The treatment for the disease of sores, which is caused by the bite of an insect, is made with the ingestion of benzonidazole, an antiparasitic medicine offered free of charge by SUS.
The dose of the drug should be doctor-directed according to body weight and repeated every 12 weeks for 60 days without needing to be admitted to the hospital.
This treatment should be started as soon after the bite, that is during the acute phase, to prevent the development of the disease. However, treatment can also be done in:
- Cases in which the disease resurfaced due to weakening of the immune system;
- People with chronic disease in the initial phase;
- Babies who were infected during pregnancy;
In addition, people with chronic, non-symptomatic chagasic disease may also use this medication to delay their development.
During treatment, the ideal is to go to a doctor's office once a week or every 15 days and perform at least two blood tests during treatment for a better follow-up of the results.
Understand what symptoms may indicate Chagas disease.
Signs of improvement
The improvement in symptoms usually starts gradually after the first week of treatment and includes fever reduction, improvement of malaise, reduction of abdominal swelling and disappearance of diarrhea.
Although the symptoms may improve by the end of the first month, the treatment should be maintained for 2 months to ensure that the parasites inserted into the body by the insect bite are completely eliminated. The only way to ensure that the disease is cured is by doing a blood test at the end of treatment.
Signs of worsening
When the treatment is not started or is not done properly the symptoms may disappear after 2 months, however, the parasites continue in the body developing and infecting various organs.
In these cases, the person may return to new symptoms until 20 or 30 years after the first infection. However, these symptoms are more serious and are related to injuries in various organs such as heart, lungs and intestines, for example.
