Epidemiology, disease patterns, immunology, diagnosis, treatment and control measures of leishmaniasis are described. Various issues relating to leishmaniasis are highlighted: the relative lack of importance given to this disease is compared with other infections, climate change and its possible effect on extension of endemicity of this infection, and new diagnostic tests that are helping bette...

The acquisition of immunity following subclinical or resolved infection with the intracellular parasite Leishmania donovani suggests that vaccination could prevent visceral leishmaniasis (VL). The LACK (Leishmania homolog of receptors for activated C kinase) antigen is of interest as a vaccine candidate for the leishmaniases because of its immunopathogenic role in murine L. major infection. Imm...

Stimulation with Bacillus Calmette-Guerin (BCG) vaccine has been reported to enhance resistance of mice against Leishmania donovani infection. Such infection is usually lethal in hamsters, thus providing a more stringent animal model to assess the effect of BCG upon visceral leishmaniasis. Animals receive two IP injections (2-8 X 10(7) BCG) pre or post IC challenge with 4 X 10(6) amastigotes. C...

Vaccination with durable immunity is the main goal and fundamental to control leishmaniasis. To stimulate the immune response, small numbers of parasites are necessary to be presented in the mammalian host. Similar to natural course of infection, strategy using live vaccine is more attractive when compared to other approaches. Live vaccines present the whole spectrum of antigens to the host imm...

Despite intense efforts there is no safe and efficacious vaccine against visceral leishmaniasis, which is fatal and endemic in many tropical countries. A major shortcoming in the vaccine development against blood-borne parasitic agents such as Leishmania is the inadequate predictive power of the early immune responses mounted in the host against the experimental vaccines. Often immune correlate...

Only a few cases of Post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis have been reported in Japan, especially recently. We describe a case of a 32-year-old woman who developed rose-colored nodules on her forearms two years after Kala-azar. A skin biopsy specimen from a nodule revealed not only granulomatous changes but also many amastigotes of Leishmania donovani in macrophages. Rose-colored nodules were als...

Leishmaniasis is a well-documented disease of humans and animals worldwide. In humans, leishmaniasis is generally zoonotic with a number of different clinical manifestations ranging from single or multiple skin lesions (cutaneous leishmaniasis) to destruction of the mucosae, including the soft cartilage of the nasal septum (mucocutaneous leishmaniasis) or systemic infections of the liver and sp...

BACKGROUND Heat shock protein 70 (HSP70) is present in all organisms studied so far, and is a major immunogen in infections caused by pathogens including Leishmania spp. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to clone and express HSP70 from L. infantum strain MCAN/IR/96/LON-49 and evaluate antibody response against HSP70 in visceral leishmaniasis (VL). METHODS The L. infantum HSP70 gene segmen...