#chagas

(Photo by Gabriel L. Hamer from the Texas A&M University Kissing Bug Website)

Do Not Handle This Bug. 

These are Triatoma, or kissing bugs. The bugs themselves are not much to look at, but rather it’s the parasites that they carry that are cause for concern.

Chagas disease is transmitted by kissing bugs when they bite their sleeping victim and the parasite (in their defecation) is exposed to the wound. This disease has two stages, acute and chronic. The chronic stage may not show up until years, decades, down the line and by then can cause a long list of health problems, including sudden death. 

At this point, there isn’t really a general consensus about how worried people should be about Chagas disease. I’ve seen it compared to AIDS, and I’ve also seen people say it only affects dogs(false).

About four years ago I was working in NE Kansas. Before we could go out, we were given flyers about Chagas and kissing bugs - as the location we were going was known to have them and there was a chance we could accidentally touch them. If we did? Scrub, scrub with soap and don’t touch your face (much like with a certain virus going around nowadays). If we saw any kissing bugs wandering, we were to kill them and bleach the surface they were walking on.

Fortunately, I never saw them on that trip. Two years later I saw one in my house. I’ve seen even more this year. I don’t particularly live in the deep south, and I don’t live in a rural area at all.  

(Photo by Texas A&M University Kissing Bug Website - the shaded areas represent states that have reported Triatoma)

With summers warming every year, we can expect these bugs to move more and more northward. The reason I am making this post?

People have been mistaking these for stinkbugs. They have been handling them, not knowing the danger these bugs pose. Hell, even the health center I contacted didn’t even know that Chagas disease existed. 

TLDR: Don’t touch these bugs, don’t let your pets touch these bugs. They carry a parasite that can cause sudden death years down the line.

For more information (please, I haven’t included nearly everything over this issue, nor am I an expert), check out Texas A&M University’s research team’s website:  https://kissingbug.tamu.edu/   <---- For more info.

Tripping Up Chagas

Chagas disease is a global health threat and neglected tropical disease. It’s a tropical parasite spread mostly by insects, and the molecular mechanisms by which the parasite infects human cells are poorly understood. Researchers probing this damaging infection examined thrombospondin-1 (TSP1), a protein in our cells that mediates cell-to-cell interactions and plays a role in many essential functions. They found that cells lacking this key protein (right, compared to normal cells, left) resisted infection by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (green). The team revealed that the parasite activates the β-catenin signalling pathway, a molecular sequence of events crucial in species across the animal kingdom for everything from cell growth to movement. Their results suggest that during early infection, TSP1 enables some of this activity, and that overall the β-catenin pathway is a potential target for treatments or prevention tactics.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Image adapted from work by Ashutosh Arun and colleagues

Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Physiology, Meharry Medical College, Nashville, TN, USA

Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, January 2022