Bangladesh experiences long monsoon seasons, frequent flooding, stagnant water, high temperatures, humidity, and a high density of animal and human populations, which create an ideal situation for zoonotic transmission of Leptospira spp. from animals to humans.  Since 2019, IEDCR has conducted leptospirosis surveillance in 8 sentinel sites (Table 3) throughout the country with the technical support from the Bacterial Special Pathogen Branch (BSPB) of US-CDC. A surveillance team at sentinel sites is responsible for case identification, sample collection, epidemiologic data collection and transportation of samples from sentinel sites to IEDCR. Rapid Diagnostic test (RDT) for IgM antibodies is done at sentinel sites and confirmatory RT-PCR test is done at IEDCR.

Most positive cases were identified from Satkhira, Chittagong and Dhaka districts (Table 5)

From 2019 to 2023, a total of 5325 samples were tested and 334 cases were found to be positive for Leptospira (Table 6).