According to Dr. Susan Montgomery, who leads the epidemiology team at the CDC, American doctors started to hear about Chagas disease in 2007 when blood banks in the U.S. began screening for it and sending people letters informing them that they had tested positive and should see their physicians. Health care providers started contacting the CDC and they haven’t stopped. In a ranking of the common phone inquiries the CDC receives, “Chagas disease is always number two every single month,” Montgomery said.

In 2010, one of those calls came from Northern Virginia. Pediatric infectious disease doctors there were seeing an unusual parasite in the blood smears of a baby who’d been born prematurely. The mom was a 31-year-old woman from Bolivia, and the baby, who’d been born at 29 weeks, weighed slightly more than 4 pounds. He seemed to be fighting an infection, and doctors assumed it was sepsis and treated him with antibiotics. Then they saw the parasite and talked with the mom. In Bolivia, expectant women are usually tested for Chagas, and yes, she remembered. With her previous pregnancy, she’d been told she had Chagas.

“It’s not something that we think of asking right away,” said Dr. Julie-Ann Crewalk, one of the pediatricians from the private practice that handled the case. She and her colleagues have only had two diagnoses of children with Chagas, but, she said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were higher and we’re just not seeing it.”

The newborn was treated for Chagas with medications distributed by the CDC, and by his first birthday, he was considered cured. Crewalk doesn’t know about the mother. While the CDC provides medication for free, it doesn’t have a curative effect for adults with chronic Chagas, and it’s hard, if not impossible, for moms with Chagas and no health insurance to see the doctors who would connect them to the CDC.

Sanchez decided to take action two years ago, believing that Chagas screening should be routine for expectant women from endemic countries—and everyone else. She talked to Doctors Without Borders and researchers of the disease, and eventually found Marcus. Last year, the two women began screening patients through the Bolivian consulate’s mobile health clinics.

In an initial screening of 66 patients, 29 percent of them tested positive for the disease. “If you took people from endemic areas like Santa Cruz and Cochabamba [in Bolivia], 50 percent were positive,” Marcus said.

One of those patients who tested positive was Sanchez’s own 69-year-old mother, María, who lives with Sanchez and her two children in northern Virginia.

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María Frerkinj grew up in the city of Santa Cruz, Bolivia, and she spent three months every year out in the countryside, where the kissing bugs, known as vinchucas in her country, lived in the cracks of houses made of mud and sticks. The moment the lights were turned off at night, the insects would run out from the crevices, but, María recalled that “people would say, ‘That bug doesn’t do anything.’” No one there knew about the connection to Chagas. When a neighbor or family member died of cardiac failure due to Chagas, people simply called it muerte súbito, or sudden death.

A grandmother, María says she has times now when she feels her chest tighten for a few moments, and then it passes and her heart starts beating faster than usual. She needs an echocardiogram but doesn’t have health insurance, which Marcus said is the case for the majority of her patients with Chagas. Marcus is herself working with a donated EKG machine and has often paid out of pocket for lab work that can run up to $225 a patient.