Larva migrans in children in india - is it as rare as we think?

REVIEW ARTICLE

Year : January-March 2017 | Volume : 14 | Issue : 1

DOI : 10.7199/ped.oncall.2017.35

Larva Migrans in Children in India - Is it as Rare as we Think?

Sanghamitra Ray¹, Rajesh Kumar Meena².
¹Department of Pediatrics, Cantonment General Hospital, Delhi Cantt, New Delhi, India, ²Department of Paediatrics, ESIC Hospital, New Delhi, India.

Abstract

Context- Larva migrans are parasites, mainly the larvae of nematodes causing zoonotic disease. They cause broad spectrum of diseases in man depending on the organ involved. India being a developing country; overcrowding, poor level of hygiene, lack of safe drinking water and adequate sanitation, close contact with animals make our population extremely susceptible to this infection. Despite the presence of epidemiological triad of agent, host and favorable environment, incidence of larva migrans cases reported is surprisingly low in pediatric population of India. There is very little awareness among pediatricians about this entity. Hence it is possible that we are missing a lot of cases due failure to suspect, vagueness of symptoms, difficulty in diagnosis and lack of easy availability of diagnostic tests. These facts prompted the authors to review this disease which is routinely thought only to be of academic interest.
Evidence Acquisition: We conducted a detailed literature search on PubMed-Central, Google-scholar and Cochrane Database using the terms ‘larva migrans’ OR ‘visceral larva migrans OR, ocular and cutaneous larva migrans’ WITH AND WITHOUT ‘India’ AND “children “ as references. We also searched the reference lists from such articles. Extracted manuscripts and reviews were analyzed and summarized with special emphasis on Indian scenario in pediatric population.
Result- Though world literature shows wide spectrum of manifestations of larva migrans in children, few scattered pediatric case reports from India do not corroborate with its epidemiological profile. Hence it can be concluded that we are missing a lot of cases as we fail to suspect.

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