Chagas Congenito Workshop

I went to a Chagas workshop the day after I came back from my salar-uyuni trip; very informative. We covered almost every aspect of the Chagas disease, from the discovery of it to the treatment; as well as the norms that are to be implanted. It took 5 hours to inform other health professionals that are to be capacitated to perform the Chagas treatment in their communities. Many of them came from rural areas of the department of Tarija to become capacitated to capacitate others in their districts. One of the main purposes of this workshop was to instruct health professionals that in order to prevent Chagas, one has to alert their communities about the disease, and the different treatments that are being performed depending on the areas, some are highly pandemic, some are being already controlled and others are not pandemic but the disease exists. It is important to be patient when informing communities the kind of treatment that is being taken because just like everything in nature, the parasite evolves to the drugs and/or people can become re-infected. The presence of the vector in a community has to be reduced to a 3% in order to proceed with the anti-parasite drugs; otherwise, the treatment is pointless since people can become infected again. To reduce the presence of the vector, pesticides are applied to these areas until the optimal percent of its presence is achieved. Then, one can start testing for the disease to begin any treatment.