Cutaneous leishmaniasis is a painful disease that exerts a serious toll on societies around the world that are afflicted by it. Although not life-threatening, the skin ulcers and scars it causes can lead to isolation and psychosocial pathologies due to social stigma, and its occurrence is often asso...ciated with regional conflicts.
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Visceral leishmaniasis is an important disease in East Africa where recurrent outbreaks occur. Leishmania-HIV coinfected people have high chance of developing the full-blown clinical disease, and high relapse and mortality rates. Poverty, malnutrition and population movements in endemic areas increa...se the risk of developing VL. Early diagnosis and effective prompt treatment reduce the prevalence of the disease and prevents disabilities and death. This course aims at providing health workers with the necessary knowledge to understand the epidemiology, diagnosis, treatment, surveillance and outbreak investigation of this important disease in East Africa.
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Website last accessed on 18.03.2023
WHO often receives requests from Member States and implementing partners to provide training in capacity‐building in endemic areas in order to better equip health personnel to diagnose, treat and control the disease.
Cutaneous Leishmaniasis (CL) is a painful disease that exerts a serious toll on societies around the world that are afflicted by it. Although not life-threatening, the skin ulcers and scars it causes can lead to isolation and psychosocial pathologies due to social stigma, and its occurrence is often... associated with regional conflicts. The Cutaneous Leishmaniasis Research Meeting was held on December 7, 2020, with participation by basic researchers, clinical researchers, and drug discovery experts involved in research and development related to CL under the auspices of the Joint Usage/Research Center on Tropical Disease, Institute of Tropical Medicine. In addition, the CL Webinar was held on March 5, 2021, hosted by the Graduate School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health, co-hosted by the Institute of Tropical Medicine, and supported by Médecins Sans Frontières and DNDi.
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Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease caused by a protozoan of the Leishmania genus, and is considered a neglected tropical disease. It still remains a main public health concern at global level and in Arab world mainly in low-income countries. Therefore, this study was designed to evaluate the Arab ...world’s growing contribution to global leishmaniasis research.
This study describes a bibliometric review of all leishmaniasis research publications published between January 1998 and December 2017 indexed on the Scopus database.
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Frequently Asked Questions on Visceral Leishmaniasis
Leishmaniasis is a vector-borne disease with a wide variety of parasite species, reservoirs, and vectors involved in transmission. It is caused by different species of the protozoa Leishmania and is transmitted to animals and humans through a bite of insects in the Psychodidae family. Its presence i...s directly linked to poverty, but social, environmental, and climatalogic factors directly influence the disease's epidemiology.
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Leishmaniasis is a parasitic disease caused by intracellular protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania (Trypanosomatidae family); it is endemic in more than 98 countries worldwide [1]. Visceral (VL) and cutaneous (CL) leishmaniasis are the most common forms of the disease. VL causes a systemic dis...ease characterised by fever, hepatosplenomegaly, anaemia and lymph node enlargement and may be fatal without appropriate treatment, while CL mainly causes skin ulcers and is considered a less severe form of the disease [2]. The incubation period for VL varies from 10 days up to nearly 3 years and for CL from 2 weeks to 3 years [3]. The natural route of transmission is a bite of blood-feeding phlebotomine sandflies; it may be zoonotic or anthroponotic, depending on the parasite species and the geographical location
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The development of this target product profile (TPP) was led by the WHO Department of Control of Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) following standard WHO guidance for TPP development. In order to identify and prioritize diagnostic needs, a WHO NTD Diagnostics Technical Advisory Group (DTAG) was form...ed, and different subgroups were created to advise on specific NTDs, including a subgroup working on the human African trypanosomiasis (HAT) diagnostic innovation needs. This group of independent experts included leading scientists, public health officials and endemic-country end-user representatives. Standard WHO Declaration of Interest procedures were followed. A landscape analysis of the available products and of the development pipeline was conducted, and the salient areas with unmet needs were identified.
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La leishmaniasis es una enfermedad tropical desatendida sensible
al clima, trasmitida por la picadura de insectos flebótomos y
se calcula que amenaza a mil millones de personas en todo el mundo.
Esta enfermedad altamente compleja se presenta de varias formas
clínicas, causadas por 20 especies ...del parásito Leishmania.
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Leishmaniasis is a climate-sensitive disease. Changes in
temperature, rainfall, and humidity can have strong impacts on
the sandfly vector, altering their distribution and influencing their
survival and population sizes. Increased temperatures shorten
vector development time, reduce Leishmania p...arasite incubation
time, and increase vector biting rates, allowing transmission
in areas not previously endemic for the disease. Poor and
marginalized communities will be hit disproportionately harder by
the effects of climate change, and droughts, famines, and floods
can also lead to displacement and migration of immunologically
naive people to areas where leishmaniasis is endemic, posing a
threat of leishmaniasis outbreaks.
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Localized cutaneous leishmaniasis and its evolving forms (diffuse cutaneous leishmaniasis, mucosal leishmaniasis and cutaneous leishmaniasis recidivans), together with the sequela of visceral leishmaniasis (post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis), account for about one million cases of dermal leishmani...ases per year worldwide. Although not lethal, the dermal leishmaniases cause chronic, disfiguring skin lesions which are an important cause of morbidity and stigma.
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Front Chem. 2021; 9: 622286.
Published online 2021 Mar 12. doi: 10.3389/fchem.2021.622286
Surveillance mondiale de la leishmaniose: 2021, évaluation de l’impact de la pandémie de COVID-19
The aims of this report are to update the results of the GHO leishmaniasis indicators reported by Member States to WHO up to 2021, to describe specific indicators of gender and age distribution, re...lapses, the AmBisome® donation programme, selected outbreaks, case fatality rates for visceral leishmaniasis (VL, also known as kala-azar), rates of co-infection with HIV and VL and the burden of post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis (PKDL). This report also describes the Kala-azar Elimination Programme in South-East Asia and adverse events after administration of antileishmanial drugs.
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