#leishmaniasis

💔 Help Fenrir Fight Leishmaniasis

Fenrir is a young Belgian Shepherd with a heart full of love and life. Sadly, he’s battling advanced leishmaniasis, a serious parasitic disease. While incurable, it can be controlled — but the treatments are expensive.

Each relapse requires a special medication called Milteforan, and just one round costs nearly €500. On top of that, there are blood tests and vet visits.

We’re doing everything we can to care for him, but we can’t do it alone. If you can donate, we would be beyond grateful. If not, just sharing this link means the world to us. 💖🐾

"The infection is most common in parts of Africa, Brazil and the eastern Mediterranean region, like Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, according to the World Health Organization. "

"All leishmaniasis infections are caused by Leishmania parasites but can have varying clinical presentations. The most common form – called cutaneous leishmaniasis – can cause ulcers and permanent scars. Some more severe variations of the disease can be fatal, according to the CDC."

Back in 2014, dermatologist Bridget McIlwee saw a 3-year-old patient in central Texas with unusual bumps on his ear. "They looked a little bit like almost kind of a benign mole that you would see in a child, except that you wouldn't expect something like that to come up quickly and then multiply," she says. McIlwee sent off a sample for laboratory testing, and the results came back pointing to a surprising culprit: The boy had tested positive for cutaneous leishmaniasis, a neglected tropical disease. The World Health Organization says between 600,000 and 1 million new infections happen worldwide every year, mostly in tropical regions of the Americas, the Mediterranean basin, the Middle East and Central Asia — not in Texas. These illnesses can be disfiguring, even if they are rarely fatal. "I was shocked, because in medical school, we're taught that this is a tropical disease, something that you see in immigrants, military returning from deployment, people who went on vacation to South America or Asia or Africa," McIlwee says.

She gets cold pretty easily, as in a few weeks ago we had some slightly colder weather (like 20°C during the day and at most 10°C at night) and she was cold enough to need a sweater at night.

I've bought some warm costs for the winter, but I do hope she'll grow some of the fur back.

I'm most worried about her ears, the tips are completely bald and at risk for frostbite once it gets cold.

Her back is basically the only place she has decent fur, everywhere else is super thin.

Could you tell that a spot was shaved 2 weeks ago?

And her belly is still completely bald from getting spayed 6+ months ago

Illustration of post-kala-azar dermal leishmaniasis by @claire_carswell

Plug and Parasitise

Responsible for leishmaniasis, a disease that can cause severe skin lesions or affect internal organs, Leishmania parasites use biting phlebotomine sand flies as vectors to move between hosts. To maximise transmission into a new victim, they produce a thick fluid, the promastigote secretory gel (PSG), which obstructs the flies’ digestive system. Looking inside an infected fly, using micro-computed tomography, reveals how the mass of parasites and PSG distends the midgut (in green, with ingested blood in red), and forces a valve, lying between the foregut and midgut, to open more widely. This makes it more difficult for flies to take in blood, causing them to feed for longer than usual when they next bite, and so increasing the chance of parasites being regurgitated. If infected flies do manage to get another meal, parasite numbers grow and the volume of the PSG plug increases, further boosting transmission during later bites.

Written by Emmanuelle Briolat

Image from work by Martin JR Hall and colleagues

Natural History Museum, London, UK

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Pathogens, August 2021

The protozoan disease visceral leishmaniasis (VL) has recently expanded to places where it had not previously been reported and has expanded its geographic distribution within countries where it was already endemic. Now, researchers writing in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases describe three dispersion routes that have moved Leishmania infantum into and through central-Southern Brazil, helping shed light on the overall mechanisms of VL dispersal.