Active clinical trials for "Leishmaniasis, Visceral"

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is a public health problem in Bangladesh, India and Nepal. To control the disease in these three countries a National kala-azar elimination program is ongoing. One of the major pillars of the elimination program is VL vector control. Currently there is a no public VL vector control program in Bangladesh. In India the program is depending on Indoor Residual Spraying with insecticides. IRS with DDT and in Nepal on Alpha-cypermethrin. The sand fly, vector of VL is already resistant to DDT and hurdles related with IRS i.e. funds, logistics and human resources make IRS unsustainable VL vector control method in Nepal. Thus alternative to IRS for VL vector control is highly desirable for the success of national kala-azar elimination program in these three countries. Through current research activities we will compare the effectiveness of three effective VL vector control methods. They are 1) Plastering of household walls with lime (a traditional method known in the study areas),treatment of possible sand-fly breeding places with lime and bleaching powder; 2) Installing durable wall lining containing deltamethrin in the main living room(s) of households; 3) Impregnation of existing bed-nets with slow release insecticide tablet containing deltamethrin. The study finding will be important for the national elimination program of the three countries through discovering the most effective VL vector control method.

Visceral leishmaniosis (VL) is widely reported in Ethiopia, with about 30% of cases being associated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). In absence of antiretroviral treatment (ART), poor prognosis, high mortality and high relapse rates are characteristic of Ethiopian VL patients with HIV co-infection. Conversely, co-infection can be successfully managed via a combination of effective treatment of the initial episode, timely ART and prevention of relapses. Actually, until cellular immunity returns with ART, the patient is at risk of VL relapses, which can result in death, severe illness, reduced ART efficacy, drug-resistance and possibly transmission of drug-resistant Leishmania donovani. Patients most vulnerable to relapses are those with high levels of immunosuppression, with previous VL episodes, or with opportunistic infections (OIs). The most important factor to prevent relapses seems to be the clearance of visible parasites. Limited studies in Europe show that HIV co-infected patients may benefit from secondary prevention with antimonials (part of mainstay treatment for VL in Ethiopia) and pentamidine (PM), not used for VL treatment in Africa. Such maintenance treatment has not been studied in African VL, but the poor outcomes without secondary prevention highlight a need of better care to patients at risk of relapse. This prospective cohort study aims at documenting the patient's outcomes of secondary prophylaxis with PM in VL-HIV co-infection, in terms of time to relapse or death, safety and feasibility, before it can be considered for general use in Ethiopia. A placebo group is not included, due to the clear advantages of the intervention to the patient population.

A cluster-randomized vector control trial in Bihar, India, and neighboring Nepal, will test the efficacy of long-lasting impregnated bednets (LLINs, Permanets) for reducing visceral leishmaniasis incidence. The intervention unit is the village (400-1000 people). The study is designed to detect a 50% reduction in Leishmania donovani incidence in intervention compared to control clusters over 2 years. 24 clusters (selected as high incidence during previous years) will be randomly allocated to intervention or control. Following health education, and with informed consent, all households in intervention villages will receive free Permanets (from September 2006). Net usage will be monitored and new nets provided if required. Control villages will not be given untreated nets, as - although commonly used in this region - their effectiveness against sandflies has not been proven. Pre-intervention infection status of villagers (>2 yrs) will be evaluated serologically from finger-prick blood (and past/current disease status noted). Incident infections will be recorded by 3-monthly active search for clinical cases, and by annual serological diagnoses to detect subclinical infections. All villagers (>2yrs) will be leishmanin skin tested at the end of the trial for further subclinical infection detection, and sera from a sub-sample will be tested for antibodies to sandfly saliva antigens (a measure of sandfly exposure). All clinical cases will be given free treatment. Free Permanets will be provided to control villages after the trial. Complementary studies involve entomological surveillance by light traps in a sample of houses and social/economic questionnaire surveys. The entomological surveys will test whether community-wide use of LLINs provides any mass effect, which could protect those in the community who fail to use LLIN for any reason.

Background: - Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) is an infection caused by parasites carried by sand flies. The parasites cause fever, weight loss, and enlargement of the spleen and liver. They can also affect the blood and immune system. One possible treatment for VL involves an experimental drug called SCH708980, which may help to prevent the immune system from becoming suppressed and worsening the VL. Researchers want to give the drug along with AmBisome(Registered Trademark), which kills the parasites, to see if it is a safe and effective treatment. Objectives: - To study the safety and effectiveness of SCH708980, alone and combined with AmBisome(Registered Trademark), as a treatment for visceral leishmaniasis. Eligibility: Individuals 18 to 60 years of who have been diagnosed with visceral leishmaniasis in the past 4 to 5 days, are HIV-negative, and are willing to stay in the hospital for 30 days. All participants will come from and be treated at the Kala-Azar Medical Research Center in Muzaffarpur, India. Design: This is a two-part study. Participants will be assigned to only one part of the study. Participants will be screened with a medical history and physical exam; blood, urine, and stool samples, spleen or bone marrow samples; spleen measurements; a chest xray; and a heart function test. Part 1 participants will be separated into two groups: a larger group will have a selected dose of the study drug followed by AmBisome 7 days later, and a smaller group will have a placebo treatment followed by AmBisome. Part 2 participants will have either the study drug or a placebo plus AmBisome, based on the test results from the Part 1 participants. All participants will be monitored in the hospital for 30 days, and will have the following tests: Regular blood samples Urine and stool samples (day 14) Spleen measurements (days 8, 14, 21, and 30) Spleen or bone marrow sample (day 30 only). Participants who still have VL symptoms will give another sample on day 45. At 6 months after the start of treatment, participants will have a follow-up visit with spleen measurements, blood and stool samples, and possible spleen or bone marrow samples

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) also known as kala-azar is a public health problem in Bangladesh. Since 2005 a national kala-azar elimination program is going on in the country. The program has preparatory, attack, consolidation and maintenance phases. The target of the program is to reduce the VL incidence less than 1 per 10,000 people at upazila (sub-district) level in VL endemic upazilas of the country. The program is heading successfully to its consolidation phase. During attack phase house to house search for VL suspects and also suspects with Post-kala-azar Dermal Leishmaniasis (PKDL) was the tool for early diagnosis of VL and PKDL cases. Indoor residual spraying with insecticide (Deltamethrin) was the method for sand fly control to reduce the transmission of the disease. Since in the consolidation phase the VL case load is many times less than that in the attack phase, house to house search for VL and PKDL cases and IRS for vector control is no more cost-effective for the program. Therefore there is a need for alternative methods for active search of VL and PKDL cases and method for sand fly control, appropriate for the consolidation phase. In the present study the investigators propose to investigate the efficacy of Inesfly 5AIGRNG TM containing Alphacypermethrin 0.7%; D-Allethin 1.0% and Pyriproxyphen (0.063%), commercial available durable wall lining (DWL), impregnated of existing bed-net with insecticide tablet, KO TAB 123, indoor residual spraying (IRS) with Delthamethrin against a control group Methods: A cluster randomized controlled design to measure sand fly density reduction at intervention household as well as sand fly mortality by entomological methods. Outcome measures/variables: reduction of sand fly density at intervention household and sand fly corrected mortality on intervention surfaces compare to control households/conditions.

Visceral leishmaniasis (VL) / Kala-azar (KA) is a public health problem in the many countries in the world including Bangladesh. Where more than 90,000 VL cases have been reported since 1994. The disease is fatal if not treated. Even with treatment the mortality rate is high (10%). VL is a vector-borne disease, caused by the parasite Leishmania donovani (LD) and is transmitted by female sandfly sp. Phlebotomus argentipes. Not all people exposed to the LD parasite develop disease. According to our observation only about 30% of the infected with LD parasite develop disease within one year of diagnosis. Malnutrition and intestinal helminth infection have been found to be associated with the risk of active VL. Down regulation of Th1 cellular immune response confers susceptibility to active VL. Both malnutrition and intestinal helminth infection down regulate the Th1 cellular immune response. Till now there is no established prophylaxis against active VL among the people exposed to the LD infection. Many studies including ours have been shown that periodic regular deworming reduced malnutrition significantly. Micronutrient such as zinc and iron as well vitamin A supplementation also improve malnutrition and may enhance Th1 cellular immune response. Thus we hypothesize that periodic deworming and. micronutrient and vitamin A supplementation together may reduce the risk of active VL among the people exposed to the LD infection. The study will be carried out in the Harirampur union, Trishal, Mymensingh. This area is highly endemic for VL. Two hundred asymptomatic VL patients aged 2-60 will be enrolled to the study. Children aged less than 2 years, pregnant women, active VL case, person with chronic disease, disable individuals and those who will refuse written consent will not be enrolled to the study. After enrollment subjects will be divided into two groups through randomization. One group will receive deworming and nutritional supplement (intervention group) and other group will receive placebo (placebo group). Two groups will be followed for 12 months through active surveillance for developing of active VL. In addition morbidity data, monthly stool sampling, monthly anthropometry, urine and blood sampling at baseline, before and after treatment of active VL will be carried out Successful completion of the study and derived results from it will provide useful information that whether periodic deworming with micronutrient and vitamin A supplementation can reduce the risk of active VL among the people exposed to the LD infection.

The purpose of this study is to compare the safety, tolerability, and immunogenicity in healthy adult subjects of an investigational vaccine being developed for the prevention of visceral leishmaniasis.

Tropical fevers have been a diagnostic challenge from the antiquity. Nowadays, despite the availability of good diagnostic capacities, undifferentiated febrile illnesses continue to be a thorny problem for travel physicians. In developing countries, the scarcity of skilled personnel and adequate laboratory facilities makes the differential diagnosis of fevers even more complex. Health care workers must often rely on syndrome-oriented empirical approaches to treatment and might overestimate or underestimate the likelihood of certain diseases. For instance Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTD) contribute substantially to the burden of persistent (more than 1 week) fevers in the Tropics, causing considerable mortality and major disability. These diseases are however rarely diagnosed at primary health care (PHC) level. The difficulty in establishing the cause of febrile illnesses has resulted in omission or delays in treatment, irrational prescriptions with polytherapy, increasing cost and development of drug resistance. In resource-limited settings, clinical algorithms constitute a valuable aid to health workers, as they facilitate the therapeutic decision in the absence of good laboratory capacities. There is a critical lack of appropriate diagnostic tools to guide treatment of NTDs. While clinical algorithms have been developed for some NTDs, in most cases they remain empirical. Besides, they rarely take into account local prevalence data, do not adequately represent the spectrum of patients and differential diagnosis at the primary care level and often have not been properly validated. The purpose of the study is to develop evidence-based Rapid Diagnostic Test (RDT)-supported diagnostic guidelines for patients with persistent fever (≥ 1 week) in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Sudan, Cambodia and Nepal.

Leishmaniasis is considered by the WHO as emerging and uncontrolled diseases. They are the second leading cause of death and the fourth leading cause of morbidity in tropical diseases. Leishmaniasis is parasitic reticulo-endotheliosis, the pathogenic agent of which is a flagellated protozoan belonging to the genus Leishmania. It is estimated that there are about 2 million new cases per year. Effective treatments against visceral leishmaniasis are few and resistance problems appear. To date, only a canine vaccine is available protecting dogs from the development of canine leishmaniasis to L. infantum. In man, in parallel clinical cases, leishmaniasis is characterized by a large number of asymptomatic carriers. This is the case in the Alpes-Maritimes where 50% of the inhabitants of the hinterland of Nice are carriers of the parasite. the investigators wish to study the protective immune response to the parasite and more particularly to the asymptomatic carriers. Indeed, these patients were infected with the parasite and did not develop the disease. Understanding the protective immune response in these patients against the parasite is therefore paramount in the development of a human leishmaniasis vaccine. For this purpose, the investigator wants to make an ex vivo study of the immune response of lymphocytes coming from asymptomatic carriers after stimulation by Leishmania vaccine peptides. It also wants to describe the immune response, after stimulation by these peptides, in the lymphocytes of subjects asymptomatic carriers and lymphocytes from subjects not infected with the parasite and comparing them. This study is unicentric and non-randomized. It wishes to recruit 20 asymptomatic carriers of L. Infantum and 10 uninfected subjects. They will be selected from our database. A simple blood sample will be taken. After verification by quantitative PCR and western blotting of their status towards leishmaniasis, the team will divide them into two groups (asymptomatic or healthy). Then the blood samples will be sent to the team of Jean Loup Lemesre of the Laboratory INTERTRYP - UMR177 of the IRD in Montpellier. ELISPOT analysis and assay of cytokines and proteases to describe the immune response of the two groups and to compare them. In addition, cell typing will be performed by flow cytometry to determine the type of lymphocytes involved in the immune response against Leishmania peptides. HLA typing will also be performed to validate the HLA coverage of the peptides tested. Finally, an analysis of the transcryptome will be carried out, which will allow to identify the differential expression of genes and metabolic pathways involved in the immune response and thus to understand how asymptomatic people can control the infection.

The actual format of the anticipated LEISH3 trial is under review.