Chagas is a disease is caused by a parasite named Trypanosoma cruzi, which causes an extremely popular and spread infection. Almost twenty million people worldwide have suffered from Chagas disease. This disease is especially popular in South America, in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Bolivia, Columbia, Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. The bugs that cause this disease live in cracks and in open holes in the houses that are not carefully cleaned, all over the South American continent. These bugs are infected themselves after they have sucked the blood of an infected animal or person.

A person can suffer from the Chagas disease if they touch their faces after having been in contact with an infected bug, if they eat food that has been previously touched and contaminated by triatome bug feces. This disease is also transmitted from mother to child during childbirth, but also if you need a blood transfusion from a person who has Chagas disease.

The serious part of this disease is that people usually become infected during childhood but the symptoms are visible only after more than fifteen years. The situation of those who experience a critical form of Chagas disease is delicate since their life expectancy is shorter with nine years.

The infection with Chagas disease meets three stages that have different symptoms, namely the acute stage, the indeterminate stage and the chronic stage. In the acute stage, only in one percent of the cases there are visible symptoms such as the swelling of only one of the eyes, fatigue, fever, the liver or the spleen are enlarged, and the lymph glands are swollen. In some cases, the person who has been infected with Chagas disease experiences a rash, loss of appetite, severe diarrhea, nausea, vomiting. These symptoms usually last for up to two months even when no treatment is being used. But in most cases the acute stage in the development of the Chagas disease does not present any symptoms.

The indeterminate stage appears immediately after the acute stage in which the symptoms have been present. This period of inderminacy can last for many years, and no symptoms are registered during the indeterminate stage of evolution of the Chagas disease.

In the last stage of development of this disease, namely the chronic stage, most people experience the most severe symptoms of this disease, symptoms that include heart problems (the enhancing of the dimension of the heart, disorders at the level of the heart rhythm, heart attacks) or/and enlargement of the esophagus and of the bowel which causes such problems as constipation and difficulty or impossibility of swallowing. The chronic stage affects the nervous system, the well-functioning of the heart, and the digestive system. In some cases, these symptoms develop in extremely serious conditions such as dementia, serious damage of the heart muscle, and exaggerated weight loss due to the impossibility to swallow caused by the infection of the digestive system. But the symptoms of the chronic stage in the evolution of Chagas disease do not always appear.

The problem of the significant distribution of this disease in the Latin America is extremely important especially since it seems to be transmitted from there in other area too, mostly in North America. This disease is transmitted through blood transfusions, by transplantation of organs, breastfeeding. The transfusions with infected blood also lead to the transmission of HIV and of different types of hepatitis.

It is very important to be remembered that there are quite sufficient cases in which no symptoms are present, which makes it so difficult to trace this disease. The only method of diagnosing this disease is by a blood test.