Disordered urbanization and deforestation are the main activities proposed as causal factors of re-emergence of American cutaneous leishmaniasis caused by Leishmania braziliensis. The purpose of this work was to investigate, in the hyperendemic area of Argentina, the distribution of Phlebotomine sand flies at the modified primary vegetation-crop interface, as one of the potential sites where th...

The feeding success of sand flies (Diptera: Phlebotominae) is linked to the vast array of pharmacological substances in their saliva, which interferes with the host haemostasis and immune response. Modification of feeding site plays also an important role in Leishmania transmission. In naive hosts, co-inoculation of saliva and Leishmania parasites increases the chance of successful transmission...

BACKGROUND We investigated the efficacy, safety and cost of lime wash of household walls plus treatment of sand fly breeding places with bleach (i.e. environmental management or EM), insecticide impregnated durable wall lining (DWL), and bed net impregnation with slow release insecticide (ITN) for sand fly control in the Indian sub-continent. METHODS This multi-country cluster randomized cont...

Chitinases of trypanosomatid parasites have been proposed to fulfil various roles in their blood-feeding arthropod vectors but so far none have been directly tested using a molecular approach. We characterized the ability of Leishmania mexicana episomally transfected with LmexCht1 (the L. mexicana chitinase gene) to survive and grow within the permissive sand fly vector, Lutzomyia longipalpis. ...

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Early Cretaceous flagellates with characters typical of trypanosomatids were found in the gut of sand fly larvae, as well as in surrounding debris, in Burmese amber. This discovery supports a hypothesis in which free-living trypanosomatids could have been acquired by sand fly larvae in their feeding environment and then carried transtadially into the adult stage. At some point in time, specific...

Blood feeding by the sand fly Lutzomyia longipalpis is aided by the presence of a vasodilator in its salivary glands. This novel vasodilator has been isolated by reversed-phase high-performance liquid chromatography. Ten nanograms of the vasodilator are present in the extract of a pair of sand fly salivary glands. It has 500 times the vasodilatory activity of calcitonin gene-related peptide, pr...

Gravid females of 2 sand fly species, Phlebotomus papatasi and P. perniciosus, were exposed to carbon dioxide anesthesia for 5, 10 and 20 minutes. Recovery time, mortality at 0 min and 24 h, percentage of females laying eggs, time to oviposition, and egg productivity for each exposure time were registered. Survival, fecundity and oviposition time in the 2 species were not adversely affected by ...

The aim of the present review is to give relevant information on aspects of the biology and ecology, including the vectorial competence of Lutzomyia sand fly species suggested as vectors of American cutaneous leishmaniasis in Brazil. The disease, due to Leishmania (Viannia) braziliensis, has been registered in most municipalities in all the Brazilian states and its transmission is associated wi...

The sand fly Lutzomyia longipalpis is the most important vector of American Visceral Leishmaniasis. Adults are phytophagous (males and females) or blood feeders (females only), and larvae feed on solid detritus. Digestion in sand fly larvae has scarcely been studied, but some glycosidase activities putatively involved in microorganism digestion were already described. Nevertheless, the molecula...