leishmaniasis | Leishmaniasis | Cutaneous leishmaniasis | Visceral larva migrans | Canine leishmaniasis |
In 1903, together with Alphonse Laveran (1845–1922), he showed that the parasite responsible for the visceral leishmaniasis (or Kala-azar, a fever in India), first described by William Boog Leishman (1865–1926), is a new protozoa, different from Trypanosoma, the agent of the sleeping sickness, and from Plasmodium, the agent of paludism (malaria).
One of the compounds found in P. harmala, vasicine (peganine), has been found to kill Leishmania donovani, a protozoan parasite that can cause potentially fatal visceral leishmaniasis.