Chagas disease

Chagas disease / New AIDS of the Americas

Chagas disease or American trypanosomiasis is a tropical parasitic disease caused by the flagellate protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi. T. cruzi is commonly transmitted to humans and other mammals by an insect vector, the blood-sucking "kissing bugs" belonging to the Triatoma, Rhodnius, and Panstrongylus genera.  Akin to AIDS, the disease can also spread through blood transfusion and organ transplantation, ingestion of food contaminated with parasites, and from a mother to her fetus.

• In an article published on May 31, 2012, the Chagas disease has been named the “the new AIDS of the Americas”.
• The authors, several of whom are tropical disease experts from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, argue that the dangerous spread of Chagas through this hemisphere somewhat resembles the early spread of HIV.
• Like HIV, it is also difficult to detect and can take years for symptoms to emerge, because the bugs carry single celled parasites called trypanosomes. (Their best-known relative, spread by tsetse flies in Africa, causes sleeping sickness).
• Like AIDS, Chagas disease has a long incubation time and is hard or impossible to cure. Chagas infects up to eight million people mostly in Bolivia, Mexico, Colombia and Central America. But more than 300,000 of the infected live in the United States, many of them immigrants.

Treatment involves harsh drugs taken for up to three months and works only if the disease is caught early.