Research on policy shifts has found that repositioning can be costly as it affects candidates’ perceived honesty, reliability, and competence. It remains unclear, however, whether a politician’s gender affects perceptions of repositioning. Research on gender stereotypes has found that while male politicians are viewed as more competent, decisive, and displaying strong leadership, female politicians are believed to be more honest. Applying expectancy-violation theory, I test the hypothesis that the reputational cost of repositioning is more pronounced for female politicians in a preregistered survey experiment fielded on a large convenience sample in Flanders, Belgium (n = 6,957). I find that while frequent repositioning is evaluated negatively, the negative effect of repositioning is not more pronounced for female candidates than for male candidates on most outcome measures.

Leishmaniasis is a vector-borne neglected tropical disease caused by protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania for which there is a paucity of effective viable non-toxic drugs. There are 1·3 million new cases each year causing considerable socio-economic hardship, best measured in 2·4 million disability adjusted life years, with greatest impact on the poorest communities, which means that desperately needed new antileishmanial treatments have to be both affordable and accessible. Established medicines with cheaper and faster development times may hold the cure for this neglected tropical disease. This concept of using old drugs for new diseases may not be novel but, with the ambitious target of controlling or eradicating tropical diseases by 2020, this strategy is still an important one. In this review, we will explore the current state-of-the-art of drug repurposing strategies in the search for new treatments for leishmaniasis.

Neospora caninum is an apicomplexan parasite strongly related to reproductive problems in cattle. The neosporosis control is not well established and several fronts are under development, predominantly based on immune protection, immunomodulation and chemotherapy. The use of anti-malarial drugs as therapeutic sources has, in theory, considerable potential for any apicomplexan. Drugs such as methylene blue (MB) and pyrimethamine (Pyr) represent therapeutic options for malaria; thus, their use for neosporosis should be assessed. In this work, we tested the effects of MB and Pyr on N. caninum proliferation and clearance, using LacZ-tagged tachyzoites. The drugs inhibited at nanomolar dosages and its combination demonstrated an antagonistic interaction in proliferation assays, according to the Chou and Talalay method for drug combination index. However, the drug combination significantly improved the parasite in vitro clearance. The repositioning of well-established drugs opens a short-term strategy to obtain low-cost therapeutics approaches against neosporosis.