BACKGROUND Leishmaniasis is a group of diseases that are created by intracellular parasites of Leishmania. Cutaneous leishmaniasis is considered as one of the health problems in some provinces of Iran. METHODS In this study, a total of 178 Giemsa-stained slides from confirmed cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis were examined. The slides were prepared from the patients with cutaneous leishmaniasi...

An epidemiological study to examine the sero-prevalence of zoonotic visceral leishmaniosis (ZVL) among domestic and wild canines in endemic foci of Iran was carried out during 1999-2003 to assess the distribution of the disease and the possible association between infection in dogs, wild canines and people. Anti-leishmanial antibodies were detected by the direct agglutination test (DAT). Parasi...

Extrachromosomal DNA elements have been identified in wild-type populations of the parasitic protozoan Leishmania. Elements from L. major and L. tropica were detected using orthogonal-field-alternation-gel electrophoresis. They are nonhomologous, supercoiled circular DNA molecules derived from different chromosomes in the Leishmania genome. Electron microscopy revealed that the elements have ve...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the leishmanicidal activity of saponin, dasyscyphin C of Eclipta prostrata and sapogenin, gymnemagenol from Gymnema sylvestre leaves under in vitro conditions. MATERIALS AND METHODS Dasyscyphin C/Gymnemagenol were dissolved in phosphate buffered saline (PBS) and diluted with liquid medium to obtain concentrations ranging from 1000 to 15 mug /ml. The leishmanicidal activi...

A two-year study was conducted of phlebotomine sand fly fauna in a defined focus of Leishmania tropica. A total of 17,947 sand flies representing 10 species were collected from the location. Phlebotomus guggisbergi, a vector of L. tropica in Kenya, was the most prevalent species through the entire period, representing about 80% of the total catch. There was marked seasonal fluctuation in the po...

Virulence variability was investigated by analyzing the experimental pathogenicity of seven Leishmania tropica strains isolated from human lesions in Syria, through the evaluation of the infective ability, growth pattern and pathogenicity. Two of the strains presented higher levels of macrophage infection, increased promastigote replication in culture medium and as well as amastigote multiplica...

Leishmania tropica promastigotes that are highly resistant to methotrexate, a dihydrofolate reductase inhibitor, have been developed. Organisms resistant to 1 mM methotrexate have a 40-fold increase in dihydrofolate reductase which is associated with thymidylate synthetase, and they contain amplified regions of DNA that may be directly visualized on stained gels of restriction digests. The ampl...

OBJECTIVE This study aimed to evaluate the potential in vitro anti-leishmanial activities of moxifloxacin, linezolid and caspofungin against Leishmania tropica. METHODS In vitro effects of all agents were studied by using the microdilution method. For this purpose, serial dilutions of the aforementioned agents were prepared in concentrations between 4096 μg/mL-0.008 μg/mL. Afterwards, promast...