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Source: http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-0...s-disease.html
With climate change, US could face risk from Chagas disease
March 15, 2012
In the spring of 1835, Charles Darwin was bitten in Argentina by a "great wingless black bug," he wrote in his diary.
"It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one's body," Darwin wrote, "before sucking they are quite thin, but afterwards round & bloated with blood."
In all likelihood, Darwin's nighttime visitor was a member of Reduviid family of insects ? the so-called kissing bugs because of their habit of biting people around the mouth while they sleep.
From this attack, some infectious disease experts have speculated, the famed naturalist might have contracted Chagas disease, a parasite-borne illness carried by kissing bugs, that today afflicts millions of people in Central and South America. Darwin's bite may have led, ultimately, to his death from heart problems.
This hypothesis has been contested for decades, but if Darwin had experienced this bug attack in the United States, no one would have made such a speculation, since Chagas disease is almost unheard of in the U.S.
That could change, new research shows.
Lori Stevens, a biologist at the University of Vermont, and her colleagues, found that 38 percent of the kissing bugs they collected in Arizona and California contained human blood.
This upends the previous understanding of insect experts and doctors that the eleven species of kissing bugs that occur in the US don't regularly feed on people...
With climate change, US could face risk from Chagas disease
March 15, 2012
In the spring of 1835, Charles Darwin was bitten in Argentina by a "great wingless black bug," he wrote in his diary.
"It is most disgusting to feel soft wingless insects, about an inch long, crawling over one's body," Darwin wrote, "before sucking they are quite thin, but afterwards round & bloated with blood."
In all likelihood, Darwin's nighttime visitor was a member of Reduviid family of insects ? the so-called kissing bugs because of their habit of biting people around the mouth while they sleep.
From this attack, some infectious disease experts have speculated, the famed naturalist might have contracted Chagas disease, a parasite-borne illness carried by kissing bugs, that today afflicts millions of people in Central and South America. Darwin's bite may have led, ultimately, to his death from heart problems.
This hypothesis has been contested for decades, but if Darwin had experienced this bug attack in the United States, no one would have made such a speculation, since Chagas disease is almost unheard of in the U.S.
That could change, new research shows.
Lori Stevens, a biologist at the University of Vermont, and her colleagues, found that 38 percent of the kissing bugs they collected in Arizona and California contained human blood.
This upends the previous understanding of insect experts and doctors that the eleven species of kissing bugs that occur in the US don't regularly feed on people...