Chagas Disease
Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2025 6:29 pm
I remember first learning about Chagas disease in a collage class back in the 90's and being glad it wasn't here. Now it's here. It looks like California has the worst of it but it's in at least 29 other states, maybe more since it's not a reportable disease in all states.
From latimes.com. And here's what the disease life cycle looks like.It’s one of the most insidious diseases you’ve never heard of, but Chagas is here in California and 29 other states across the U.S.
It kills more people in Latin America than malaria each year, and researchers think roughly 300,000 people in the U.S. currently have it but are unaware.
That’s because the illness tends to lie dormant for years, making itself known only when its victim keels over via heart attack, stroke or death.
Chagas disease is caused by the parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, which lives in a bloodsucking insect called the kissing bug. There are roughly a dozen species of kissing bugs in the U.S. and four in California known to carry the parasite. Research has shown that in some places, such as Los Angeles’ Griffith Park, about a third of all kissing bugs harbor the Chagas disease parasite.
It’s why a team of epidemiologists, researchers and medical doctors are calling on the World Health Organization and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to label the disease as endemic, meaning consistently present, in the U.S. They hope that will bring awareness, education, dialogue and potentially public health investment to a disease that has long carried a stigma, falsely associated with poor, rural migrants from bug-infected homes in far-off tropical nations.
“This is a disease that has been neglected and has been impacting Latin Americans for many decades,” said Norman Beatty, a medical epidemiologist at the University of Florida and an expert on Chagas disease. “But it’s also here in the United States.”
“We had a kid from the Hollywood Hills who got it,” said Salvador Hernandez, a cardiologist with Kaiser Permanente in Northern California. He said the patient had not traveled out of the country and probably got it in his leafy, affluent neighborhood, where kissing bugs are prevalent.
The parasite has also been detected in local wildlife, including wood rats, skunks and mice in Griffith Park, as well as in bats, raccoons and black bears in other parts of the state.
“Kissing bugs are pretty equal opportunity when it comes to who they take a blood meal from,” said Sarah Hamer, an epidemiologist at Texas A&M University’s College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, listing a variety of animals, such as ocelots, bobcats, coyotes, birds, reptiles and amphibians.
“That means the reservoir for T. cruzi is pretty large,” she said.
