Clinically visceral leishmaniasis is suspected in only a fraction of infected persons, as the majority of these may not have clinical manifestations and remain asymptomatic. There is scanty information on diagnosing latent infections and predicting disease in asymptomatic persons. We therefore carried out a study on asymptomatic contacts of patients with visceral leishmaniasis and post-kala-aza...

IN the years following 1858, when the British government formally assumed power over the whole of British India, the government of Bengal became concerned by reports of an epidemic of quinine-resistant fever occurring in the district of Burdwan in Lower Bengal. The mortality was so great that the population, the productivity of the land, and consequently the government revenue were greatly dimi...

In 1950s the Government of India under National Malaria Eradication Programme (NMEP) now National Vector Borne Disease Control Programme, launched massive insecticidal spraying with DDT for malaria vector control and kala-azar came to a halt in Assam as a collateral benefit of malaria eradication programme. As a result, there were no further reports of kala-azar from the northeastern region exc...

Sir, Kala-azar, transmitted by sandflies was endemic in Assam until 1950, with three major epidemics between 1875 and 19501,2. Intensive insecticide spraying as part of National Malaria Eradication Programme eliminated the disease from Assam by mid 1950s, except for isolated case reports upto 19853. We recently diagnosed kalaazar in an adult male aged 43 years from Guwahati city, Assam, who was...

INTRODUCTION The treatment of Indian tropical disease such as kala-azar is likely to be troublesome to the clinicians as AmpB- and miltefosine-resistant Leishmania donovani has been reported. The rationale behind designed a novel inhibitors of model of L. donovani enolase and performing a binding study with its inhibitors to gain details of the interaction between protein residues and ligand mo...

The Fucose-Mannose Ligand (FML) of Leishmania donovani is a complex glycoproteic fraction. Its potential use as a tool for diagnosis of human visceral leishmaniasis was tested with human sera from Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The FML-ELISA test, showed 100% sensitivity and 96% specificity, identifying patients with overt kala-azar (p < 0.001, when compared to normal sera), and subjects w...

Post-Kala-Azar Dermal Leishmaniasis (PKDL) remains a major public health threat in Bangladesh. A cross-sectional study was carried out in Surya Kanta Kala azar Research Centre (SKKRC), Mymensingh, from January 2012 to July 2013 to evaluate the health seeking behaviour and the length of delay of PKDL management. The consecutive 200 diagnosed PKDL cases that got treatment in SKKRC hospital were s...