Evandro Chagas Institute Evandro Chagas Institute The Evandro Chagas Institute (Portuguese Instituto Evandro Chagas, or IEC) is a non-profit organization which promotes public health in Brazil named after Evandro Chagas. In the 1940s fisherman Henrique Penna from the Rockefeller Foundation in Rio de Janeiro reported that he had discovered cases of leishmaniasis in Brazil's countryside. The disease had not been previously detected in Brazil, and as a response, Carlos Chagas of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute organized a commission leishmaniasis to be headed by his son Evandro Chagas. In 1938 this commission became the "Instituto de Pathologia Experimental do Norte", or Northern Institution for
Oswaldo Cruz Cruz. As a child, he moved to Rio de Janeiro with his family. At the age of 15 he started to study at the Faculty of Medicine of Rio de Janeiro and in 1892 he graduated as medical doctor with a thesis on water as vehicle for the propagation of microbes. Inspired by the great work of Louis Pasteur, who had developed the germ theory of disease, four years later he went to Paris to specialize in bacteriology at the Pasteur Institute, which gathered the great names of this branch of science of that time. He was financed by his