When Emiliana Rodriguez, a native of Bolivia, was still small, she recalls watching friends play a nighttime soccer match when one of the players abruptly díєd on the pitch.
Unaware of what had transpired, Rodriguez developed a phobia of the dark and the “monster”—ᴛʜᴇ sɪʟᴇɴᴛ ᴋɪʟʟᴇʀ known as Chagas—that she had been told only appears at night.
Chagas disease, a unique sort of illness that is spread by nocturnal insects, is also known as the “silent and silenced disease” that infects up to 8 million people annually, kιℓℓiиg 12,000 people on average.
Emiliana Rodriguez discovered she had to live with Chagas, a “monster,” after relocating to Barcelona from Bolivia 27 years ago
“Night is when the fear generally struck. I didn’t always sleep well,” she admitted. “I was worried that I wouldn’t wake up from my sleep.”
Rodriguez had specific tests when she was eight years old and expecting her first child, and the results indicated that she carried the Chagas gene. She recalled the passing of her buddy and remarked, “I was paralyzed with sho/ck and remembered all those stories my relatives told me about people suddenly dyíng.” “I wondered, ‘What will happen to my baby?’”
However, Rodriguez was prescribed medicine to prevent the parasite from vertically transmitting to her unborn child. After she gave birth to her daughter, she tested negative. Elvira Idalia Hernández Cuevas, 18, was unaware of the Mexican sɪʟᴇɴᴛ ᴋɪʟʟᴇʀ until her 18-year-old son was diagnosed with Chagas.
Idalia, an eighteen-year-old blood donor from her birthplace near Veracruz, Mexico, was diagnosed positive for Chagas, a disease caused by triatomine bugs, often known as vampire or kissing bugs and bloodsucking parasites, when her sample was tested.
“I started to research Chagas on the internet because I had never heard of it.”, Hernandez stated in an interview with the Guardian. When I read that it was a sɪʟᴇɴᴛ ᴋɪʟʟᴇʀ, I became really afraid. I had no idea where to go or what to do.
She is not alone in this; so many people are ignorant of the diseases that these unpleasant bugs can spread. The term Chagas originates from Carlos Ribeiro Justiniano Chagas, a Brazilian physician and researcher who made the discovery of the human case in 1909.
Over the past few decades, reports of the incidence of Chagas disease have been made in Europe, Japan, Australia, Latin America, and North America.
Kissing bugs are mostly found in rural or suburban low-income housing walls, where they are most active at night when humans are asleep. The insect bites an animal or person, then excretes on the skin of the victim. The victim may inadvertently scratch the area and sever the skin, or they may spread the excrement into their mouth or eyes. This is how the T. cruzi infection is disseminated.
