This author interview is by Dr. José A.L. Lindoso, of Instituto de Infectologia. Dr. Lindoso's full paper, Diagnosing Neglected Tropical Diseases in HIV Coinfection, is available for download in Human Parasitic Diseases.

Please summarize for readers the content of your article.
This paper discusses the diagnosis of some neglected tropical diseases in the context of co-infection with HIV. The approach includes clinical and laboratory aspects of Malaria, Leishmaniasis and Chagas disease. The symptoms of these diseases in immunosuppressed patients may have unusual clinical presentation, and laboratory tests commonly used in the diagnosis show reduced sensitivity, particularly those dependent on humoral response.

How did you come to be involved in your area of study?
My training is as an infectious disease physician with an expertise in tropical diseases. Since I live in an area of high HIV-AIDS prevalence, I became interested in studying the clinical and laboratory aspects of the main tropical diseases that occur in Brazil in patients living with HIV-AIDS.

This review article reflects the knowledge acquired in relation to these tropical diseases in patients living with HIV and alerts health professionals to stay tuned to the diagnosis of these diseases in patients with HIV-AIDS, because clinical manifestations may resemble the other opportunistic diseases.

How has your work in this area advanced understanding of the topic?
Over the years I have been working in the area of tropical diseases and HIV and the search for several articles in the literature has raised new questions we are now seeking to answer, such as the true prevalence of Leishmania infection in patients living with HIV / AIDS.

What do you regard as being the most important aspect of the results reported in the article?
One of the most important aspects in this article is that despite tropical diseases occurring in the tropics, they overlap HIV transmission areas and these diseases makes the prevalence of tropical diseases increase in patients with HIV / AIDS around the world. We need to better understand the real problem of co-infection of tropical and HIV disease in regards to the understanding of the clinical manifestations and the search for new diagnostic tools that are more robust and can be used in the clinical practice.