Leishmaniasis: background information
A brief history of the disease
Although cutaneous leishmaniasis can be traced back many hundreds of years, one of the first and most important clinical descriptions was made in 1756 by Alexander Russell following an examination of a Turkish patient. The disease, then commonly known as "Aleppo boil", was described in terms which are relevant: "After it is cicatrised, it leaves an ugly scar, which remains through life, and for many months has a livid colour. When they are not irritated, they seldom give much pain.
It affects the natives when they are children, and generally appears in the face, though they also have some lesions on their extremities. In strangers, it commonly appears some months after their arrival in an endemic area; very few escape having lesions, but they seldom affect the same person above once."
Representations of skin lesions and facial deformities have been found on pre-Inca potteries from Ecuador and Peru dating back to the first century AD. They are evidence that cutaneous and mucocutaneous forms of leishmaniasis prevailed in the New World as early as this period.
Leishmaniasis: A neglected disease
Texts from the Inca period in the 15th and 16th centuries, and then during the Spanish colonization, mention the risk run by seasonal agricultural workers who returned from the Andes with skin ulcers which, in those times, were attributed to "valley sickness" or "Andean sickness"....
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The disease and its epidemiology
The leishmaniases are caused by 20 species pathogenic for humans belonging to the genus Leishmania, a protozoa transmitted by the bite of a tiny 2 to 3 millimetre-long insect vector, the phlebotomine sandfly.....
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A pre-Inca pottery
A Bolivian case of leishmaniasis
