Talk:Kala azar in India

World Health Organization reports
Consider these. I looked intently at them because if accurate this is an excellent summary report. There is funny business here for republishing the nearly same report 7 years later seemingly like an update, but with strangely identical text, and no comment on this. It could be that the situation really has not changed and both reports are accurate. These are not academic publications so there are no citations or indication of the source of the content in these reports. I would like to believe this information is accurate



They come with a qualification that they are WHO regional office reports and not reports of WHO central. I am not sure what that means.

I do not know about the changing incidence of disease because I am not familiar with the numbers. However, these reports are from 2005 and 2012, and they use the some of the same text to describe the state of the disease. Both reports in the same words say that there are 1,00,000 cases a year of kala azar / visceral leishmaniasis in the region and a cost of 4,00,000 disability-adjusted life years. A different report from the WHO with 2007-12 data says there are 1,62,000-3,13,000 cases of VL in the subcontinent a year, so 50-300% more which seems like a lot of variance. I do not know how to reconcile this.

The 2005 report says there are 109 districts with the disease and the 2012 report says 96. The 2005 report says that many people seek treatment from "private doctors/unqualified practitioners" who give wrong treatment and also are a cause of disease spread by delaying correct treatment. The 2012 report describes this same situation but calls them "private doctors/quacks", so I guess someone in the health office is fed up. Other academic papers mention quackery as a barrier to treatment as well.

The impact objective in both reports are the same words exactly, but the 2005 report targets 2012 and the 2012 report targets 2015.

The 2005 report says that co-occurring diseases are HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and leprosy, and the 2012 lists those plus adds malaria, dengue, and filaria.

The 2005 report gives a timeline and plan. There is a preparatory phase in 2006, an attack phase from 2007-2012, a consolidation phase from 2011-2013, and a maintenance phase in the end. The 2012 report has all this same text but omits the dates and does not mention if any of these phases have started.

Both reports give the same description of a 2003 meeting in Benares as central to planning. Both reports say that the health ministers of India, Nepal, and Bangladesh met in the Maldives on 5 September 2004 to plan this. The 2005 report says that they will meet in May 2005, and the 2012 report uses the same text but says they did meet in 2005.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  20:39, 10 February 2020 (UTC)

Scroll.in reports
Scroll.in is a popular journal in India. I like their reports on kala azar, but I wish they would cite their sources. It seems like their reporter read the academic papers and summarized them nicely, but as this is a magazine, I do not know the original sources. These seem heavily advised by an expert, as I cannot imagine any journalist being so thorough and precise in the context of so many sources on this topic. Here they are -

community stories

Good story of the history

Nice graphs in this one

 Blue Rasberry  (talk)  03:54, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

History of disease from 100 crore years ago
This strange source mixes information about the fossil record with the disease.

I thought this was interesting, and it talks about divergence of the parasite species in India, but it was more than I wanted to examine right now.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  04:00, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Kala azar in UP
Most reports talk about kala azar in Bihar.



This report of Varanasi, a UP city not far from Bihar, is unusual because not many reports come from UP, and also because in this outbreak the parasite affected all sorts of people instead of just certain populations. This is a short-term report and not for Wikipedia to interpret alone. I could not find a follow up to see how the government contained the disease after this. Later this happened

 Blue Rasberry  (talk)  04:08, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Regional journalism over the years
So many articles exist like this These just give a description at a place and point in time. I did not try putting these in this article.  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  04:14, 11 February 2020 (UTC)

Article title
Should this article not be located at Leishmaniasis in India, since the name of the main article is Leishmaniasis? I understand that it's focused on India but we don't use regional names for other similar articles. Most English-speakers searching for the information would reasonably think to search for Leishmaniasis, not Kala azar. &spades;PMC&spades; (talk) 06:29, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * I will make some conversation about this. Feel free to talk this through more here, if you like.
 * Reasons to use Leishmaniasis
 * Most of the money used to research this disease is spent outside India
 * Scientific literature and Western medicine use this Latin language term (from William Boog Leishman) as the common name
 * The articles cited in this article also mention this term
 * Reasons to use Kala azar
 * "Kala azar" is an English language term. Wikipedia often uses local language variants for regional articles. I posted Indian English on this page, and this term is standard in Indian English.
 * This article cites mostly articles which use the term "kala azar"
 * "Leishmaniasis" is not a common name anywhere. In the Western world doctors, researchers, and public health officials know it, but there is no typical household use of this term anywhere.
 * "Kala azar" is a common household term in India which both English and other language speakers use.
 * The people who actually experience this disease call it kala azar
 *  Blue Rasberry  (talk)  17:18, 16 July 2020 (UTC)