Antifungal activities of the plant euphorbia cortinifolia against fungi causing onychomycosis

Onychomycosis is a stigmatizing condition whose management is associated with a number of problems including poor prognosis due to the nature and etiology of the disease, limited effective antifungal agents, side effects of the antifungal agents and resistance of the causative agents towards antifungal agents. Furthermore the patients require longer exposure to these antifungal agents making management of the disease expensive. All the this necessitated investigating the g effectiveness of the latex of the plant Europhobia cotinifolin populary used in Kilimanjaro and _ Dar es Salaam Regions for this condition] The specific objectives of the study were to screen the methanolic extracts and plant latex for antifungal activity, to determine the minimum inhibitory concentrations, to carry out a brine shrimp lethality test and establish the TLC profile for the extracts and latex. Disc diffusion method was used to screen for antifungal activity of latex and methanolic extracts U of the leaf and stem bark against Trichophyron rubrum, T. mentagrophytes, Aspergillus niger and Candida albicans. The Minimum inhibitory concentrations were determined by broth microdillution method. The TLC profile on silica plates was established by determining the “appropriate solvent system by polarity adjustment. The Brine shrimp lethality was determined by using modified Mayer et al., 1982 method The leave extract displayed more antifungal activity on the tested fungi when compared to the to stem bark extracts while the latex lacked the activity. The MIC of the leaves extract was 2.5 ug/ml for Trichophyron mentagrophytes and Aspergillus niger, the stem bark extract had MC‘ of 2.5ug/ml for. Trichophyron mentagrophytes Regarding brine shrimp test, the extracts showed high activity with LC50 of lo.7ugf1nl and l'7.057ug/ml for the leaf extract and stem extracts respectively. It can be concluded that the latex popularly used to treat onychornycosis lacks antifungal activity though the extracts were able to display activity against some of the tested fungi. However, the plant displayed a strong cytotoxic effect. It is therefore recommended that further studies should be done in regard to the cytotoxic activity involving several cell lines