Leishmania

Roque, André Luiz R. & Jansen, Ana Maria, 2014, Wild and synanthropic reservoirs of Leishmania species in the Americas, International Journal for Parasitology: Parasites and Wildlife 3 (3), pp. 251-262 : 253

4. Leishmania hosts and putative reservoirs

Studies of host–parasite interaction among wild mammals and Leishmania species are rare because of the complexity of performing long-term field-work and the difficulties of maintaining captivity colonies of wild species for experimental infection. Moreover, an essential aspect of this type of study is the accurate taxonomic identification of the mammalian hosts. Identification is not trivial for taxa (e.g. rodents and bats) that comprise a great diversity of species, including several whose taxonomic position is still debatable and can be identified only by karyotyping and/or molecular analysis. Our aim in this review was to re-interpret the available data on Leishmania reservoirs using an ecological approach and to consider the transmissibility potential from that species. We also added data on characterization of parasite in wild hosts from the Leishmania sp. collection of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (CLIOC/Fiocruz: clioc.fiocruz.br). Our main difficulties in this review involved: (i) access to the full text of some articles, especially the older articles, published in languages other than English and in journals that are not broadly distributed; and (ii) in some cases, identification of Leishmania species, as the numerous taxonomic revisions have repeatedly changed the nomenclature of some species.

In this context, we discuss some of the wild and synanthropic species known to be infected with Leishmania spp. , distinguishing between “parasite hosts” and “potential reservoirs”, with the latter designation used only when the authors demonstrated the retention of infection or the potential to transmit the parasite to vectors (positive xenodiagnosis or cultures from skin or blood). As already noted, Leishmania reservoirs show regional and temporal variation, and only a local study including ecological and parasitological analysis can determine whether these “potential reservoirs” may serve as reservoir in a given environment.