials and methods: stool specimens were collected from 308 patients with watery diarrhea. These samples were tested with many criteria such as TCBS agar, gram stain, biochemical tests and VITEK-2 system to improve the isolati

The present study attempts to identify some of the differences between the skull bones of two species Cyprinus carpio and Carassius carassius, which belong to the Cyprinidae family. The study is a taxonomic diagnostic study between the two species which are considered local fish abundant in the Iraqi aquatic environment

Translating culture-specific proverbs (CSPs) is a challenging task since they often occur in a peculiar context. Further, CSPs are intended to imply meanings that extend far beyond the literal meaning of such a kind of proverbs. As far as English and Arabic are concerned, translators often encounter problems in translating CSPs due to cultural differences between the source language(SL) and the target language (TL) as well as what seems to be the lack of equivalence for some CSPs.

In view of this, the present study aims at investigating the translation of CSPs in three English-Arabic dictionaries of proverbs, namely Dictionary of Common English Proverbs Translated and Explained (2004), One thousand and One English Pr

The increasing use of antiseptic compounds creates selective pressure cause emergence of antiseptic resistance among Staphylococcus aureus .Resistance mechanism of antiseptic is driven mainly by multi drug resistant (MDR) efflux protein.Sixty five isolates of S.aureuswere collected from different clinical sources and subjected to 11 antibiotics most of them are recognized by efflux systems as extruded substrates. Range of efflux activity was estimated using cartwheel method. Simultaneous discrimination of antiseptic coding genes (qacA/B, smr and norA)as well as nuc and mecA genes among multidrug resistantS.aureus(MRSA) isolates was preformed using multiplex PCR assay

Introduction and Aim: The pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-39, a member of the IL-12 family plays a key role in the inflammatory response by modulating immune cell activity and inflammation. A literature search shows no study undertaken for the effect of IL-39's on arthritis so far. Hence, the purpose of this study was to investigate the role of IL-39 in rheumatoid arthritis. Materials and Methods: This study involved 80 patients with rheumatoid arthritis registered at the Rheumatology Clinic at Baghdad teaching hospital. The patients were divided into three groups based on treatments received. Group 1 included patients who were not on any treatment for arthritis, Group 2 with patients on hydroxychloroquine and or prednisone treatment,