WHO targets chagas disease

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The World Health Organization is expanding its efforts to eliminate chagas, a parasitic disease that affects an estimated nine million people in the Americas, most of them children.

The initiative, funded in part by Bayer HealthCare, comes as Brazilian health care officials have been wrestling with an unusually virulent and widespread outbreak of the disease. Three people have died and 25 cases have been confirmed in an outbreak that Brazilian officials have linked to contaminated sugar cane juice. Brazil has pulled the juice from shelves and notified neighboring countries that any tourists who visited beaches in the state of Santa Catarina should see their doctors if they drank sugar cane juice and felt unwell.

Chagas is spread when the feces of parasite-carrying triatomine bugs, or kissing bugs, is carried into the body. Symptoms can take years to appear and include cardiac problems and the swelling of internal organs, resulting in disability and even death.

Long limited to the Americas, chagas has recently been found in Europe and the United States because of migration and poor screening of blood bank donations.

Regional initiatives in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay and large parts of Brazil and Central America have reduced the number of cases from about 18 million in 1990, but it is still thought to cause about 50,000 deaths a year. The WHO program, announced Friday in Geneva, would allow the treatment of about 30,000 people over the next five years.

Posted by Nicole Gaouette in Washington, D.C.