Producción CyT
Capítulo de Libro
Autoría
Fecha
2024
Editorial y Lugar de Edición
Routledge
Libro
Rural Disease Knowledge. Anthropological and Historical Perspectives
(pp. 97-121)
Routledge
Routledge
ISBN
9781032563251
Resumen
Información suministrada por el agente en
SIGEVA
Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis, was first described in 1909 by the Brazilian physician Carlos Chagas. Since the 1950s, it has been considered one of the most important endemic diseases in Latin America, with six to seven million people infected. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the standardized definition of Chagas disease considers it to be an infectious disease caused by a parasite, Trypanosoma cruzi, which lodges in human tissues and causes damage, main...
Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis, was first described in 1909 by the Brazilian physician Carlos Chagas. Since the 1950s, it has been considered one of the most important endemic diseases in Latin America, with six to seven million people infected. Since the second half of the twentieth century, the standardized definition of Chagas disease considers it to be an infectious disease caused by a parasite, Trypanosoma cruzi, which lodges in human tissues and causes damage, mainly to the heart. According to this definition, infection can cause heart failure, which can lead to death, after a period that can last several years. The main vector of T. cruzi is the triatomine bug, which nests in rural dwellings and feeds on the blood of the inhabitants, transmitting the parasite to them. Traditionally in epidemiology, the disease is associated with rural poverty because of the precarious living conditions in which it thrives. Despite being consensual today, all of these ideas became highly controversial in the decades following Chagas’s announcement of the discovery of the disease in 1909. The clinical manifestations, diagnostic methods, and, fundamentally, the epidemiological distribution proposed by Chagas were intensively discussed. So were the political implications of disease recognition and intervention. Following the initial announcement on the discovery of Chagas disease, which had great scientific and political impact in Brazil, the disease soon lost its scientific and political relevance in the 1920s. In Argentina in particular, since the mid-1910s, health authorities considered that the disease did not exist. This situation began to change with the work of Salvador Mazza and his collaborators at the Misión de Estudios de Patología Regional Argentina (Mission for the Study of Argentine Regional Diseases, MEPRA), a laboratory established in 1926 by the University of Buenos Aires at the North-West border of the country.This chapter explores the trajectory of Chagas disease from its discovery to the 1940s, analyzing the entanglement of scientific knowledge, political interests, living conditions and institutional frameworks that conditioned the definition of the disease in Argentina. Of particular interest to this study are the consequences of the implementation of a political-scientific project based on the development of bacteriology in the reconfiguration of the rural territory of Argentina. In particular: how did the identification of a new microorganism change ideas about the rural world? Under what social and political conditions could the disease become a legitimate scientific object? Which epistemic framework of Chagas disease were developed and mobilized at each point in time? And what consequences did these imply both for the scientific community and the rural world?
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Palabras Clave
Rural diseasesBacteriologySalvador MazzaEnfermedad de Chagas