Kissing bugs are bringing a disease to many Texas homes - Chagas disease, a neglected tropical disease that has gone under the radar for many years. In the city of Lubbock, five kissing bugs have been spotted in certain residential areas since Friday.
"The whole city needs to be aware of the possibility of this bug being in their home," said Michael Askew, manager director of Bug Tech. He taught city residents to identify the bug but advised them not to touch it. He also told them to catch it with a small plastic bag and to bleach the area where it is found, KBCD reports.
Chagas is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, which is transmitted by the kissing bug. The bug proliferates in poor housing conditions and lives in wall cracks and small crevices. It typically goes out at night and bites a person on the face, thus the name "kissing bug."
T. cuzi is not passed on through the bug's bite, but through its feces, which it sometimes leaves near the bite wound. The parasite enters the bite wound and burrows into heart tissue. It lives there quietly, a silent killer that slowly eats away at the heart and causes sudden heart failure later in life.
Chagas has been previously thought to be endemic to Mexico, Central America and South America. However, recent reports of Texas patients testing positive for Chagas who have not been outside the country have led some doctors to believe that the disease is now endemic to Texas, according to Mosaic.
Experts say the number of Chagas cases in the country is underestimated and that many people with the disease are not diagnosed, as the disease typically does not show symptoms. Dr. Peter Hotez, chair of tropical pediatrics in Texas Children's Hospital and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said Texas alone may have tens of thousands of cases.
"Chagas has become a serious health issue especially for the population of South Texas . It's been in Texas a long time, but no one was looking," he told Houston Chronicle "While we were calling them neglected tropical diseases, the 'tropical' part is probably a misnomer."
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that one in 300,000 Americans is infected with Chagas, but a study done in 2014 showed otherwise: one in 6,500 people who donated blood tested positive for the disease.
Sahotra Sarkar, a disease ecologist at the University of Texas, created a Chagas disease risk map for Texas, which was published in the open journal PLOS in 2010. He studied the distribution and density of kissing bugs in Texas and determined how many of them were infected.
The results of Sarkar's study showed that Texas' southeastern tip faced the highest risk for Chagas. The Louisiana and San Antonio bayous were also at a high risk. With so many infected kissing bugs in the state, Sarkar believes Chagas is endemic in Texas. However, there hasn't been enough response from the medical world.
"The response from physicians was almost complete silence because they didn't even know this disease could be a serious issue in Texas," he said, according to Mosaic.
But hope is not lost. Last month, the Sabin Vaccine Institute and Texas Children's Hospital received a $1.8 million grant from the Robert Klebert Jr. and Helen C. Kleberg Foundation for the development of the Chagas vaccine, which can curtail its progression in the body, according to the Houston Chronicle.
A law was also recently enacted in Texas that can help the monitoring of Chagas and other neglected tropical diseases be more efficient.
