Pages Menu
Categories Menu
Welcome!KFWH Condensed Learning Guide on Chagas! Press the Bug!

Inside KFWH - Articles, Facts, The Organization, Culture, Story

New Tool to Fight Deadly Tsetse Fly

After 10 years of effort, a team led by scientists at Yale has finally decoded the genes of the tsetse fly, a bloodsucking scourge of Africa. Click here to read full article....

Neglected Parasitic Infections, Chagas Disease, in the United States

Most people think of parasitic diseases occurr in poor and developing countries, and is something they might pick up on a trip to a foreign country. However, parasitic infections also occur in the United States. In some cases, they affect millions of people. Click here for full...

DFMO Story

Dr. Cyrus Bacchi writes his account of a discovery of a cure for African trypanosomias for our kfwh website. Dr. Bacchi works at Haskins Laboratories in New York City. Cyrus J. Bacchi, Ph.D. Haskins Laboratories Pace University 41 Park Row, New York, NY 10038   March 21, 2006 DFMO Story In 1974, my laboratory at Pace University began studying an enzyme (GPDH) which is critical to the cell respiration of African trypanosomes. The enzyme needed the metal magnesium for full activity, but the magnesium could be replaced by the polyamines spermidine or spermine. Polyamines are small molecules which are required by all cells for division and growth. Polyamines have many...

Chagas: The Facts

Chagas is a parasitic disease transmitted by insects. It is most prevalent in Latin  America. The beetles that transmit Chagas live in cracks in the walls of mud and straw housing, which are common in rural areas and urban slums.  It affects an estimated 16-18 million people and claims 50,000 lives annually. Symptoms:  There are often no apparent symptoms after infection, with the exception of a  short- lived flu-like reaction. The disease is progressive and after 10 to 20 years, thirty percent of those infected will develop permanent and often irreversible damage to the heart, esophagus, and colon. Diagnosis and Treatment:  Diagnosis is difficult because of lack of symptoms...

The KFWH 2012 Newsletter

 Dear Advisory Boards, Friends of KFWH,Student Members of KFWH,  Another year, and another wish for Hope for all the world’s people!  On behalf of the Student Policy Board and the KFWH Board of Directors, Happy Holiday Season!  Our Immediate Goals for the Year 2013! 1. To continue our project/action work for the treatment of     Chagas Disease in the region of Camiri, Boliva. 2. To complete and launch our newly designed website with     Marcia Kalisch, website designer. 3. To establish communication sites that will enhance our interactive     dialogues among villagers, patients, healthcare workers and     kfwh students in the United States. 4. To search foundations for grant...

Kids for World Health Presents: “My Trip to Uganda: A Journey to the Human Spirit” – with photographic journal

Africa…As a child, I dreamed of the visual map of a distinctively shaped continent far far away; images of jungle-like landscapes, tall grass, roaming hungry lions, rambunctious chimpanzees, and a doctor named Albert Schweitzer. I remember asking the questions, as assuredly most of us do, as to why we are born to different parts of the world, each of us with a life to live…often finding ourselves in very different centers of what appears to be inequitable opportunity. And underlying that cultural stamp, I often asked myself, “What is it that we do share…and how visible are our human spirits within the recognition of what we hold in common...