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Review
. 2018 Jul 10:2018:9872095.
doi: 10.1155/2018/9872095. eCollection 2018.

Current Visceral Leishmaniasis Research: A Research Review to Inspire Future Study

Kaiming Bi  1 , Yuyang Chen  1 , Songnian Zhao  1 , Yan Kuang  1 , Chih-Hang John Wu  1
Affiliations
Review

Current Visceral Leishmaniasis Research: A Research Review to Inspire Future Study

Kaiming Bi et al. Biomed Res Int. .

Abstract

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL), one of the deadliest parasitic diseases in the world, causes more than 50,000 human deaths each year and afflicts millions of people throughout South America, East Africa, South Asia, and Mediterranean Region. In 2015 the World Health Organization classified VL as a neglected tropical disease (NTD), prompting concentrated study of the VL epidemic using mathematical and simulation models. This paper reviews literature related to prevalence and prevention control strategies. More than thirty current research works were reviewed and classified based on VL epidemic study methods, including modeling approaches, control strategies, and simulation techniques since 2013. A summarization of these technical methods, major findings, and contributions from existing works revealed that VL epidemic research efforts must improve in the areas of validating and verifying VL mathematical models with real-world epidemic data. In addition, more dynamic disease control strategies must be explored and advanced simulation techniques must be used to predict VL pandemics.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Research tree for this paper.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Distributions of confirmed and borderline VL cases from 1960 to 2012.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Reported VL cases from 2006 to 2016 [11].
Figure 4
Figure 4
Reported VL cases in severely afflicted countries from 2006 to 2016 [11].
Figure 5
Figure 5
Reported VL cases in vulnerable countries from 2006 to 2016 [11].
Figure 6
Figure 6
System diagram of ZVL transmission model [12], where d, f, h represent the dog, sandflies, and human species and S, E, I, R, H represent the susceptive, exposed, infected, recovered, and hospitalized population for each species.
Figure 7
Figure 7
Infection rate distribution based on human age in various countries [13].
Figure 8
Figure 8
Simulation of dog culling [12].
Figure 9
Figure 9
Efficacy comparison of control strategies [14].
Figure 10
Figure 10
Spatial simulation of predicted VL rates in 2010, Brazil [15].
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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