Scrub typhus, a deadly disease common in Southeast Asia and spread by microscopic biting mites known as chiggers, has now taken hold in a part of South America and may have become endemic there, scientists said on Wednesday.
The tropical disease, which kills at least 140,000 people a year in the Asia-Pacific region, has been confirmed in a cluster of cases on a large island off Chile, some 12,000 kilometers from its usual haunts on the other side of the Pacific.
Scrub typhus has been known of for years and the bacteria that causes it was first identified in Japan in 1930.