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Article History

Received: 2 April 2019

Accepted: 22 December 2019

First Online: 6 January 2020

Ethics approval and consent to participate

: The study was done as part of an urgently needed outbreak response and programme evaluation study with the purpose of improvement of the national kala-azar elimination programme. Therefore, it was considered exempt from review by institutional ethics committee as guided by the ICMR National Ethical Guidelines for Biomedical and Health Research involving Human Participants 2017. The study was conducted in accordance with the national ethical guidelines and a certificate to this effect was provided by chief medical officer of Sheikhpura district. Verbal informed consent was taken from all participants of the study including the index case, in the presence of two witnesses. Informed consent was obtained from a parent or guardian for those participants less than 16 years of age. Verbal informed consent method was adopted due to overwhelming majority of study participants not being literate. Due to the urgent nature of the outbreak investigation, approval of this verbal informed consent procedure could not be sought from ethics committee.

: Not applicable.

: The authors declare that there is no competing interest for publication of this article. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily represent the views of their respective organizations.