Chagas disease in the Chaco

摘要

You would not know it if you drove to his small farm, but Ramon Raul Alegre is the owner of a unique mud hut. It looks like all the other adobe outhouses dotted near the dusty, dirt tracks in Pampa del Indio, which is a municipality of Argentina's northerly Chaco province, except that it is more dilapidated than most. That is because the walls of Alegre's hut have been dismantled chunk by chunk, every few months, by scientists from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA) in Argentina, who are searching for the blood-sucking bug Triatoma infestans. It is the region's main vector of Trypanosoma cruzi, which is the parasite that causes Chagas disease.