Mal de Chagas: la enfermedad de la pobreza, Casas de fuego (1995)

Abstract

Chagas disease is transmitted by a parasite through the bite of an insect or by means of infected blood. Worldwide, there are some 20,000,000 people with illness and 100,000,000 more are considered to be at risk of contracting the disease because they live in areas where the parasite is endemic. Despite these astronomical figures,  Chagas disease belong to the groups of so-called “forgotten illnesses” owing to the scant attention paid them by the pharmaceutical industry as regards the development of new products for their treatment.                 The reason why the disease has been forgotten can be glimpsed simply by looking at the poverty map of America. This coexistence of poverty and the disease is due to the vector insect’s habit of living in straw roofs and cracks in walls of the population’s precarious houses. This means that one way of eradicating the disease would be to destroy its habitat, burning those buildings and replacing them with more solid and hygienic dwellings. Hence the name of the film: Houses of fire.                 The film tells us how after learning of the investigations of Carlos Chagas in Brazil the Argentinean doctor Salvador Mazza begins his research by attempting to fill in the missing gaps in the disease, and the movie posits the unflagging struggle of a Public Health Worker, who is interested in saving the lives of those with no name, no face and no culture, to achieve the necessary funds and support from a hypocritical political society and an uninterested scientific community.