Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Acta Tropica journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/actatropica Human myiasis cases originating and reported in africa for the last two decades (1998–2018): A review Simon K. Kuria a, ⁎ , Adebola O. Oyedeji b a Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Walter Sisulu University, P/Bag X1, Mthatha 5117, South Africa b Department of Chemical and Physical Sciences, Walter Sisulu University, P/Bag X1, Mthatha 5117, South Africa ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Myiasis Calliphoridae Cordylobia anthropophaga Furuncular myiasis Life cycle Africa Botanicals ABSTRACT The article reviews literature on myiasis in Africa and cases that originated in Africa over the last two decades (1998–2018). The relevant literature was obtained by using several databases (Science-Direct, JSTOR, Google Scholar, Ebscohost and PubMed). We searched for the following words or their combination myiasis, maggots, fy species responsible for myiasis found in Africa, and the diferent types of myiasis. References in several articles provided links to other relevant works. Only papers written in English were reviewed. In total, we reviewed 51 articles which covered a total of 849 myiasis cases. The review encompasses geographical dis- tribution of the disease, dipteran species responsible, predisposing factors, sex of the patient, type of myiasis and treatment. Myiasis is found in most parts of the African continent, however only 18 articles reported myiasis cases in Africa during the period under review. The rest of the articles report cases from the rest of the world but acquired by travellers when visiting Africa. Cordylobia anthropophaga (Blanchard) was responsible for 93.28% of all the reported cases in this review. The low number of articles on human myiasis reported in Africa may be due to underreporting by physicians or most cases are not diagnosed. Therefore, the actual prevalence of myiasis in Africa is currently unknown. 1. Introduction Myiasis is a parasitic disease named from a Greek word “myia” meaning fy, caused by invasion of living or dead tissues of humans or other vertebrates by dipteran larvae. The larval parasites responsible for this disease may be obligate, facultative, or accidental (Villwock and Harris, 2014), and largely belong to four dipteran families Callipho- lidae, Sarcophagidae, Oestridae and Cuterebridae (Zumpt, 1963). Ap- proximately 50 fy species are responsible for human myiasis (Karadag- Oncel et al., 2014). Natural hosts of these fies in human environment include cattle, sheep, goats, dogs, horses and rodents (Pandey et al., 2009; Ahmad et al., 2011), and humans are only accidental host. Human myiasis is a cosmopolitan disease, but is prevalent in Africa (McGarry, 2014) and South America (Onyeama and Njai, 2005; Graveriau and Peyron, 2017). The disease is classifed either as internal or external myiasis, where external myiasis comprises cutaneous, ocular and aural myiasis (Abdellatif et al., 2011), while internal myiasis con- sists of gastric, intestinal and urogenital infestations (Markell et al., 1999). Other workers have categorized the disease based on the af- fected tissue, accidental myiasis (digestive tract), semi-specifc myiasis (wounds), and obligatory myiasis (undamaged skin) (Yuca et al., 2005). Myiasis cases reported in Africa and other parts of the world but having originated from the African continent for the last two decades include cutaneous, ocular, nasal, urogenital, gastral and intestinal myiasis (Table 1). In total, we reviewed 51 articles which reported 849 cases. Cutaneous myiasis had 805 cases accounting for 94.8% of all the reported cases. But 544 of these cases were reported in Nigeria in three articles, and one of the publications reported 500 cases (Table 1). The remaining cases comprised 36 ocular, 4 gastrointestinal, 3 urogenital, and 1 case each for nasal and ocular, and aural. In 39 articles out of the 51 that we reviewed, we were able to discern age and sex of patients. A total of 57 patients were reported in these articles. The number of males (32) infected was higher compared to that of females (25). We also found that a large proportion of cases that were described belonged to the ages below 15 years (13), and above the age of 45 years (21). Furuncular myiasis afects cutaneous tissues of patients on diferent parts of the body. Left untreated, the larvae mature and eventually drop on the ground to pupate. However, most patients tend to seek treatment because of the painful nodules accompanied by serosanguineous dis- charge. In some instances, furuncular myiasis is misdiagnosed and treated as bacterial infection. Ultimately the infection fails to heal ne- cessitating patients to keep seeking treatment until the right diagnosis is https://doi.org/10.1016/j.actatropica.2020.105590 Received 15 May 2020; Received in revised form 14 June 2020; Accepted 14 June 2020 ⁎ Corresponding author : Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences, Walter Sisulu University, P/Bag X1, Mthatha 5117, South Africa. E-mail addresses: kkuria@wsu.ac.za (S.K. Kuria), aoyedeji@gmail.com (A.O. Oyedeji). Acta Tropica 210 (2020) 105590 Available online 16 June 2020 0001-706X/ © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. T