Dirofilariasis is a long ignored disease much like Lyme disease was in the early 60’s. There are no obvious signs of this disease that are visible to a physician and there is no approved serological tests for the disease. A physician essentially has no tools to help them diagnose or understand their patients very diverse and nondescript medical issues. Nothing will currently point that physician at making a correct diagnosis, and even if they could diagnose this disease there is no treatment for the disease. Prescribing highly toxic medications to a patient where the doctor can not even prove the patient is sick is not going to happen. We desperately need a test for this disease as it is nearly impossible to study a disease you can not even see.
One insect byte is all it takes to acquire a stealthy disease having both no test and no cure in humans. Because there is no test for it nobody ever gets diagnosed with the occult form of this disease. Without a diagnosis there are no statistics to collect, and without statistics there is no money for research that might otherwise develop a viable test for the disease. It is an endless cycle of waiting because without a medical test it is not even possible to even find a pool of subjects where one can study the pathology and progression of the disease. Even the best of scientists can not possibly study a disease if they can not determine who even has the disease.