Human infection with Trypanosoma cruzi and Leishmania viannia braziliensis (Lvb). A clinical perspective.

These remarks are in English, the current lan­ guage of science, as Chinese, Arabic, Greek and Latin were in the past. My qualification for making them is that, apart from my general clinical and teaching duties, I have spent 25 years doing research on T. cruzi and 15 years on Lvb. I am a clinician first and a parasitologist second so that my research is applied to aspects pertaining to diagnosis, treatment and prevention. This classification is used in this discussion and among these six topics there has only been one great advance during my time, the control of Chagas’ disease in Brazil. Diagnostic techniques still lack sensitivity and precision and the drug companies have shown little interest in chemotherapy. For this reason I wanted to make some observations.