Conclusion
CD is a highly neglected tropical disease, and it has increasingly become a worldwide problem. There are an alarming number of undiagnosed and untreated patients, and an urgent need for researchers and providers to change this fact. The choice for treatment remains between two drugs, created a century ago. The strongest data to support benefit-risk considerations come from trials in children (see Table 1 ).
Scientific and economic effort should be urgently aimed to supply early diagnose and treatment in this population, in addition to more research in this area. New biomarkers for CD are strongly needed for the diagnosis and detection of treatment efficacy and efforts from academia and pharmaceutical companies to accelerate the process of new drugs development are necessary. Also, an extra effort to standardize a predictive Chagas disease in vivo model should be done and validated in order to improve its predictability and to ease its comparison and reproducibility.
Early diagnosis and treatment of Chagas diseases, especially in pediatric patients, are vital for an effective and safe use of the available drugs (BZN and NF) medications.
Funding: The authors received no funding specifically for this project. Dr Facundo Garcia-Bournissen is funded by the University of Western Ontario, Dr Jaime Altcheh is funded by Hospital de Niños Ricardo Gutierrez, Buenos Aires, Argentina, and Dr Fernanda Lascano is the recipient of a “doctorate” scholarship by CONICET, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Conflicts of interest: Dr Facundo Garcia Bournissen has consulted for Chemo for projects not related to benznidazole, and has participated in nifurtimox clinical trials sponsored by Bayer.
Dr Jaime Altcheh has consulted for Bayer, and for Chemo. Dr Fernanda Lascano has no potential conflicts of interest to disclose.