Introduction:

Knowledge of the geographical distribution of Leishmania species allows guiding the sampling to little-studied areas and implementing strategies to define risk zones and priority areas for control.

Objective:

Given that there is no publication that collects this information, the search, review, and compilation of the available scientific literature that has identified species in Colombia is presented in this paper.

Materials and methods:

A bibliographic search was performed in PubMed, Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar, SciELO and LILACS with the terms “(Leishmania OR Leishmaniasis) AND species AND Colombia”, without restrictions on publication year, language or infected organism; records of national scientific events and repositories of theses from Colombian universities were also included.

Results:

Eighty-six scientific documents published between 1985 and 2017 were found in which the species of Leishmania and their geographical origin were indicated. The species reported, in descending order of frequency, were: Leishmania (Viannia) panamensis, L. (V.) braziliensis, L. (V.) guyanensis, L. (Leishmania) infantum, L. (L.) amazonensis, L. (L.) mexicana, L. (V.) colombiensis, L. (V.) lainsoni and L. (V.) equatorensis; the last three were found with the same frequency. Leishmania species were reported from 29 departments.

Conclusion:

Information on the distribution of Leishmania species in Colombia is limited; therefore, it is necessary to gather existing data and propose studies that consolidate the distribution maps of Leishmania species in Colombia. This would allow the detection of areas where species have not been identified as well as the comparison of existing parasite and vector distributions.

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