Chagas Disease: How A Silent Tropical Parasite Prospers In The US
By Elizabeth Whitman @elizabethwhitty
Amy Nordrum @amynordrum
A Deadly Kiss: Ordinarily, the disease starts with a parasite called Trypanosoma cruzi. The parasite is carried by blood-sucking triatomine bugs, also known as “kissing bugs,” which can be found in the cracks and walls of mud homes in Latin America… An infected bug crawls out at night and bites a person, usually on the face, and then defecates on or near the bite. A person becomes infected if the feces, which contain the parasite, touch the wound or other orifices, like the eyes.
Maira Gutierrez is 42 years old, but she knows that at any moment, she could drop dead from a heart attack. Although she eats a heart-healthy diet, doesn’t smoke and is not overweight, she knows that nothing can eliminate the threat of her heart failing her. That’s because Gutierrez has a tropical disease known as Chagas, and the parasites that cause the condition are inching steadily, irreversibly through her heart. A routine blood screening caught the disease too late for doctors to cure her.
Though Chagas thrives in improverished rural areas in the developing world, Gutierrez doesn’t live in a remote village, far from decent medical care. She has been a Los Angeles resident for most of her life. Still, her condition went undiagnosed for years. Her experience is far too common in the United States, where medical experts say Chagas has become a lurking public health threat. The disease often goes overlooked because of whom it primarily affects: immigrants. Physicians do not regularly screen for Chagas, and because it causes heart disease, which is relatively common from other causes, people can die without ever being diagnosed. Treatment is available solely on an experimental basis and effective only if the disease is caught early.
Last week at the World Health Assembly in Geneva, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who is also serving as current president of the G7 nations, pledged a renewed focus on fighting a handful of debilitating diseases that afflict the world’s poorest people, including Chagas. Yet it is because of this status, as a scourge of developing nations, that the most basic aspects of treatment – a proper diagnosis and timely intervention – are still sorely lacking for those with Chagas in the U.S.
In the U.S., most people who have Chagas disease contracted it while they were growing up or living in rural areas throughout Central and South America. There, the disease is still readily transmitted. In 1981, Gutierrez moved at age 7 with her younger sister from rural San José Las Flores in El Salvador, where they lived in a mud home with their grandmother, to join their parents in a rented house in Bell, a district of Los Angeles.
Gutierrez went to donate blood when she was 23. Shortly after, she received a letter saying her blood could not be used and she should contact the CDC. She nervously called the 800 number, and learned that she had tested positive for Chagas.
(More on International Business Times)
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