Squash Blotting Phlebotomus Papatasi to Estimate Rates of Infection by Leishmania Major

Abstract

Any attempt to control sandfly vectors of leishmaniasis should include the monitoring of infection rates before, during and after the control programme. Few have tried to measure temporal changes in infection rates during control programmes (Le Pont & Pajot, 1981; Ready et al., 1985). The screening process is slow: each female sandfly examined must be dissected in order to look microscopically for intestinal infections and diagnostic morphological characters. Then, usually, infecting Leishmania must be identified by isoenzyme characterization (Maazoun et al., 1981) or by analysis of extracted kinetoplast (k) DNA (Barker et al., 1986), but this requires at least 109 cells that can be difficult to grow either in laboratory rodents or in axenic culture media.