New Disease

[Edwin]

There is a new disease in Latin America and the USA. It is named "Chagas." This disease is spread by insects which bits a person to suck their blood. While sucking their blood the insects inject parasites. The victim itches and so scratches causing a wound. The parasites move into that wound, and then into the blood stream. Early on the disease can be treated with harsh drugs, but if the disease progresses to the point of causing an enlarged heart or intestines, they will burst causing sudden death. It can only be cured if the disease is caught and treated early on. This article is from Yahoo News, and is also part of a CNN report.



Chagas: Is tropical disease really the new AIDS?
By Dylan Stableford | The Lookout

Chagas, a tropical disease spread by insects, is causing some fresh concern following an editorial—published earlier this week in a medical journal—that called it "the new AIDS of the Americas."
More than 8 million people have been infected by Chagas, most of them in Latin and Central America. But more than 300,000 live in the United States.
The editorial, published by the Public Library of Science's Neglected Tropical Diseases, said the spread of the disease is reminiscent of the early years of HIV.
"There are a number of striking similarities between people living with Chagas disease and people living with HIV/AIDS," the authors wrote, "particularly for those with HIV/AIDS who contracted the disease in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic."
[Related: U.S. AIDS Relief program prevented 741,000 HIV/AIDS deaths in Africa]
Both diseases disproportionately affect people living in poverty, both are chronic conditions requiring prolonged, expensive treatment, and as with patients in the first two decades of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, "most patients with Chagas disease do not have access to health care facilities."
Unlike HIV, Chagas is not a sexually-transmitted disease: it's "caused by parasites transmitted to humans by blood-sucking insects," as the New York Times put it.
"It likes to bite you on the face," CNN reported. "It's called the kissing bug. When it ingests your blood, it excretes the parasite at the same time. When you wake up and scratch the itch, the parasite moves into the wound and you're infected."
"Gaaah," Cassie Murdoch wrote on Jezebel.com, summing up the sentiment of everyone who read the journal's report.
[Related: Coming soon - an over-the-counter HIV test]
Chagas, also known as American trypanosomiasis, kills about 20,000 people per year, the journal said.
And while just 20 percent of those infected with Chagas develop a life-threatening form of the disease, Chagas is "hard or impossible to cure," the Times reports:
The disease can be transmitted from mother to child or by blood transfusion. About a quarter of its victims eventually will develop enlarged hearts or intestines, which can fail or burst, causing sudden death. Treatment involves harsh drugs taken for up to three months and works only if the disease is caught early.
"The problem is once the heart symptoms start, which is the most dreaded complication—the Chagas cardiomyopathy—the medicines no longer work very well," Dr. Peter Hotez, a researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and one of the editorial's authors, told CNN. "Problem No. 2: the medicines are extremely toxic."
And 11 percent of pregnant women in Latin America are infected with Chagas, the journal said.

[Smiley]

Great! Exactly what we need

[Edwin]

Yes, Smiley, it seems that all we need is something else like this huh? It seems like things come around too often, like the Swine Flue, or the Nile Fever. This one is particularly scarey because of the insects causing this damage. It is very difficult to avoid contact with insects! We have ticks that we have been picking off the dogs constantly. They tell me that the ones that have the little spot on their backs are the ones that cause the tick fever. We have been getting those ticks on us also. I usually feel them crawling and then I get them off, and use my finger nails to put them out of my miseray. I remember when I was younger pulling a tick off my arm and ending up with a small hole in the arm where the tick was holding on. We have just had lots of ticks on us, and more on the dogs. I think I get them from the dog that sleeps with me. I will just have to be alert for ticks because I am going to keep letting him sleep with me. He is a very loving dog, and he thinks Carol and I are wonderful, all except when we are looking for ticks on them, and then he doesn't like it! My great grandmother died just 2 miles from here from a tick on the base of her spine, where the spine connects to the head. She was older, so maybe that is why she didn't feel that tick in time to get it off her, before it killed her. They took her and my great grandfather both to Sumas, Washington on the Canadian/USA border and buried them both there. That was their home, where all of my Mom's family came to when they came from Oklahoma/Kansas/Arkansas. They were from all those places and they moved around a bit. When they got here, they were from Sumas, lived in Mansfield and went broke, then came here and made it good. Some of them became rich, by our standards anyway. Two of my Mom's brother's ended up with wheat and cattle ranches, 25 to 30 thousand acres, mostly pasture land, with maybe 1200 to 1400 acres of wheat, and running 400 to 600 head of cows and calves. My parents only had 2000 or so acres, ran 100 or so cows and calves with, maybe 300 acres they grew Jones Fife wheat for feed for the cows, and now one nephew and my brother has that, and our kids have 40 acres of it, and they just live on it, but it doesn't make them a living. But they enjoy everything they raise, livestock and garden.