Bugs That Transmit 'Silent Killer' Are Biting More in U.S.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=silent-killer-chagas-disease


A freshly molted Triatoma rubida, the most common kissing bug species in much of western U.S. This bug has not completed cuticle hardening, therefore the dark parts of the integument are still red. Image: Justin Schmidt

Transmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease—which afflicts millions in Central and South America—may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought. Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host—and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas.

Chagas, aka American trypanosomiasis, is a cryptic foe. After a person becomes infected, early symptoms—fever, a swollen eye—may be mistaken for any number of other ailments. The disease earns its moniker, the "silent killer," from its tendency to lie dormant in a person's system for years, even decades, until striking the victim down, usually through sudden heart or digestive failure.

Currently, the U.S. is relatively unaffected by Chagas transmission—but the new study gives researchers pause. "The dogma is that bugs and humans are quite separate in the U.S.," says Patricia Dorn, a molecular parasitologist at Loyola University New Orleans. "But now it seems that contact is not as rare as we thought," she says.

To investigate the threat of Chagas disease in the U.S., Dorn and colleagues collected kissing bugs in California and Arizona. Using a new analytical method, they identified which vertebrate species the bugs had parasitized by isolating fragments of DNA left over from blood meals. They cloned each DNA segment to separate out the species, such as chicken, wood rat and pig. They found that five of the insects contained human DNA, indicating they had bitten a person, and two of those insects had fed on two different people. Moreover, more than half the insects tested were infected with the Chagas parasite, the researchers reported in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. This is a high percentage of bugs infected with the parasite, Dorn says, although infection prevalence in bugs varies enormously in different locations. In endemic areas such as Guatemala, for example, researchers usually find 25 to 30 percent of kissing bugs to be infected. A 55 percent parasite infection prevalence is not unheard of, however, and Dorn found a similar infection prevalence in Louisiana in 2007.