Excerpt

Chagas disease was named after the Brazilian hygienist, scientist, and bacteriologist Carlos Chagas, who in 1909 identified Trypanosoma cruzi as the pathogen agent in a 2-year-old girl named Berenice who was feverish with enlarged spleen and liver and swollen lymph nodes. Chagas also discovered that triatoma bugs are vectors of the parasite and that various animals (first, the armadillo) are wild reservoirs for the parasite. Chagas named the parasite in honor of his mentor, the Brazilian physician and bacteriologist Oswaldo Gonçalves Cruz (1872 to 1917), founder of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute.1 The disease is, of course, much older than Chagas’ discovery and has been associated with humans shortly after they arrived in the Americas some 15,000 years ago. T. cruzi has been found in mummies from northern Chile and southern Peru that are nearly 9000 years old. Chagas disease is becoming a worldwide health and economic burden due to multiple bioecological, sociocultural, and political factors, including migration. The World Health Organization estimates that 8 to 10 million people are infected worldwide, mostly in Latin America where the disease remains endemic.2 A recent study estimates global costs of $7.19 billion/year for Chagas disease and, noteworthy, more than 10% of these costs emanate from the United States and Canada, where Chagas disease is not recognized as a significant health problem.3 …