Chagas Disease - History

History

The disease was named after the Brazilian physician and infectologist Carlos Chagas, who first described it in 1909, but the disease was not seen as a major public health problem in humans until the 1960s (the outbreak of Chagas disease in Brazil in the 1920s went widely ignored). He discovered that the intestines of Triatomidae (now Reduviidae: Triatominae) harbored a flagellate protozoan, a new species of the Trypanosoma genus, and was able to prove experimentally that it could be transmitted to marmoset monkeys that were bitten by the infected bug. Later studies showed squirrel monkeys were also vulnerable to infection.

Chagas named the pathogenic parasite as Trypanosoma cruzi and later that year as Schizotrypanum cruzi, both honoring Oswaldo Cruz, the noted Brazilian physician and epidemiologist who successfully fought epidemics of yellow fever, smallpox, and bubonic plague in Rio de Janeiro and other cities in the beginning of the 20th century. Chagas was also the first to unknowingly discover and illustrate the parasitic fungal genus Pneumocystis, later infamously linked to PCP (Pneumocystis pneumonia in AIDS victims). Confusion between the two pathogens' life-cycles led him to briefly recognize his genus Schizotrypanum, but following the description of Pneumocystis by others as an independent genus, Chagas returned to the use of the name Trypanosoma cruzi.

In Argentina, the disease is known as mal de Chagas-Mazza, in honor of Salvador Mazza, the Argentine physician who in 1926 began investigating the disease and over the years became the principal researcher of this disease in the country. Mazza produced the first scientific confirmation of the existence of Trypanosoma cruzi in Argentina in 1927, eventually leading to support from local and European medical schools and Argentine government policy makers.

It has been hypothesized that Charles Darwin might have suffered from Chagas disease as a result of a bite of the so-called great black bug of the Pampas (vinchuca) (see Charles Darwin's illness). The episode was reported by Darwin in his diaries of the Voyage of the Beagle as occurring in March 1835 to the east of the Andes near Mendoza. Darwin was young and generally in good health, though six months previously he had been ill for a month near Valparaiso, but in 1837, almost a year after he returned to England, he began to suffer intermittently from a strange group of symptoms, becoming incapacitated for much of the rest of his life. Attempts to test Darwin's remains at the Westminster Abbey by using modern PCR techniques were met with a refusal by the Abbey's curator.