Visceral Leishmaniasis Control

Visceral leishmaniasis is a neglected tropical disease of public health importance in India and is endemic across four states, Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand and Uttar Pradesh, with an estimated to be 165.4 million persons at risk. 

The current visceral leishmaniasis elimination programme includes indoor residual spraying and case management. In 2015, Michael Coleman’s group demonstrated that DDT-based IRS in Bihar was suboptimal, due to high levels of DDT resistance and poor quality spray.  These findings provided the platform for a positive policy change on insecticide and a cluster randomized trial to determine if compression pumps were a better method of insecticide delivery than the stirrup pump favoured in India. LSTM is now assisting in the monitoring and evaluation of the programme.

More information on the Bihar IRS Programme can be found in the Vector Biology 2016 report: Supporting the Bihar VL Elimination Programme