LEISHMANIOSE

It is an infect contagious disease, that it can be classified as zoonose, for the fact of being transmissible of the animals to the man, and vice and it turns, caused by a protozoan (Leishmania), that has the egg-round form and it attacks some cells BLOOD called macrófagos. They are several the species of that group capable to cause the disease, but all have the fact in common of they need, to reproduce and to reach the adult form, of a spineless host, obligatorily a mosquito, call, in Brazil, of Biriguís, Mosquito Palha, Mosquito gunpowder or Cangalhinha. Such have night habits, attacking your victims in general for sugar blood in the evening and beginning of the night, and of that bite they transmit for the new host (animal or the man), the disease, that assumes two different forms: CUTANEOUS LEISHMANIOSE OR TEGUMENTAR and VISCERAL LEISHMANIOSE.

Visceral Leishmaniose, is frequently that found among the sensitive animals as the dog or the cat, besides the guinea-pig used at laboratory.

The mosquito host, to the sugar blood of an animal (or of the man) infected, it is contaminated, and in your intestines and glands you salivate the protozoan he/she multiplies. When those mosquitos porteriormente sugarem blood of another animal inject the forms infectantes of Leishmania, the one which falling of the sanguine circulation of the new host (called definitive host), it reproduces the disease.

The incubation period (period that is going of the bite for the mosquito infected until the emergence of the first symptoms) it varies between 10 and 25 days, being able to, in the however, to arrive until one year. After that period they appear pápulas in general in the skin of the animal or of the infected man, pápulas those anything characteristics, however proriginosas (they scratch) determining sensation of heat and pain. It also happens in that phase the inflammation of the close ganglions the bite for the mosquito. In this phase, starting from the analysis of the collected material of the inflamed ganglions it can be found the forms infectantes of the protozoan. The ganglion inflamed lymphatic necrosa, and harmed like this it ends for coming to I hole to evacuate that festering material, being at your place an ulcer, denominated of cancer espúndico. In that phase the disease is easily diagnosticavel for the exhibition of characteristic cutaneous ulcers.

In some cases, in the however, the cutaneous disease assumes forms non ulcerous, impetiginoide calls or tuberiformes. The evolution of the disease without appropriate treatment, takes to serious lesions and deformantes, besides with losses a lot of unrecoverable times of the nose and of the epidermis of the face.

In your visceral form, the lesions being internal, mainly in the spleen, they are translated by increase of volume of that organ (esplenomegalia), besides fever and abdominal pain. Your evolution also takes to an increase of volume of the liver.

PROPHYLAXIS OF THE DISEASE

The most efficient prevention measure is the combat to the mosquito host, impeding him/it of multiplying. That measured it is possible with the application of insecticides in your criatórios.  Parallel, isolation of the sick definitive hosts, or your treatment when possible.

DIAGNOSIS

A test exists, created by a Brazilian cientist in 1926 that it is quite efficient and it consists of a simple allergic reaction, obtained by the inoculation by road intra-dérmica of a leptomonas suspension to which the phenol was joined for your sterilization. They exist however some clinical signs that can help:

• accentuated weigh loss and reduction

• atrophies muscular

• cyclical hipertermia

• anemia

• fall of the hair, especially in the head and it breaks inferior of the thorax and tail, accompanied of an rash of the skin

• excessive growth of the fingernails.

TREATMENT

Several medicines quimioterápicos were already used, however all determining serious secondary reactions parallel, what makes unfeasible your treatment, to not to be in very few cases, and in these forcing direct and permanent medical accompaniment.

PREVENTIVE VACCINATION

In animals it is not used and given the difficulty of efficient treatment of the infected animals, as well as serious secondary reactions when the treatment is tried, the sacrifice of the sick animals is prescribed, mainly in if treating of the dog or of the cat, with the objective of like this to impede the human infection.

People infected with the parasite, they should be obligatorily isolated in appropriate place, in order to be to interrupt the chain evolutina of the protozoan. It is treated, in the however, of a disease called ezótica, happily present in very few places of the Brazilian territory. For those characteristics, when diagnosed a fóco of the disease, they are made necessary energetic measures for your eradication, under penalty of your disseminação.

Carmello Liberato Thadei (Veterinary Doctor -CRMV-SP-0442)