(Todd Ackerman, Houston Chronicle)
Houston scientists have launched an attack against little-known tropical diseases, scourges of the developing world, increasingly showing up in poor areas of Texas.
The diseases, spread by all manner of blood-sucking insects, cyst-forming tapeworms and tissue-invading bacteria and viruses, typically don’t kill, but they cause chronic disabilities that trap sufferers in lasting poverty.
“They may have been here all along, but now that we’re looking we’re seeing these diseases more and more,” says Dr. Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine infectious disease professor leading the effort. “They have a huge impact – heart disease, epilepsy, mental retardation – even though they fly beneath most everyone’s radar.”
Hotez calls it “a national disgrace that these diseases are not higher on the public health agenda.” He says the reason is that they afflict “forgotten people, not wealthy people living in the suburbs.”
The discovery of more cases in the United States, however, is starting to get attention. In Texas, those include an outbreak of dengue fever in Brownsville; common occurrences in Houston of a tapeworm that invades the brain; and a parasitic disease, transmitted by “the kissing bug” and affecting the heart and digestive system, that scientists now estimate afflicts more than a quarter of a million people living in Texas.
(Read more at the Houston Chronicle)
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