When people develop<unk> , the most typical symptoms are fever and the enlargement of the spleen, with enlargement of the liver sometimes being seen as well. The blackening of the skin that gave the disease its common name in India does not appear in most strains of the disease, and the other symptoms are very easy to mistake for those of malaria. Misdiagnosis is dangerous, as without proper treatment the mortality rate for<unk>  is close to 100%. L. donovani itself is not usually the direct cause of death in<unk>  sufferers, however. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and dysentery are omnipresent in the immuno-depressed regions where leishmaniasis thrives, and, as with AIDS, it is these opportunistic infections that are more likely to kill, flaring up in a host whose immune system has been weakened by the L. donovani infection. Progress of the disease is extremely variable, taking anywhere from one to twenty weeks, but a typical duration for the Sudanese strain of the disease is narrower, between twelve and sixteen weeks. Even with recovery,<unk>  does not always leave its hosts unmarked. Some time after successful treatment—generally a few months with African<unk> , or as much as several years with the Indian strain—a secondary form of the disease may set in, called post<unk>  dermal leishmaniasis, or PKDL. This condition manifests first as small, measle-like skin lesions on the face, which gradually increase in size and spread over the body. Eventually the lesions may coalesce to form disfiguring, swollen structures resembling leprosy, and occasionally causing blindness if they spread to the eyes. (This disease is not the same as cutaneous leishmaniasis, a milder disease caused by another protozoan of the Leishmania genus which also causes skin lesions.)
Visceral leishmaniasis
Psittacosis
Leishmaniasis
African trypanosomiasis
Babesiosis
Human trypanosomiasis
Trypanosomiasis
Cutaneous leishmaniasis