INTRODUCTION Kala-azar is a disease resulting from infection by Leishmania donovani and Leishmania infantum. Most patients with the disease exhibit prolonged fever, wasting, anemia and hepatosplenomegaly without complications. However, some patients develop severe disease with hemorrhagic manifestations, bacterial infections, jaundice, and edema dyspnea, among other symptoms, followed by death....

The difficulty of treatment of kala-azar when associated with pulmonary tuberculosis has been recognized by all workers who have come across such cases. Napier (1937) considered pulmonary tuberculosis and kala-azar to be a fatal combination. He had observed that when kalaazar and pulmonary tuberculosis co-existed, antimony treatment had little or no effect on the symptoms, fever and splenic enl...

The efficacy of antimony in the treatment of kala azar was established before the period covered by these observations. China gave antimony to the world2, but the honour of its successful introduction and application in the treatment of kala azar belongs chiefly to Napier and to Brahmachari of India. The compounds of antimony now in use for the treatment of kala azar are direct results of the c...

thirty eight patients with visceral leishmaniasis were reviewed, age ranged from 2 months to 10 years, 74% above 3.5 y, with 24% affection in infants (7 to 12 m), with slight male predilection. all the patients had weight loss, splenomegaly and hepatomegaly, 97% with fever, 92% had positive serology and 63% had positive bone marrow findings. a few patients presented with atypical clinical findi...

in a descriptive analytical study in six villages in meshkin shahr area, the important endemic focus of kala-azar in northwest iran, a kap study was carried out on various aspects of kala-azar in a total of 245 young mothers selected randomly and interviewed the results of the present investigation showed that 93.5% of the mothers were illiterate and only 2.4% of them had acceptable knowledge a...

Remote sensing was applied for the collection of spatio-temporal data to increase our understanding of the potential distribution of the kala-azar vector Phlebotomus argentipes in endemic areas of the Vaishali district of Bihar, India. We produced monthly distribution maps of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) based on data from the thematic mapper (TM) sensor onboard the Landsat...

6 1 Global Overview of Leishmaniasis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 7 1.1 Disease Types . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 8 1.2 Disease Incidence/Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ....

Visceral leishmaniasis (kala-azar) continues to be a major rural public health problem in Bangladesh. A cross-sectional study was carried out in two subdistricts of Mymensingh district from January 2006 to June 2007 to evaluate the delay kala-azar treatment. Suspected patients who attended to out patient department (OPD) were subjected to a dipstick test (RK39) for kala-azar. Sixty five from Bh...

BACKGROUND We evaluated the diagnostic accuracy as well as the reproducibility of the urine latex agglutination test 'KAtex' in the diagnosis of kala-azar in patients recruited at a tertiary care centre in Dharan, Nepal, between November 2000 and January 2002. METHODS All patients presenting with fever of 2 weeks or more and splenomegaly were consecutively enrolled. Bone marrow and--if negati...

1. Smears from the nasal cavities of fifteen patients suffering from kala-azar have been examined and in nine of these typical Leishman-Donovan bodies have been found. 2. Smears from the surface of the tonsil and from the saliva in one of the above nine cases showed the presence of leishmania. The tonsils of this patient, who died as the result of kala-azar and secondary infection, at autopsy w...