Honduras sees 1.5 mln at risk from Chagas disease
The deadly Chagas disease has infected 300,000 Hondurans and could spread to 1.5 million more without measures to halt it, a health official said on Thursday.
Chagas, which is transmitted mainly by blood-sucking insects known as kissing bugs, kills up to a third of its victims and disproportionately affects the rural poor in Latin America.
"This is basically a disease of poor people who live in poor and unhealthy conditions,” Honduran health official Oscar Ortega said.
Several drugs are effective against Chagas disease for victims recently infected with the disease, which is caused by the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite. But there is no cure for the chronic stage of infection, which can result in fatal heart disease.
Many peasants in tiny Honduras, one of Latin America’s poorest countries and already ravaged by AIDS and Tuberculosis, could have the disease and not know it, said Concepcion Zuniga, coordinator of Honduras’ Chagas prevention program.
Her forecast puts a fifth of the country’s population, or about 1.5 million people, at risk of catching the infection.
“Often people don’t know they are suffering from this as it starts with an inflammation in the eye and eyelid which disappears. But in the critical stage it provokes inflammation in the heart, heart murmurs and low (blood) pressure,” Zuniga said.
“We are starting programs to fumigate and improve housing in rural areas to prevent this disease spreading further,” she said.
Ortega said kissing bugs were found increasingly in urban areas as peasants migrate to cities.
“There are lots of people in the outskirts of Tegucigalpa and other cities who live in the same or worse conditions as in rural areas,” he said.
Sixteen to 18 million people in Central and South America have become infected with the disease, according to the World Health Organization. Up to 120 million, or 25 percent of the region’s population, are at risk of catching it, WHO said.
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