How it began
Carlos Chagas was a physician and researcher of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute. He was working in Lassance, in the interior of Minas Gerais, when a railroad engineer warned him about blood-feeding insects that lived in local buildings. Chagas found a parasite in these bugs and named it Trypanosoma cruzi. On April 14, 1909, he detected the same parasite in the blood of a little girl named Berenice, the first human case. He presented the new disease to the public that year.
How it works
The disease is an infection with the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi. It is carried by triatomines, blood-feeding bugs that live in the walls of poor rural houses. Later clinical work showed that the infection can become chronic and damage the heart, a condition recognized as chronic Chagas cardiomyopathy once parasitology was combined with cardiology in the 1940s.
Who pushed back
The discovery was contested in Brazil. In 1922 and 1923 a controversy was fought out inside the National Academy of Medicine. Afranio Peixoto, who held the chair of hygiene at the Rio de Janeiro School of Medicine, called the condition a mere illness from Lassance. He argued that the picture of a country full of tropical disease fed European prejudice about the tropics and harmed Brazil's image abroad.
What changed first
Chagas presented the disease as a medical and a social problem at once. He described it as an expression of the poverty and neglect of the rural interior, where there were no public health services. This showed the elites of Rio de Janeiro a Brazil quite unlike the modern country they celebrated, and it made rural health a public question.
What lasted
A study center opened in Bambui, Minas Gerais, in 1943, and in the 1940s and 1950s the disease entered the political agenda of the Brazilian state. In 1950, with residual insecticides available, the Ministry of Education and Health began Brazil's first vector control campaign in the Minas Gerais Triangle under Emmanuel Dias. Lassance is now free of transmission. The World Health Organization marks World Chagas Disease Day on April 14.
