Meanwhile, in Mexico, Elvira Idalia Hernández Cuevas had never heard of Chagas until her 18-year-old was diagnosed with the silent killer.
Idalia, 18, was donating blood in her hometown, near Veracruz in Mexico, when her sample was screened, resulting in a positive diagnosis for Chagas, a disease caused by a blood-sucking parasite, triatomine bugs that are commonly known as kissing or vampire bugs.
“I had never heard of Chagas so I started to research it on the internet,” Hernández said in an interview with the Guardian. “I was terrified when I saw it described as a silent killer. I didn’t know what to do or where to go.”
She’s not the only one, many people are unaware of the vectorborne illness caused by these pesky pests.
Chagas is named after Carlos Ribeiro Justiniano Chagas, a Brazilian physician and researcher who identified the human case in 1909. Over the past several decades, Chagas disease is known to be prevalent in Latin America, North America, Europe, Japan and Australia.
Kissing bugs mostly live in the walls of low-income housing in rural or suburban areas and are most active at nighttime when people are sleeping. The bug passes the T. cruzi infection by biting an animal or human, then defecating on the skin of its victim, who may accidentally scratch the spot and break the skin, or spread the feces into the eyes or mouth.
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