Posted on 12/13/2015 9:27:29 PM PST by EinNYC
If you've never heard of leishmaniasis, you're lucky — and you probably live in a developed country.
It's an illness caused by parasites that are carried by tiny blood-sucking insects called sandflies. The painful, hard-to-treat sores it leaves on skin and internal organs can be disfiguring and even sometimes deadly.
And while leishmaniasis mostly occurs in Central and South America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia for now, it's moving north into the United States, as Maryn McKenna reports in a blog post.
In a story for National Geographic News, McKenna describes how about half of the members of an expedition to the Honduran jungle returned to the US with an "unwelcome souvenir" that left them with fevers, chills, fatigue, and weeping sores that wouldn't heal.
Even once these five well-funded expedition members started to receive treatment directly from the Laboratory of Parasitic Diseases at the National Institutes of Health, they were still on a rough road. The only treatments are toxic, potentially causing intense pain, and kidney damage. The side effects for one riskier drug include vomiting, diarrhea, and liver damage, along with the aforementioned problems.
As McKenna notes in her blog post, a "trickle of cases" in the American Southwest — mostly in South and Central Texas — indicate that the illness is moving north, having already established a foothold in the US, and in isolated cases, patients have acquired the infection as far up as North Dakota.
In 2011, Lisette Hilton described leishmaniasis as a "growing threat" within the US in the trade publication Dermatology Times.
"For the last dozen years or so, we've been finding more cases of leishmaniasis that presumably were transmitted within the [US] borders," Dr. Scott Norton, a dermatologist at Georgetown University Hospital, told Hilton.
These numbers are still small. Researchers talk about finding 13 confirmed cases in Texas and Oklahoma between 2000 and 2007. Not a lot.
The risk of contracting this disease currently in the US is very low.
But this disease can survive anywhere that the various types of sandflies that carry it can live, and researchers have found that their range is expanding as the planet gets warmer.
One study predicts that by 2080, these vector species could be living as far north as Canada.
Why this could actually lead to a cure to a devastating illness Right now, the CDC estimates that there are between 700,000 and 1.2 million new cases of cutaneous leishmaniasis, which causes lesions on the skin, every year. There are between 200,000 and 400,000 new visceral leishmaniasis cases, which are even more dangerous since they can cause potentially deadly damage to internal organs.
One researcher told McKenna that last year, this form of the disease killed ten times as many people in South Sudan as died in the entire 2014-2015 Ebola outbreak.
But for the most part, there isn't much research into a cure for leishmaniasis, which can leave people with scars that can ruin lives. And the treatments that do exist so far are hard to get and potentially debilitating.
This illness fits into the category of neglected tropical diseases (NTD), serious illnesses that together affect more than a billion mostly poor people around the world every year. They include many diseases that Americans tend not to worry about, like leprosy, rabies, and chikungunya. Limited interest by pharmaceutical companies means that there isn't much work done to find a cure for them — it wouldn't be a particularly profitable venture.
As Bill Gates pointed out in a recent discussion of preventative care and resilient health systems at the Clinton Foundation meeting, we spend more on trying to cure baldness than we do on trying to cure malaria, which is not technically a NTD but affects a similar population.
More cases of leishmaniasis affecting people in the US and other more developed countries may be the thing that spurs the interest necessary to develop a cure or a vaccine.
McKenna writes that the challenges the expedition members faced should be a wake up call for the rest of us that it's time to come up with a way to fight this illness.
"Their experience, and their difficulty finding affordable, effective, safe treatment, should serve as warnings that we ought to heed while we can," she writes.
Love how they try to blame it on the planet getting warmer. Trolling for research grants...
Couldn’t possibly have anything to do with infected people from infested areas moving across borders...
Third World countries get Third World diseases.
But at least we will be diverse.
If you bring in more of “over there”, eventually we’ll look like “over there”.
Interesting. They are perfectly willing to throw the Spanish speakers under the bus to obscure the Syrian refujidhists bringing it here along with their terrorism skills...
“But this disease can survive anywhere that the various types of sandflies that carry it can live, and researchers have found that their range is expanding as the planet gets warmer. “
Gotta get that Hoax plug in there.
isn’t this what issis is suffering from too?
It’s spreading because we cannot test our “immigrants” as was done with our ancestors. If they had a disease or were criminals, they were turned away.
Thanks to “self-immigration” many diseases, some previously eradicated in this country, are rising.
Poor dear. Bless her heart.
Yes. Interesting coincidence, ya think?
Is the sandfly what part of the host / source lifecycle? Is it a parasitic carrier that lays eggs and hatch in the host person? Is it a bacteria from the bite? Is it a virus that uses the host as the carrier?
Well here's the real story, sans the agenda.
Leishmaniasis, also spelled leishmaniosis, is a disease caused by protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania and spread by the bite of certain types of sandflies.[2] The disease can present in three main ways: cutaneous, mucocutaneous, or visceral leishmaniasis.[2] The cutaneous form presents with skin ulcers, while the mucocutaneous form presents with ulcers of the skin, mouth, and nose, and the visceral form starts with skin ulcers and then later presents with fever, low red blood cells, and enlarged spleen and liver.
Infections in humans are caused by more than 20 species of Leishmania.[2] Risk factors include poverty, malnutrition, deforestation, and urbanization.[2] All three types can be diagnosed by seeing the parasites under the microscope.[2] Additionally, visceral disease can be diagnosed by blood tests.
] Leishmaniasis can be partly prevented by sleeping under nets treated with insecticide.[2] Other measures include spraying insecticides to kill sandflies and treating people with the disease early to prevent further spread.[2] The treatment needed is determined by where the disease is acquired, the species of Leishmania, and the type of infection.[2] Some possible medications used for visceral disease include liposomal amphotericin B,[4] a combination of pentavalent antimonials and paromomycin,[4] and miltefosine.[5] For cutaneous disease, paromomycin, fluconazole, or pentamidine may be effective.
About 12 million people are currently infected[7] in some 98 countries.[3] About 2 million new cases[3] and between 20 and 50 thousand deaths occur each year.[2][8] About 200 million people in Asia, Africa, South and Central America, and southern Europe live in areas where the disease is common.[3][9] The World Health Organization has obtained discounts on some medications to treat the disease.[3] The disease may occur in a number of other animals, including dogs and rodents.
Time for another Ivermectin shot I suppose. Not the Bovine one, but the one approved for swine. 5ml's per 100 pounds of body weight.
There is plenty of research on Leishmaniasis; it was one of the top contenders for bio-weapons research back in the 60’s.
I would be willing to bet that if any of the people working at Fort Detrick, Maryland, wanted (or were allowed) to talk about it, there is probably a cure or vaccination on the shelf right now.
I still blame OBASTARD, THE STATE DEPARTMENT, EVERYBODY IN THE OBASTARD ADMINISTRATION, and LIBTARDS IN GENERAL for allowing these diseases and parasitic infections from THIRD WORLD SH#THOLES into the United States.
NO; PUT A STAKE IN HER BLACK, EVIL, HEART.
Guess you’re not from the South.
Well by all means lets let more people into our country!
Just because they keep saying it doesn't make it so!
My dad, who lives in north central Texas, got the cutaneous form of leishmaniasis about ten years ago (a lesion on his wrist). They never did figure out how on earth he came in contact with the sandfly. The most likely guess was that some traveler brought it back accidentally. The dermatologist that my dad was referred to for this was so interested in the case (since they were even rarer at that time) that he asked my dad to come be an exhibit at a dermatologist’s convention!
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