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 construction of the Madeira-Mamoré railroad, which was interrupted due to the great number of deaths from malaria and yellow fever among the workers. In 1913, Cruz was elected a member of the Brazilian Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1915, due to health problems, he resigned from the directorship of the Oswaldo Cruz Institute and moved to Petrópolis, a small city in the mountains near Rio. On August 18, 1916, he was elected mayor of that city and outlined an extensive urbanization project he would not see implemented. In the morning of February 11, 1917, at 44 years of age,