Leishmaniasis is a group of diseases caused by protozoa of Leishmania genus. The currently available treatments for this disease are expensive, present high toxicity and are associated to difficulties of healing and parasite resistance. Therefore, the development of strategies for leishmaniasis treatment is indispensable and includes reposition of existing drugs, as well as drug combination the...

BACKGROUND Current therapies for cutaneous leishmaniasis are limited by poor efficacy, long-term course of treatment, and the development of resistance. We evaluated if pentavalent antimony (an anti-parasitic drug) combined with imiquimod (an immunomodulator) was more effective than pentavalent antimony alone in patients who had not previously been treated. METHODS A randomized double-blind c...

An aqueous solution-based doping strategy was developed for controlled doping impurity atoms into a ZnO nanowire (NW) lattice. Through this approach, antimony-doped ZnO NWs were successfully synthesized in an aqueous solution containing zinc nitrate and hexamethylenetetramine with antimony acetate as the dopant source. By introducing glycolate ions into the solution, a soluble antimony precurso...

Data on the mechanism of antimony genotoxicity is scarce. Arsenic and antimony are proposed to share some toxicological features. Thus comparative and combined experiments with As(III) and Sb(III) were performed to gain a deeper knowledge of the mechanism of antimony genotoxicity. Trivalent arsenic proved to be five times more cytotoxic and one order of magnitude more potent in induction of mic...

Recent in vitro studies have suggested a potential role for antimony as a confounder in human health studies related to arsenic in drinking water. We measured tube-well water concentrations of antimony and arsenic in the Pabna region of Bangladesh, where arsenic concentrations are known to be elevated and the concentrations of antimony have not yet been thoroughly documented. Two hundred forty-...

BACKGROUND Increased rates for failure in leishmaniasis antimony treatment have been recently recognized worldwide. Although several risk factors have been identified there is no clinical score to predict antimony therapy failure of cutaneous leishmaniasis. METHODS A case control study was conducted in Peru from 2001 to 2004. 171 patients were treated with pentavalent antimony and followed up...

Thin-film solar cells made from earth-abundant, inexpensive, and non-toxic materials are needed to replace the current technologies whose widespread use is limited by their use of scarce, costly, and toxic elements. Tin monosulfide (SnS) is a promising candidate for making absorber layers in scalable, inexpensive, and non-toxic solar cells. SnS has always been observed to be a p-type semiconduc...

Early experiments have determined that the gallium and antimony diffusivities in gallium antimonide are similar, whereas recent more precise studies demonstrate that gallium diffuses up to three orders of magnitude faster than antimony. In the present study using electronic structure calculations we predict the concentrations and migration enthalpy barriers of important defects in gallium antim...

Therapeutic failure in the treatment of cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) occurs in 5% of patients infected by Leishmania braziliensis. This study evaluates the use of topically applied granulocyte macrophage colony-stimulating factor (GM-CSF) combined with the standard dose of antimony to treat refractory cases of CL. Five patients who had received three courses or more of antimony were enrolled in...

The results of a study and application of leucocrystal violet for the determination of antimony in parts per million levels is described here. The proposed method is based on the reaction of antimony(III) with acidified potassium iodate to liberate iodine. The liberated iodine selectively oxidizes leucocrystal violet to crystal violet dye. The formed dye shows maximum absorbance at 590 nm. The ...