Lessons from a national survey of Chagas disease transmission risk in Colombia.

In recent years, there has been a revitalization of large-scale programmes to control parasitic disease in developing countries. In 1997, the Governments of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador and Peru committed themselves to replicate the cost-effective elimination of Trypanosoma cruzi transmission achieved in the Southern Cone by using insecticides against the domestic triatomine vectors (in combination with blood-bank screening). Central American Governments launched a complementary initiative. All plan to interrupt vectorial transmission throughout the region by 2010 but specific targets are decided nationally. In this article, we highlight the novel approach taken by the Colombian Government for determining the geographic distribution of Chagas disease risk to select where to intervene first.