Toxicology
Aruna Bakhru in Nutrition and Integrative Medicine, 2018
Mercury is a silvery-white metal element that is liquid at ordinary room temperature; it has no taste or smell. It occurs as metallic mercury (Hg), as cinnabar (HgS), and in about 25 other organic mineral compounds. Mercury exists in three basic forms: the elemental (H0), inorganic salts (H2 and H3), and the organic state. The elemental state is a silver-gray liquid, which volatilizes slowly at room temperatures, and vaporizes more rapidly when heated. This form accounts for most occupational exposures. Inhalation of the elemental vapor is very hazardous and nearly 100% absorbed and 75% retained. Following vapor inhalation, only 7% is expelled through exhalation. Only about 0.01% is absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract when ingested. The fecal route is probably the primary route of excretion for elemental mercury with the urine also being an important route. The saliva and sweat are also potentially capable of excreting mercury.
Tattooing in Vitiligo
Vineet Relhan, Vijay Kumar Garg, Sneha Ghunawat, Khushbu Mahajan in Comprehensive Textbook on Vitiligo, 2020
The most commonly used tattoo pigment is iron oxide, which can give different shades of light brown, dark brown, camel yellow and black, depending upon the shades of the constitutional skin tone and complexion of the normal skin to which it needs to be matched. However, good matching of the tattooed skin may be achieved at the time of tattooing but it tends to become grayish blue with time. In addition, iron oxide yellow color can be obtained by using cadmium oxide, while white titanium oxide can be used to mix and match various shades required with iron oxide. Cinnabar and mercuric sulfate are red pigments which can also be used to obtain various shades by mixing and matching. The red pigments, however, have more allergenic potential than others, and iron oxide is the most versatile pigment as it can give various shades and has the least sensitizing potential [5].
Syphilis
Scott M. Jackson in Skin Disease and the History of Dermatology, 2023
In Turner's treatise on syphilis, 26 of the 30 patient cases described resulted in a cure, which Turner defined in several ways: reduction in the pain of either urination or the urethral discharge; drying up of the scabs and pustules; resolution of the swollen lymph nodes; healing of chancres; preservation of the voice; or relief of pain in head and legs.68 To achieve these successes, Turner, a mercurialist, required his patients to stay in bed for a month. He administered oral calomel for mild forms of the Pox, and for more severe cases, he advocated external application of topical mercurial “unctions.” In both instances, salivation was the goal and signaled to Turner that the treatment was working. If the patient did not “salivate” with topical delivery of the mercury, fumigation with cinnabar (mercury sulfide) was the next step. By the 1730s, since the stigma of salivation prompted a month of inconvenient sequestration, salivation fell out of favor among practitioners in London, who deemed it an antiquated approach and its advocates—including Turner—quacks.69 Mercury remained a mainstay of treating syphilis after Turner's time; however, prescribing it to the point of salivation—a sign of severe toxicity—was no longer the goal.
Nephrotoxicity induced by natural compounds from herbal medicines – a challenge for clinical application
Published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, 2022
Jinqiu Rao, Ting Peng, Na Li, Yuan Wang, Caiqin Yan, Kai Wang, Feng Qiu
Aristolochic acid nephropathy (ACN) is a rapidly developing interstitial kidney disease that first appeared in the public in 1993 after a young Belgian woman took a herbal diet drug adulterated with aristolochic acid (AA) and caused renal failure (De Broe 1999). Although most countries prohibit or restrict the sale and use of products containing AA caused by a variety of herbs and products has been still reported all over the world (Vaclavik et al. 2014). The unintentional long-term consumption of food contaminated with AA can cause Balkan endemic nephropathy (BEN) (De Broe 2012). Researchers believed BEN patients may have been poisoned by eating food made from flour contaminated with the seeds of the Aristolochia plant family (Jelaković et al. 2015). Some crops can absorb and bioaccumulate AA from soil and water where Aristolochia species grow (Gruia et al. 2018). In addition to AA, many other components of HMs can cause nephrotoxicity. In 2009, a 29-year-old man developed acute renal failure after taking Euphorbia paralias, a drug that is used to treat edema. Despite that Glycyrrhiza glabra is one of the most popular HMs, a 65-year-old woman developed hypertension with sodium retention, edema, hypokalemia, metabolic alkalosis, low plasma aldosterone, and low renin activity after taking Glycyrrhiza granules for six months (Ronovan Ottenbacher 2015). Aloe with aloe-emodin as the main component is used as a component additive in various foods and cosmetics, while it was clinically indicated that the intake of aloe preparations may be related to renal failure (Dong et al. 2020). Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F is a well-known HM for its various pharmacological activities, especially anti-inflammatory, anti-virus, and antioxidant activities (Zhang et al. 2021). However, severe renal tubular inflammatory cell infiltration, renal tubular epithelial cell degeneration, and necrosis were found in renal biopsy in clinical cases of patients with nephropathy caused by Tripterygium wilfordii Hook F (Luo et al. 2018). Cinnabar is mainly known for treating insomnia and epilepsy. Long-term use of cinnabar accumulated mercury in the kidney, resulting in renal tubule damage and renal interstitial fibrosis (Wang, Wang, et al. 2015). According to available data, more than 100 kinds of herbal constituents, including organic acids, alkaloids, anthraquinones, flavonoids, terpenoids, phenylpropanoids, glycosides, and minerals all have renal toxicity (Xu et al. 2020).
Evaluation of the potential nephrotoxicity and mechanism in rats after long-term exposure to the traditional Tibetan medicine tsothel
Published in Pharmaceutical Biology, 2018
Li Xiang, Bo Lin, Ping Wang, Yingfan Hu, Jiasi Wu, Yong Zeng, Xianli Meng
Additionally, the results presented in this paper clearly demonstrate that the toxicity potential of tsothel was much less than that of common mercurials (MeHg and HgCl2), which is similar to the results of recent studies comparing the toxicity of mercury-containing traditional medicines with that of common mercurials (Shi et al. 2011; Lu et al. 2011; Wang et al. 2013). As mentioned above, tsothel contains 54% mercuric sulphide, numerous herbs, animal medicines and some mineral substances. Additionally, tsothel is insoluble and thus may be poorly absorbed from the gastrointestinal tract. Thus, it is not surprising that the toxicological potential of tsothel is quite different from that of common mercurials. In the present study, the renal Hg accumulation in the tsothel groups was some thousands-fold higher than that in the control group, but its nephrotoxicity potential seemed to be tolerable and reversible. It has been speculated that ‘soluble Hg’ or ‘free Hg’ contributes to the potential nephrotoxicity of HgS rather than the total Hg content (Shi et al. 2011). Therefore, the renal Hg accumulation in our present study was always at a high level, but the mercuric components contributing to the potential nephrotoxicity of tsothel were probably just small amounts that were not enough to induce obvious and irreversible nephrotoxicity. As several studies have shown, mercuric polysulphides are the major dissolved components released from HgS, and their behaviour is quite different from that of HgCl2 in binding serum protein (Zhou et al. 2010). Furthermore, the release of Hg (++) from HgS (cinnabar) is more difficult than that from HgCl2 (Lu et al. 2011). Elemental mercurials, inorganic mercurials and organic mercurials must be distinguished when discussing their toxicity (Klaassen 2006), and the total mercury content alone is inappropriate for the safety evaluation of tsothel and HgS-containing traditional medicines (Zalups and Lash 1994). This prompts us to note that the renal toxicity of mercurial depends not only on the total Hg content but also on the chemical forms and physical status (Zalups and Lash 1994; Shi et al. 2011; Lu et al. 2011). Therefore, the use of the total Hg content alone to evaluate the safety of HgS-containing traditional medicines is not scientifically sound, and chemical forms of the metal and their disposition should be taken into consideration in risk assessment. Moreover, it is also important to avoid overdose, long-term use, and improper processing of HgS-containing traditional medicines to reduce potential renal injury.
What Sherlock sorely missed: the EVA technology for cultural heritage exploration
Published in Expert Review of Proteomics, 2019
Pier Giorgio Righetti, Gleb Zilberstein, Alfonsina D’Amato
Prior to his death Casanova wrote his famous Memoirs (Histoire de ma Vie), which are archived at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France in Paris. His autobiography is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life in the 18th century and is also regarded as a literary masterpiece of that epoch. In 1785 he became the librarian to Count Joseph Karl von Waldstein, a chamberlain of the emperor, in the Castle of Dux, Bohemia. A few years later, in 1789, he began in earnest to write his Memoirs, as ‘the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying of grief’. The first draft was completed by July 1792, and he spent the next six years revising it. His autobiography was still being compiled at the time of his death, his account having reached only the summer of 1774. A letter by him in 1792 states that he was reconsidering his decision to publish them, believing that his story was despicable and he would make enemies by writing the truth about his affairs. But he decided to proceed, using initials instead of actual names of the persons appearing in the book and toning down the strongest passages. He wrote in French instead of Italian because ‘the French language is more widely known than mine’. His opus is monumental: in their original publication, the memoirs were divided into twelve volumes, and the unabridged English translation by W. R. Trask runs to more than 3,500 pages. In his adventurous life he mentions he had love affairs with 122 women and girls. These adventures claimed a price, i.e. sexual diseases. He candidly admits in his Memoirs that he had several bouts of gonorrhea, the first one occurring early in his life, at the first sexual intercourse at the age of thirteen. As we did in our previous analyses of the writing of Bulgakov [19], of the pages of the death registries of the Milano’s plague of 1630 [22] and on Chekhov’s shirt [20], we assumed that, by exploring the surface of the original manuscript, we might be able to find traces of the pestiferous gonorrhea bacterium that accompanied him for most of his life. The data gleaned have just been published in Electrophoresis, in a special issue dedicated to bio-analysis [28]. Although potential traces of his pathology could not be detected, we do have data on the presence of substantial traces (reaching 0.04mg/kg, i.e. 20 times higher than background levels) of HgS in the pages of his manuscript (Figure 8). This chemical compound, known also as cinnabar, had been used, in medieval painting, as a red pigment to produce the red colour vermillion. Yet, in the XVIII century, its use was not any longer as a pigment but as a medicament, of wide diffusion, to cure sexual diseases, in particular gonorrhea. This pathology was indeed very common among the European population; risks of capturing this infection were quite high in love affairs. Thus our findings indicated that, at the time of this writing, Casanova had likely had a relapse of this pathology and was curing it by using mercury sulphide, whose powder was spilled, in minute amounts, also on the page surfaces (in those days the high toxicity of this metal in human beings was not known!).
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