Use this function to determine the antibiotic code of one or more antibiotics. The data set \code{\link{antibiotics}} will be searched for abbreviations, official names and synonyms (brand names).
All entries in the \code{\link{antibiotics}} data set have three different identifiers: a human readable EARS-Net code (column \code{ab}, used by ECDC and WHONET), an ATC code (column \code{atc}, used by WHO), and a CID code (column \code{cid}, Compound ID, used by PubChem). The data set contains more than 5,000 official brand names from many different countries, as found in PubChem.
In the ATC classification system, the active substances are classified in a hierarchy with five different levels. The system has fourteen main anatomical/pharmacological groups or 1st levels. Each ATC main group is divided into 2nd levels which could be either pharmacological or therapeutic groups. The 3rd and 4th levels are chemical, pharmacological or therapeutic subgroups and the 5th level is the chemical substance. The 2nd, 3rd and 4th levels are often used to identify pharmacological subgroups when that is considered more appropriate than therapeutic or chemical subgroups.
This package contains \strong{all ~450 antimicrobial drugs} and their Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) codes, ATC groups and Defined Daily Dose (DDD) from the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Drug Statistics Methodology (WHOCC, \url{https://www.whocc.no}) and the Pharmaceuticals Community Register of the European Commission (\url{http://ec.europa.eu/health/documents/community-register/html/atc.htm}).
These have become the gold standard for international drug utilisation monitoring and research.
The WHOCC is located in Oslo at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and funded by the Norwegian government. The European Commission is the executive of the European Union and promotes its general interest.
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\section{Read more on our website!}{
On our website \url{https://msberends.gitlab.io/AMR} you can find \href{https://msberends.gitlab.io/AMR/articles/AMR.html}{a comprehensive tutorial} about how to conduct AMR analysis, the \href{https://msberends.gitlab.io/AMR/reference}{complete documentation of all functions} (which reads a lot easier than here in R) and \href{https://msberends.gitlab.io/AMR/articles/WHONET.html}{an example analysis using WHONET data}.
}
\examples{
# These examples all return "ERY", the ID of Erythromycin: