Chagas disease and the london declaration on neglected tropical diseases

Successes and Advances Among the successes in the control and prevention of Chagas disease is the reduction of vector-based transmission in some countries in the Southern Cone of South America using a combination of widespread and recurrent domestic application of pyrethroid insecticides and screening of blood donations to prevent transfusion-related transmission. [...]to long-held views on the autoimmune origin of the pathology of the chronic stage of Chagas disease, multiple lines of investigation confirm that the persistence of parasites is the key factor underlying the sustained inflammatory responses that lead to such manifestations [8], [9]. [...]the condition should be treated as an infectious, not an autoimmune, disease, and specific treatment should be offered to all seropositive patients, perhaps with the exception of those with terminal disease [2], [10].