Fig 1.
Timeline of key epidemiological events for leishmaniasis in China from 1951 to 2024.
This figure illustrates major national control efforts, significant outbreaks, and re-emergence of zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis, and the emergence of L. donovani. Data synthesized from published literature. The figure was created in BioRender, Bezerra Santos, M. A. (2026) https://biorender.com/w3jg2sq.
Table 1.
Leishmania species in China: associated hosts (reservoir and suspected), vectors, and geographic distribution.
Fig 2.
Leishmania species associated with their primary vertebrate host and Phlebotominae sand fly species in China, highlighting their interactions with other hosts.
Colors of arrows represent different species of Leishmania: red, Leishmania infantum; light green, Leishmania donovani; dark green, Leishmania turanica, Leishmania gerbilli; light brown, Leishmania tropica; dark brown, Leishmania sp.; purple, Sauroleishmania spp. Solid arrows represent known associations and infections, whereas dashed arrows indicate limited information on infection and pathogenicity in China. Created in BioRender. Mendoza, J. (2026) https://BioRender.com/vkppnoz.
Table 2.
Human visceral leishmaniasis (VL) cases and canine leishmaniasis (CanL) cases from different provinces in China during 1951 to 1958 and CanL cases from 1959 to 1982 [37,65].
Table 3.
Detection rates of canine leishmaniasis in China from 2005 to 2025.
Fig 3.
County-level distribution of Leishmania species, animal hosts, and canine leishmaniasis detection rates in China, 2005 to 2025.
Animal silhouettes represent Leishmania spp. hosts detected in China. Red circles indicate the proportion of dogs testing positive via serological and/or molecular analysis at the county level. Light red fill shows provinces with Leishmania-positive dogs. Light blue fill shows the provinces with Leishmania-positive other animals. The base map uses province and county-level administrative boundaries from the geoBoundaries Global Database (https://www.geoboundaries.org/countryDownloads.html); license: CC BY 4.0 (https://www.geoboundaries.org/#tabs1-js). The animal silhouettes are from Free SVG, licensed under the CC0 public domain license (https://freesvg.org/). The map was created in QGIS version 3.44.9.