This is a kind of Halloween story, but it is a true one.
Chagas disease is the stuff of horror movies, but public health officials are doing very little to address it.
A rare and deadly tropical disease once thought to be limited to economically depressed regions of South America is now appearing in areas of the US Southeast—and the situation is worse than the government thinks. While the CDC estimates that just one in 300,000 Americans who donated blood was infected, a recent study predicted that one in 6,500 Americans who gave blood—fifty times more than the CDC’s estimate—were infected.