Chagas: Is tropical disease really the new AIDS? Overblown Hype? Somewhere in Between?

By Dylan Stableford | The Lookout – Thu, May 31, 2012

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."
 

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 Triatominae, the kissing bug, conenose bugs, assassin bugs or triatomines. 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.

 

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.

Should the FDA approve Big Pharma marketing drug treatments to healthy people?

Monday, May 21, 2012 by: Melissa Melton

(NaturalNews) This week, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will consider allowing an anti-HIV drug to be promoted to otherwise healthy, HIV-free people as a purely preventative measure for the first time. If approved, Gilead Sciences will be able to market Truvada to anyone who might be considered "at risk" for contracting the disease based on lifestyle and other factors (such as sexual orientation). Normally, HIV-infected patients take Truvada to slow viral replication. Under the new guidelines, doctors would begin openly touting this therapy as a glorified prophylactic to people who do not have HIV based on fear they might contract it someday (and all at the low price of just $14,000 a year).

According to Truvada's own website, treatment side-effects may include lactic acidosis, a serious medical condition that can lead to death. Truvada patients can suffer impaired kidney function and "serious liver problems" such as enlargement and hepatotoxicity. In lab tests, Truvada has also been shown to cause osteopenia or changes in bones that make them more susceptible to fractures.

One of the two studies used to back this new approval push was funded by none other than the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This is the same organization that financially backed untested polio vaccines recently linked to more than 47,000 cases of paralysis in India. Bill Gates has also espoused the idea that money used to provide end-of-life care to the elderly could be better spent paying teacher salaries instead (Youtube.com).

So far, FDA response has been favorable. With the organization's recent proposal to make many prescription drugs available over-the-counter (thus maximizing use and profits), it is hardly surprising. The problem with allowing medications to be marketed this way is that it opens the door for all pharmaceutical companies to start requesting allowances to market all kinds of drugs to otherwise healthy people purely under the guise of fear masked as prevention. Under this logic, should overweight people considered to have poor diet and exercise habits start taking insulin shots to prevent type 2 diabetes? Should someone with a family history of cancer take chemotherapy treatments just in case? Where does the line get drawn? If approved, this decision will be a slippery slope rife with so much potential for Big Pharma abuse, it is hard to even contemplate.

Though it may be stating the overly obvious, instead of pushing expensive and potentially dangerous medical treatments on otherwise healthy people, would it not make more sense to simply work harder to promote healthier lifestyle choices?

Sources for this article include:

http://online.wsj.com/article

http://www.naturalnews.com/035627_polio_vaccines_paralysis_India.html

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47340784

Merck Vaccine Chief Admits to Bringing HIV/AIDS to America

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