Carlos Chagas
Carlos Justiniano Ribeiro Chagas (born July 9, 1879, Oliveira, Minas Gerais, Brazil; died November 8, 1934, Rio de Janeiro), was a Brazilian physician. He discovered Chagas disease, also called American trypanosomiasis in 1909, while working at the Oswaldo Cruz Institute in Rio de Janeiro. Chagas’ work is unique in the history of medicine, because he was the only researcher so far to describe completely a new infectious disease: its pathogen, vector, host, clinical manifestations and epidemiology.
Early life
Chagas was the son of José Justiniano das Chagas, a coffee farmer from Minas Gerais, and Mariana Cândida Chagas. After his secondary studies at Itu, São Paulo and São João del Rey, he enrolled in the School of Mining Engineering at Ouro Preto, but changed to the Medical School of Rio de Janeiro in 1897, influenced by his uncle, who was a physician and owner of a hospital at that city. He graduated in 1902 and got his M.D. in the following year with a thesis on the hematology of malaria, working at the new medical research institute created by noted physician and, later, friend and colleague, Oswaldo Cruz (1872-1917.
After a brief stint as a medical practitioner in the backlands, Chagas accepted a position in the port authority of Santos, São Paulo, with the mission of fighting the malaria epidemic which was affecting its workers. There he introduced an innovation, which consisted in using pyrethrum, an insecticide, to desinfect households, with a surprising success. His published work on this method served as the basis of prevention of malaria all over the world and was adopted by a service of the Ministry of Health in Brazil which was established expressly for this purpose.
The discovery of Chagas disease
In 1906, Chagas returned to Rio de Janeiro and joined the Oswaldo Cruz Institute where he remained working for the rest of his life. In 1909, he was sent by the Institute to the small city of Lassance, near the São Francisco River to combat a malaria oubreak among the workers of a new railroad to the city of Belém, in the Amazon. He stayed there for the next two years and soon was able to observe the peculiar infestation of the rural houses with a large hematophagous insect of the genus Triatoma, a kind of "assassin bug" or "kissing" bug (barbeiro in Portuguese, so called because it sucked the blood at night by biting the faces of its victims). He discovered that the intestines of these insects harbored a flagellate protozoa, a news species of the Trypanosoma genre and was able to prove experimentally that it could be transmitted to marmoset monkeys which were bitten by the infected bug. Chagas named this new parasite Schizotrypanum cruzi, in honor of Oswaldo Cruz (later renamed to Trypanosoma cruzi.)
Chagas suspected that the parasite could cause human disease, due to its prevalence of the insect vector in human households and its habit of biting people, so he took blood samples and, in April 23, 1909 discovered for the first time the same Trypanosoma parasite in the blood of a three year-old girl. He also observed parasitic inclusions in the brain and myocardium which would explain some of the clinical manifestations in diseased people, and closed the proposed life cycle of the parasite by suggesting that the armadillo could be its natural reservoir. To complete his work on the pathology of the new disease, Chagas described 27 cases of the acute form of the disease and performed more than 100 autopsies on patients who exhibited the chronic form. His description of the new disease was to become a classic in medicine and brought domestic and international distinction to Carlos Chagas. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine and received the prestigious Schaudinn Prize for the best work in protozoology and tropical medicine, on June 22, 1912. The contenders were luminaries such as Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), Emile Roux (1853-1933), Ilya Mechnikov (1845-1916), Charles Laveran (1845-1922), Charles Nicolle (1866-1936) and Sir William Boog Leishman (1865-1926), several of them who had already received or would receive tht Nobel Prize for Medicine. Chagas was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize (in 1913 and 1921), but never received the award.
Late life
After the death of his mentor in 1917, Chagas accepted Cruz's directorship of the Institute, a post he held until his death, in 1934. From 1920 to 1924 he became the director of the Department of Health in Brazil. Chagas was very active in organizing special health care and prevention services and campaigns for the Spanish flu epidemics, sexually transmitted diseases, leprosy, pediatrics, tuberculosis and rural endemic diseases. He created nursing school and was the founder of the concept of sanitary medicine, the first chair of tropical medicine and the graduate study of hygiene.
He died in Rio from a acute heart infarction at only 55 years of age.
References
- Lewinsohn R.: Carlos Chagas (1879-1934): the discovery of Trypanosoma cruzi and of American trypanosomiasis (foot-notes to the history of Chagas's disease).Trans R Soc Trop Med Hyg. 1979;73(5):513-23.
External link
- Carlos Justiniano Ribeiro Chagas. WhoNamedIt.