Host competence of the African rodents and for from Ethiopia and . () sp. from Ghana.

Visceral leishmaniasis caused by is regarded as mostly anthroponotic, but a role for animal reservoir hosts in transmission has been suggested in East Africa. Field studies in this region have shown the presence of this parasite in several mammalian species, including rodents of the genera and . Further, the natural reservoirs of ( sp. causing human cutaneous disease in Ghana, West Africa, are unknown. This study assessed the potential role of the Sub-Saharan rodents , and as hosts of and . from Ghana, based on experimental infections of animals and xenodiagnoses. The distribution and load of parasites were determined using qPCR from the blood, skin and viscera samples. The attractiveness of and to was tested by pair-wise comparisons. None of the animals inoculated with were infectious to females, although, in some animals, parasites were detected by PCR even 30 weeks post infection. Skin infections were characterized by low numbers of parasites while high parasite burdens were present in spleen, liver and lymph nodes only. Therefore, wild and found infected with should be considered parasite sinks rather than parasite reservoirs. This is indirectly supported also by results of host choice experiments with in which females preferred humans over both and , and their feeding rates on rodents ranged from 1.4 to 5.8% only. Therefore, the involvement of these rodents in transmission of by is very unlikely. Similarly, poor survival of parasites in the studied rodents and negative results of xenodiagnostic experiments do not support the involvement of and spp. in the transmission cycle of from Ghana.