First World Chagas Day
Updated: May 4, 2020
This week we had the first World Chagas Day.
Chagas is a potentially life-threatening illness, transmitted through contact with the faeces or urine of a triatomine bug. The main reservoir of this disease is Latin America but due to globalization we can find this disease in every inhabited continent.
Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis, is known as a "silent and silenced disease” due to the slowly progressing and initially asymptomatic clinical course but also because it affects mainly impoverished communities.
This neglected tropical disease deserves as much visibility as possible to improve the rates of early treatment and cure, together with the interruption of its transmission.
It is a pleasure for UniversalDoctor to have been collaborating with the Department of Neglected Diseases of WHO and the platform BeatChagas to launch an educational chatbot in Spanish and English with the intention of raising awareness and capacity-building.
These chatbots can be found in the platform BeatChagas, which is developed by the Technical Group No. 6 in Information, Education and Communication (*TG6IEC-Chagas*) of the WHO Chagas Programme to communicate and share information, education and communication (IEC) tools related to the problem of Chagas.
Through these chatbots, you can access many of the multimedia resources, such as educational videos made by BeatChagas, that aim to break the silence around Chagas.