Health, Migration, and NTDs: An Anthropological View

Also called American trypanosomiasis, Chagas disease was first discovered by the clinician and scientist Carlos Justiniano Ribeiro Chagas in 1909 in Brazil, who identified a new species of flagellated microorganism that was to be found in the intestines of hematophagous insects, in the blood of various domestic animals, and in the blood of people. The parasite was called Trypanosoma cruzi, in honor of Professor Oswaldo Cruz (Araujo-Jorge et al. 2017). One hundred and eleven years later, on April 14, 2020, World Chagas Day was officially recognized and celebrated for the first time. The objective was to give visibility in the global health agenda to the challenges faced by people affected by Chagas disease. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the celebration of a neglected tropical disease was obviously obscured by more imminent concerns. This is the nature of neglected tropical diseases (NTDs); also referred to as silenced diseases. “When we say that Chagas disease is a silent disease we are simply stating a fact: in most cases it is a disease that presents no suspicious signs or symptoms for several years […] until a heart or digestive dysfunction develops in its chronic stage. However, when we say that Chagas disease is a silenced disease we want to stress that there are those who wish to silence it” (Medecins Sans Frontier 2005, my emphasis).