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at Uvalde, Texas, in the same locality where Lu. diabolica was found. 

 The female flies were collected in the mornings while feeding on 

 domestic rabbits. Attempts to feed this fly on man were unsuccessful. 



Packchanian (1946) reviewed distributions and habits of the six 

 species of sand flies then known to occur in the USA. He drew 

 attention to the fact that sand flies were known vectors of 

 leishmaniasis in the Old World and were known to have been infected 

 naturally or experimentally with leishmaniasis in numerous localities 

 in Latin America. He stated that in all probability the species found 

 in the USA represented potential vectors of leishmaniasis and that 

 this important problem remained to be investigated under rigid 

 experimental conditions. 



In 1968, Simpson et aj_. reported the first well documented, and 

 undisputed, autochthonous case of leishmaniasis in the USA. The 

 patient was a 64-year-old Mexican-American woman from San Benito, 

 Texas, who had a 57 year history of chronically active, disseminated 

 anergic cutaneous leishmaniasis. 



Shaw et aj_. (1976) described two more autochthonous human cases 

 of cutaneous leishmaniasis in Texas. The first occurred in 1972 in a 

 74-year-old woman from Dilworth, Gonzales County, and the second in a 

 56-year-old man from Kenedy, Karnes County. The first patient owned a 

 ranch a few miles from her home and visited it daily to feed the 

 cattle and some stray dogs. She related that she frequently saw 

 swarms of gnats and small black flies, but did not remember any 

 specific insect bites, especially in relation to her skin lesions. 

 Aside from short visits to northern Mexico she had had no foreign 

 travel (Shaw et al., 1976). The second patient lived in a primitive 



