Chagas disease: the silent killer linked to deforestation

The animals hide in the cracks of houses and come out at night to suck the blood of its occupants. These are not vampires, but the Triatominae insects, known in Brazil as “barber bugs” for their tendency to feed on humans’ faces. In Bolivia, they go by the name vinchuca, which means “to drop” in Quechua, as they literally fall from the ceiling onto unsuspecting people. 

There are more than 150 species in the Triatominae family, which decades ago fed on the blood of small mammals and lived in the canopy of trees. But as human settlements encroached on what was once virgin forest, the barber bugs developed a taste for the blood of humans and pets.

They are the vectors of Chagas disease, which affects between 6 and 7 million people worldwide, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), and has caused an average of 4,000 deaths per year in Brazil over the last decade.

The danger lies in wattle-and-daub houses and in places that are dirty, full of garbage, and lack basic sanitation, and whose residents belong to the poorest segments of Brazilian society. Most of those infected are black and illiterate.

The WHO considers Chagas a neglected tropical disease, like other ailments typical of underdeveloped tropical countries, in which there is little interest in developing advanced treatment.

“It’s a disease of the poor. If it were [a disease] of the rich, there would be investment from the pharmaceutical industry in rich countries,” says Tania Araújo-Jorge, director of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute (Fiocruz) and a researcher of Chagas disease for the past 40 years.

Fiocruz takes its name from the physician and epidemiologist Oswaldo Cruz, who dedicated his life to the...