Armaghane Danesh Bimonthly Journal (Jul 2006)
A New Endemic Focus of Visceral Leishmaniosis in Southeren IRAN
Abstract
Introduction & Objective: Visceral leishmaniosis (VL) is endemic in some parts of Iran. Mediterranean type of disease is present in Iran where its causative agent is Leishmania infantum and dogs are the main reservoirs. Since many cases of the disease were reported from Noor-abad, in Fars provine, we aimed to carry out an epidemiological survey on VL in human and animal reservoirs (dogs) in Mahoor-Milaty district of Noor-Abad city at WestNorth of Fars province. Materials & Methods: In this cross-sectional descriptive survey, blood samples were randomly collected from all children 10 years old, 10% of the adult population and 20% of the dogs kept by owners in Mahoor-Milaty villages drawn by systematic sampling. The specimens were subjected to direct agglutination test (DAT) on serum and PCR on whole blood. The data were analyzed by standard statistical tests using SPSS software. Results: Of the 321 human samples, 234 samples belonged to children 10 years old and 87 samples were from adults. 182 (56.7%) out of 321 samples were prepared from males and 139 (43.3%) from females. Totally, 6 cases (1.86%) of human samples showed specific Leishmania antibodies with titers 1:3200 or higher by DAT. Of the 19 dog samples, 5 cases (26.3%) showed specific Leishmania antibodies with titers 1:160 or higher. Likewise, kinetoplast DNA (kDNA) of Leishmania infantum was identified in 6 cases (31.5%) of all dogs by PCR with specific primers on whole blood. None of these cases had seropositive titer. Conclusion: Results of this study show that dogs are the main sources of infection for human visceral leishmaniasis in this region and VL is endemic in Mahoor-Milaty district where the incidence rate of human VL cases has recently been increased. Besides it seems that PCR method is a good tool for primary screening of dogs' blood samples with overt or cryptic VL infection
