Detecting Leishmania in dogs: A hierarchical-modeling approach to investigate the performance of parasitological and qPCR-based diagnostic procedures.

Background: Domestic dogs are primary reservoir hosts of Leishmania infantum, the agent of visceral leishmaniasis. Detecting dog infections is central to epidemiological inference, disease prevention, and veterinary practice. Error-free diagnostic procedures, however, are lacking, and the performance of those available is difficult to measure in the absence of fail-safe "reference standards".

Multiparametric analysis of host and parasite elements in new world tegumentary leishmaniasis.

Tegumentary leishmaniasis is a tropical disease caused by protozoa of the genus Clinically, the disease presents a broad spectrum of symptoms, the mechanisms underlying the development of lesions remaining to be fully elucidated. In the present work, we performed a correlation and multiparametric analysis to evaluate how parasite- and host-related aspects associate with each other, and with the different clinical manifestations of tegumentary leishmaniasis. This cross-sectional study involved 75 individuals from endemic areas of Brazil, grouped according to their symptoms.

Improving the reference standard for the diagnosis of canine visceral leishmaniasis: a challenge for current and future tests.

Background: Studies aimed at validating canine visceral leishmaniasis diagnostic tests present heterogeneous results regarding test accuracy, partly due to divergences in reference standards used and different infection evolution periods in animals.

Objective: This study aimed to evaluate the accuracy of the rapid test-dual path platform (TR-DPP) (Biomanguinhos®), EIE-Leishmaniose-Visceral-Canina-Biomanguinhos (EIE-LVC) (Biomanguinhos®), enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) rK39 (in-house), and the direct agglutination test (DAT-Canis) against a reference standard comprising parasitological and molecular techniques.

Methods: A phase II/III validation study was carried out in sample sera from 123 predominantly asymptomatic dogs living in an area endemic for visceral leishmaniasis.