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.

Parasites Lost

 "We're viruses with shoes."~ Bill Hicks


Sunday, January 29, 2012 by Common Dreams

by Doug Harvey

 

I once asked a Native American if he thought whether North America was in any way in a post-colonial period. His response was, “Have they left yet?” Of the New World republics that came about as a result of colonization, the United States is going to have the hardest time dealing with its past. Recently, we’ve seen a lot of people willing to strut about with their guns and imagine themselves in some pre-pubescent fantasy of John Wayne’s “unbridled individualism.” Some become so deluded as to be willing to use these guns on perceived “enemies.” But this is symptomatic only; it is useful to remember how the actual land of North America came to be claimed by European and Euro-American colonists. More importantly, the causes of these neuroses can be better understood when one realizes what separating people from their resource base means.

For over ninety-nine percent of human history, the earth and its human offspring were united. Humans were unique in the degree to which we could fashion natural products into useful items. With our minds, hands, and intuition we made the stuff of the earth more useful to us. Nothing stood between us and our resources – we were immersed in our environment and what we did to improve our surroundings and make our lives better we ourselves enjoyed. As the Thoreau disciple and wilderness advocate Bradford Angier once pointed out, “The hardest part about roughing it is smoothing it.” We were pretty good at “smoothing it.” Even cave paintings, figurines, Petroglyphs and the like helped people to understand their relationship with the world into which they had emerged. Contrary to the assumptions of the old “Whig” histories, people were generally time-rich – indeed, they could easily make more than they needed. These surplus goods could be traded for others’ surplus goods and the fruits of individuals’ skills could be shared. At some point someone began to think about accumulating these surplus goods. How, the calculating mind asked, might I enjoy these manufactures and the potential wealth they represent without having to engage in this difficult work myself? Many methods were tried with varying degrees of success. But one that did work and continues to work was coercion – physical, political, legal, economic – forcing a wedge between people and their resource base (the land) and make their reunion with it conditional. The condition for this reunion with the “means of production” is a controlling cut of the wealth produced by the interaction of human and other-than-human nature.

This division between people and nature put us on a path many are beginning to question. Besides the sense of alienation being cut off from our natural relationships with the other-than-human world produces, we are separated from our own means of production. Now, instead of using our wits and our hands to mold the stuff of the earth into usefulness, we have to go to the bourgeois “owner” and ask him to buy our labor, since it is often all we have since being deprived of our access to resources. The bourgeoisie figured out that if you usurp the land and resources, you have control of interaction between human and other-than-human – also known as labor power, which is the only real power humans have.

This defense of the relationship between humans and their resources should in no way be construed as a defense of, say, corporate access to the minerals of the Grand Canyon or oil in the Arctic. That is a looting of both nature and labor that I have discussed elsewhere. No, we have come so far down the path of exploitation of both human and other-than-human nature that assumptions and myths regarding the righteousness of this path remain unquestioned from the halls of power to the public discourse.

The surplus of useful goods that was often so abundant in pre-modern communities – under the influence of market-obsession, has acquired an exchange-value separate from its use. The result is “capital,” or surplus-value flowing to the bourgeoisie but which they themselves did not produce. Capital bought and still buys power and influence to entrench this economic system and heavily skew it toward the bourgeoisie – a sort of modern feudalism. A wedge was driven between people and their resources. Having been deracinated – alienated from their resources, homes, families, and livelihood – people had nothing to sell but their labor, and oftentimes the going rate was at starvation levels. In some regions where this deracination is at full throttle, many have chosen suicide over this type of slavery.

In North America, this separation of the land from the indigenous peoples took on an unprecedented scope. While there was certainly plenty of room in North America in 1492, there were still no fewer than five to ten million people who, in most respects, lived off the fat of an abundant land. Then, Europeans and unwilling and unwitting Africans came to the New World. With varying degrees, separating indigenous people from the land became an institution and was developed to the point of becoming a national myth: of course the Indians must be removed in the face of “progress” – removed or exterminated. Cold hard fact that it is we have yet to internalize this as a society; denial or ignorance of this history remains rampant in the U.S.

The denial becomes increasingly difficult as the separation of people from property takes on new dimensions, (if nothing else, the bourgeois class is very creative about accumulating wealth and power). Now, newcomers as well as descendents of the original colonizers – who themselves usurped the land – have found themselves being separated from their resources by a rigged system in which they have no say. Some might call this karma and that may be true, but it is certainly a continuation.

Working people took a stand in the U.S. from the Industrial Revolution to the post-World War II era and created the wealthiest working class in history. It was so successful that this working class took to calling itself the “middle class,” a democratization of the original turf held by the bourgeoisie and characterized by untitled wealth. Many people once again had a say in their relationship between themselves and their tools and resources. They did not go to the so-called “owner” with hat in hand begging to sell their labor, they collectively bargained with him to get a reasonable share of the surplus value they were producing. Some would say these negotiations were a gift to the bourgeoisie from producers who cut them more slack than they deserved. The abandonment of the American working class by the bourgeoisie, by their politicians, and even by their unions, has been nothing short of a betrayal and indeed a form of robbery.

The wealth accumulated by hook or by crook and used to manipulate the economy and political power structure is turned against the people who produced it. The old tried and true strategy of divide and conquer – white and blue collar, black and white skin, English- and Spanish-speaking, male and female, etc., etc., ad nauseum – so far still works. The financialization of the economy has turned Wall Street into a giant Las Vegas, operating – at least in part – independently of actual wealth production – subsidized and insured by taxing those who actually do produce wealth. It must keep moving fast, though, because something is gaining on it. The separation of workers from the wealth they produce; of workers from their resources; of humans from nature, is a contrivance that cannot last.

People are looking for that part of themselves that is connected to everything else. There is a deep cognitive dissonance in the U.S. resulting from a simple historical truth: wealth enjoyed by many American citizens came from resources acquired through systematic conquest and pillage. It makes it particularly hard to defend your resources on moral grounds when they were stolen to begin with. Much easier to deny or invent an alternative narrative.

Parasites often kill their hosts. To the extent that humans have become parasites, of labor and/or the resource base, we act for our own destruction. The short-term thinking institutionalized in this system is an indulgence we can no longer afford. One alternative to the path of exploitation remains vaguely familiar to us: the path of husbandry and cooperation. But alternative paths require introspection, a difficult facing of fears and facts and, finally, understanding what the relationship between humans and the earth means. As people have known for over ninety-nine percent of our history, the earth is literally our mother – our source of life. It is human nature to interact with our environment and treat it with the respect it deserves – as a part of ourselves. We act self-destructively when we assume the exploitative attitude of parasites. As with most problems, the answers are in the mirror, which is why they don’t get solved.

Louisiana warns of brain-eating parasite in tap water

By Stephen C. Webster - RAW News

Friday, December 16, 2011

Officials in Louisiana warned this week that a brain-eating parasite known as Naegleria fowleri might survive in some of the state’s tap water, cautioning that if residents use the common cold remedy known as a neti pot, they should thoroughly boil their water first.
 
Neti pots work by injecting a hot water/salt solution into users’ sinuses, flushing out mucus and clearing the nasal passages. Although Naegleria fowleri is most commonly found in pond water, lakes and rivers, officials said that two people in Mississippi recently fell victim to to the amoeba, seemingly after they used tap water in their neti pots. The two male victims, both killed by their infection, were ages 20 and 51.

The link between Naegleria fowleri and tap water should not be cause for alarm, officials told a reporter for LiveScience.com.

“If you are irrigating, flushing or rinsing your sinuses, for example, by using a Neti pot, use distilled, sterile or previously boiled water to make up the irrigation solution,” Louisiana epidemiologist Dr. Raoult Ratard said in a statement to reporters. “Tap water is safe for drinking but not for irrigating your nose.”

The microscopic creature is not capable of doing any harm to people if the water is consumed as intended: instead, it only activates if it manages to get deep into the sinuses of its victim.

“Naegleria fowleri infects people by entering the body through the nose,” the Centers for Disease Control explained. “This typically occurs when people go swimming or diving in warm freshwater places, like lakes and rivers. In very rare instances, Naegleria infections may also occur when contaminated water from other sources (such as inadequately chlorinated swimming pool water or heated tap water <47°C) enters the nose. Once the ameba enters the brain, it causes a usually fatal infection called primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM)."

Whether or not the two victims actually contracted the amoeba through tap water was still under investigation, but officials issued the warning anyway out of concern for public safety.

Bedbugs Have Evolved to Live With Mankind

The rise of bedbugs has followed the rise of mankind living indoors; their latest resurgence illustrates the survival of the fittest.
By Rob Dunn, Miller-McCune.com
Posted on March 24, 2011

Bedbugs sure is evil, they don’t mean me no good. Yeah, bedbug sure is evil, they don’t mean me no good. Thinks he’s a woodpecker and I’m a chunk of wood.” — Bessie Smith (“Mean Old Bedbug Blues”)

Bedbugs are small and sneaky. Bedbugs do nasty things. Bedbugs are also becoming more common, a trend likely to expand and worsen this spring. But none of this is new, not really. The story of the bedbugs in our lives begins no less than 4,000 years ago. It is a kind of parable about the difference between what we want and what we make. We wanted a realm inside our houses, where we would always be happy and might live forever.

Instead, we made the bedbug, a modern chimera we seem unlikely to ever really escape.

It began innocently. Once we were like the birds. The rain fell on our naked shoulders. The sun beat down on our heads. There was no inside or outside. We built our nests of sticks and mud. Then we moved out of the trees. On the ground, the world was more dangerous. Leopards crouched in the darkness between resting spots, venomous snakes hid under leaves. We sought safety, shade and cover and found them all in caves.

Caves changed the world. In moving into caves, we invented the more constant conditions of the “indoors.” No matter that this particular indoors lacked an actual door, it was still the rough seed of what would come. It was the beginning of our efforts to make the place we lived “better” than everywhere else.

It was when we began to try to find even more favorable conditions for ourselves, to engender them even, that we began the process of making bedbugs from the sticks and mud of natural selection. Bedbugs belong to two or three species, depending on exactly how you are counting and who is counting. The most common species is — thanks to a modest failure of scientific creativity — the common bedbug (Cimex lectularius). Bedbugs were originally bat bugs. Their ancestors lived in caves, on bats (where most of their kin still live), and when our ancestors moved into caves, they jumped down onto us. A few found us where we slept. Those that did prospered on our blood as we prospered.

When they moved onto us, many things would have had to change for these bat/cavemen bugs. The platelets in our blood, for example, are wider than those of bats, and so the mouthparts of the bedbugs had to widen so that they wouldn’t clog up with blood. Their mouthparts changed in length, too, because of the thickness of our skin, a thickness through which their mandibles must meander to find blood vessels. Their activity patterns changed, too. Bat bugs feed during the day, when the bats are sleeping. Bedbugs, well, they had to feed at night, when we were sleeping.

Bedbugs changed so much in moving onto us, in fact, that now they are stuck. They can’t easily go back — and why would they want to? They ride us wherever we might lead them, which, it turns out, is all around the world.

Bedbugs evolved more as our culture evolved, changing as we changed and moving as we moved. Early Egypt was dense with bedbugs. Cleopatra would have had them. Aristotle definitely did. Socrates whined about them frequently.

Bedbugs came to take advantage not just of our abundance but also of the new environments we created inside our houses, environments that are similar realms of warmth and predictability whether we live in New Jersey or Cairo. Many valiant attempts were made to control bedbugs. Democritus recommended hanging the feet of a hare at the foot of the bed, presumably with no effect on bedbugs, though with negative consequences for the hare. Cyanide was sprayed around rooms. Rooms were heated to 45 degrees C, all to relatively little permanent avail.

Then, during World War II, scientists pioneered new chemicals for warfare. We used some of those chemicals, in particular DDT, around our apartments and houses in our war with pests. These pesticides appear to have controlled the bedbugs by making the indoor environment more toxic than most bedbugs could stand. This, we hoped, would be good for us. It was certainly bad for the bedbugs, for a while.

It was clear as early as 1947 that bedbugs could evolve resistance, first to DDT and then, one by one, to its chemical descendants. They evolved similar but sometimes unique forms of resistance in many different places all around the world (and in each bedbug species), which is to say that genetically they may have actually diversified. This was possible because we never, ever killed them all. We only killed the weak, and so, just as in those first caves, they evolved once again: They changed when we made them change. Recently, the inevitable has happened. These survivors have started to become abundant again, separately, in different regions of the world. We made our bed and they slept in it.

This is where we find ourselves now, reunited again with the species we have been shaping all these years, our evolutionary masterwork. The bedbugs, after their brief hiatus, seem foreign to us now. News stories call them strange or unusual, which they certainly are. The males have sex with females traumatically (by penetrating their bellies). They smell bad (an odor one scientist described as “an obnoxious sweetness”) so that even if we find them we are unlikely to try to bite them back (speaking for myself, I was never really tempted). Male bedbug nymphs compete with each other by trying to block each other’s sexy smells.

Bedbugs smell us, on the other hand, by the scent of our bodies but also, probably, the scent that the microbes on our bodies emit. All of that is weird, but it is also our fault, the consequence of the world we have created around ourselves, a world just right for us and, once again, for them.

But … you might reasonably contend that we try to control bedbugs. We chase and kill them. That’s true. But all this chasing has not done away with them. It has made them stronger, or better adapted anyway, to our ways and lives. In the process, it may have actually made them more common than they would have been otherwise had we never tried to beat them away. They may be more common because our houses have become ever more warm and because we have become ever better at ferrying them from one place to another. Also, we seem to be getting better and better at killing the other species that live around us, species other than the bedbug (and a handful of other equally sneaky beasts) that have learned to love it this way.

All things being equal, bedbugs would probably be more rare if we were just a little bit sloppier in controlling our environments and keeping species from coming in our door. Take the example of the Pharaoh ant.

The Pharaoh ant, Monomorium pharaonis, like bedbugs, spread with us all around the world and is now on every continent except Antarctica (though it may be there). The Pharaoh ant is a species that we have been able to exclude from our houses relatively well. It is present here and there, but no longer ubiquitous. That is bad news, bad news because the Pharaoh ant is very good at eating bedbugs. During the U.S. Civil War, Pharaoh ants cleaned a camp in Meridian, Miss., of bedbugs “in a single day.” The ants could be seen carrying the bedbugs back to their small, dark queens.

Nor is this ant the only species that is good at eating bugs. So, apparently, are other species of ants, including Argentine ants (Linipithema humile), species of the ant genus, Formica, a fire ant, Solenopsis geminata, and, one presumes, many other species. Nor are the ants alone. Several species of spiders have been reported as bedbug decimators. Then there is the masked assassin bug (Reduvius personatus) that appears to turn up in houses only when bedbugs are present. It may well be a bedbug specialist, feeding specifically on the species that feed specifically on us.

In the caves of our ancestry, Pharaoh ants, masked assassins, spiders and predators more generally were present. With their small arms and mouthparts they ate at bedbugs. In doing so, they may not have gotten rid of them, but they almost certainly made them less common. They were part of a diverse food web that kept the life that plagued (and plagues) us in check, the way the mountain lions, coyotes and their kin once ate the deer that now graze densely in our yards.

This is the secret about bedbugs: From the perspective of our broad history, they are common because we are common but also because we have made decisions that have made them more common, more specialized on us and more uniquely part of our lives. They are common because we have inadvertently given them a place to live, free of parasites or predators, to dine on our ankles and then return to their hiding places, to sleep and mate in their complicated, awful ways.

What we will undoubtedly try to do when the bedbugs begin to unfold out of their eggs in the spring is to figure out new ways to spray our lives down and make the door separating inside from outside more exclusive. I would argue for the opposite, leaving the door just a little more open so that the Pharaoh ants and their kin might walk inside and do what they have been doing since long before we had coffee makers, indoor plumbing or even houses — gathering what they find, one piece or body at a time. To crudely paraphrase the Japanese poet Issa, don’t worry Pharaoh ants, I keep house easily.

In the end, we made the bedbug, generation by generation, what it is today. But we could choose to make something else, a more diverse world around us, whether in our backyards or bedrooms, a world in which there are bedbugs sometimes, yes, but also the predators that chase them from corner to corner hunting them down, the way leopards once pursued us, into caves, where this whole story started.