The effect of natural disasters on leishmaniasis frequency

Background: Natural disasters (NDs) have devastating effects on the community healthwhich may lead to increases in outbreaks and transmission of vector-borne diseases suchas cutaneous leishmaniasis (CL) and visceral leishmaniasis (VL). Although there areseveral sporadic reports on the status of leishmaniasis after some NDs, no comprehensiveinformation exists in this field. Therefore, here we systematically reviewed and gatheredall reported articles in this field published in PubMed, Scopus, Cochrane Register,Clinical key and Google Scholar since 2000.Material and Methods: We also gathered all ND events and all reported leishmaniasisfrequency (prevalence/incidence) in 16 leishmaniasis endemic countries in the last twodecades and tried to find a relationship between leishmaniasis and ND. After eligibilitysteps, 39 articles on ND-leshmaniasis were included and systematically reviewed.Results: After screening steps, 39 articles on ND-leshmaniasis were included andsystematically reviewed. These articles showed different frequencies of CL before andafter NDs in some regions of Pakistan and Iran (endemic areas), and VL in Brazil,Ethiopia, and Sudan (endemic areas). After detailed reading and reviewing of thesearticles, 4 studies for CL-ND relationship and 5 studies for VL-ND relationship wereselected for meta-analysis. The meta-analysis results showed that the leishmaniasisincidence rate increases after NDs.Conclusions: Here we showed that leishmaniasis incidence increases after NDs, but the dataof the studies reviewed here is not strong enough, because all studies on leishmaniasisfrequency have done locally in different regions of endemic countries that are hard to beassembled. Therefore, here we found a substantial gap in knowledge on relationship of NDsand leishmaniasis frequency.

کلیدواژه ها:

Natural Disaster ، Leishmaniasis ، Incidence ، Endemic country