News

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is participating in the 6th European Congress on Tropical Medicine and International Health held these days in Verona with two abstracts based on their experience in the field treating Chagas disease.

On the occasion of the Congress, MSF reminds that Chagas kills one person every hour, mainly amongst the poorest people in Latin America. In order to address the situation, the organisation underlines how important it is for countries where the disease is endemic to integrate patient care to primary health facilities. In addition, MSF insists on the need to develop new and better medicines and diagnostic methods.

The 6th European Congress on Tropical Medicine is being held in parallel to the 1st Mediterranean Conference on Migration and Travel Health. Even though Chagas is originally a Latin American disease, as a result of people’s movements worldwide more and more cases are being reported in Europe, USA and Japan. “Since Chagas is reaching developed countries, Governments and the scientific community are now paying more attention to it. This opportunity needs to be seized to address the problem in the host countries as well as to rescue from oblivion millions of people in endemic countries”, concludes Gemma Ortiz, Head of the MSF Chagas Campaign.

Despite being a potential killer, Chagas has been rather neglected by governments, the international community and research and development programmes. One hundred years after its discovery, the tools to combat Chagas diseases are not the ideal ones and many patients remain untreated. Based on his experience of 10 years in the area, MSF has shown that it is possible to diagnose and treat patients even in remote environments, now governments have to move to action and focus on patients.

In the Congress, MSF exposes two abstracts on its work in Bolivia. The first abstract is about the seroprevalence of Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that caused the disease, in children and adolescents in three programmes of diagnosis and treatment that MSF carried out in Bolivia between 2002 and 2009. The second abstract describes the benznidazole treatment-related adverse events in the same programmes.

• News back to News/Events index >