Using the circumstantial crisis of the COVID-19 pandemic to fight Chagas disease Authors

Abstract

Historically, natural or man-made events have always generated scenarios with negative impact, depending on the perspective the historian finds. In most cases, the common denominator in epidemics has been a high mortality rate, in addition to socio-economic, political, and health consequences that, despite excellent mitigation and reconstruction strategies, among others, have taken decades without achieving full recovery. The SARS-CoV-2 pandemic for a year has affected hundreds of countries around the world, with 2.5 million deaths currently. Complex health systems such as Spain, France, Italy, England, and the United States had difficult moments due to hospital collapse, because of the large percentage of hospitalizations for COVID-19 in moderate to severe stages. As there was no specific antiviral therapy that demonstrated effectiveness against the new coronavirus, multiple drugs had to be tested that act at different levels of the pathophysiology of Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (SARS), with the objective of reducing complications due to endothelial, respiratory, cardiac damage, among others.