Fundación Mundo Sano and the Ministry of Health of the Buenos Aires province have agreed to jointly carry out a Programme with unprecedented contents, aimed at detecting school children who are positive for Chagas disease, and at providing them with adequate treatment.

Said "Programme for early detection and proper treatment of Chagas Disease in the Buenos Aires province" constitutes a first step towards facing a health problem that had till recently remained unattended in this region of Argentina.

Since 2002 Fundación Mundo Sano has been carrying out projects on Chagas Disease in endemic provinces like Santiago del Estero and Chaco, and after a recently signed agreement with the Minister of Health, Claudio Zin M.D., his experience in the Buenos Aires region will add to the project.

Even though the Buenos Aires province is not part of the area considered endemic for Chagas disease, the constant domestic migration and immigration currents from areas that are in fact endemic enable the occurrence of positive cases, in spite of the fact that vector-borne transmission by the vinchuca in those territories has not been confirmed.

On the other hand, there are other modes of transmission other than that, among which is the so-called vertical transmission, which takes place when a pregnant woman who is positive for Chagas transmits the disease to the baby to be born.

In its first stage, the Programme will be implemented at a pilot scale, and it will encompass activities regarding educational and social issues for which reason, once started, it is expected to raise awareness of the problems involved by Chagas Disease among the educational and sanitary communities.

In Argentina, approximately 30% of the women coming from endemic rural areas to urban centres are estimated to be infected by Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes the disease. Other estimates show that between 5% and 8% of the babies of pregnant women with Chagas disease are born positive for Chagas.

The Programme for early detection and proper treatment of Chagas Disease in the Buenos Aires province has five specific components -Regulatory, Educational, Health, Training, and Social- and, among other things, it is aimed at raising awareness of Chagas disease among the educational and sanitary communities, at making early detection of the positive cases in the school population; at informing the results of the diagnosis to the children's next of kin; at starting an active search for cases among the rest of the family members as well as initiating early treatment in those cases that test positive.

Besides, it seeks to make a socio-environmental evaluation of the families whose children have been diagnosed with the disease; to carry out studies of the costs of an early intervention as opposed to the costs derived from treating the outcomes of the disease, and generate intervention models that can be applied at a greater scale and in other complex pathologies.

Effects of Chagas disease on public health

A century after its discovery, Chagas disease is the main cause of cardiovascular death in Latin American countries. This has been revealed in a recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which also states that, of those patients who develop coronary conditions due to Chagas disease, eighty-four per cent of those at high risk will die in the following decade.

The mortality rates are notably lower among those patients considered at medium or low risk (44% and 10% respectively), "although the long-term outlook is not promising for many of those people, given the progressive nature of the disease", as the paper states. As a consequence, Chagas disease still remains being one of the most important transmissible pathologies in Latin America.

Some estimates show that more than 15 million of Latin Americans are infected with Trypanosoma cruzi parasite, the Chagas disease precursor.Approximately 2 to 3 million of those infected would be in Argentina. Although in most of the cases the disease remains unnoticed, one third of those infected develop chronic heart disease or severe digestive alterations decades after their infection.