Chagas disease takes hold in U.S., California

Deadly illness may be sickening far more people than is known.

- BY SUSANNE RUST

MARCOS DEL MAZO Light Rocket KISSING bugs are vectors for Chagas disease.

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 ex-pert on Chagas disease. “But it’s also here in the United States.”