A new targeted screening strategy could make the diagnosis and treatment of Chagas disease more feasible in low-resource settings, concludes a new study, publishing on December 26, 2007, in the open-access journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases.Trypanosoma cruzi, the single-cell parasite that causes Chagas disease, is transmitted by triatomine bugs that infest houses in poor communities. The disease, which infects an estimated 11 million people in Latin America, kills more people than any other parasitic disease in the Americas.
