Demon Vampire Bug

If one is observant he gets used to spotting things that oughtn’t be there, even if they are fairly small.

I guess I’m observant, because the other night, as I sat on the dark brown couch in the dimly lit living room I noticed an inch-long mostly very dark brown insect on the couch a few inches away from me. Before I sent it to its eternal reward I looked at it, and was filled with dread.

It was an “Eastern Bloodsucking Conenose” to use its common name. In scientific terms it is triatoma sanguisuga. It is a “kissing bug.”

A true bug — hypodermic-needle-like proboscis, wings folded neatly on its shell-less back — it got its “kissing bug” name and reputation for a reason. It sticks its proboscis into the skin of mammals, including humans. It then sucks their blood.

When it picks a human for its meal, it most commonly chooses the face and more specifically the thin skin of the lips as its feeding site.

It gets worse: it usually does this at night, its victims asleep. It has a built-in anasthetic, so the bite isn’t felt at first. It has its meal, poops, and goes away. It might return or it might move on. The whole process takes several minutes.

Most people would be content with this much of the horror story, but we’ve barely, um, scratched the surface.

Kissing bugs, we are told, more than half the time carry a parasite, Trypanosoma cruzi. It lives in their gut. While the kissing bug is feeding, it is also defecating. Bug poop is pretty small. When our bodies ultimately react to the bite by itching a little, we scratch it — rubbing the poop into the bite.

But wait, there’s more!

Once the poop gets beneath the victim’s skin, he may now be infected with the parasite. He has Chagas disease. He very much does not want Chagas disease, whether he knows it or, more likely, not.

It seems like a roundabout route for a disease to take, but it’s apparently effective. There are said to be 6 or 7 million people worldwide who have the disease, of whom 300,000 or likely many more live in the U.S. (I should mention you can also get it by eating the bug poop or rubbing it in your eyes, things you’d probably avoid anyway.) Most victims don’t even know they have the disease, and testing for it even among those who exhibit its symptoms is not common.

Once it’s in your system, the parasite might make you a little sick with the universal “mild flu-like symptoms” for a week or so. (I do not believe I know anyone who doesn’t suffer “mild flu-like symptoms” a time or two a year.) Then it goes away for from months to decades.

When it returns, it is far worse than a bug bite, no matter how disgusting that bug bite was.

“The initial symptoms can be mild or nonexistent. But over time, Chagas disease can lead to serious heart and digestive issues,” says Dr. Jeffrey Brown of Cleveland Clinic. “It can affect your heart and lead to cardiac arrest or heart failure. If it affects your gastrointestinal tract, you can get ‘megacolon,’ an enlargement of the colon that can be quite severe.” To put it another way, it can kill you. But again, heart failure and terrible digestive disorders are found among those who do not have the disease, so it is likely that it kills many people without the true cause ever being known.

Diagnosing Chagas is not easy. It requires multiple blood tests. (It is unlikely — very unlikely — that someone who has “mild flu-like symptoms” shows up at the doctor’s office and the doctor says, “Quick, we need to test for Chagas.”)

But testing for it is easier than curing it, because there is no cure. Anti-parasitic drugs early on may do some good, though we don’t know with certainty because it isn’t typically discovered early on.

“Once Chagas disease becomes chronic, medicines won't cure the disease. But the medicines may be offered to help slow the disease and its most serious complications,” reports Mayo Clinic. Among the suggested treatments is a heart transplant.

Beginning to understand why I was not happy to find the vampirical arthropod on the couch next to me?

Most Chagas victims are in Central and South America, but that might be changing, or we may be finally noticing — hard to tell which, if either.

It is difficult to learn much about this awful true bug (are there any true bugs we wouldn’t be better off without? I can’t think of one) and the incidence of the parasite it carries. Apparently between 30 and 50 percent of those who are bitten end up getting the disease. Is that because the others didn’t scratch the itch? Or did their bodies kill the pathogen before it did any harm? Some who get infected get sick and die. Some don’t.

I’ve lived here more than 20 years and not seen the Eastern Bloodsucking Conenose until the past week, during which I encountered two. In my house. Did they carry Chagas disease? No idea. Ohio University, local to me, has an expert on the incidence of Chagas — in Ecuador. An extermination company here in Ohio has a web page about the bug — careful, it will make you jump and probably drop your phone or tablet if you go to that page — and even suggests that encountering it is unlikely. Well, we’ve zoomed past that part. It has been encountered. What now?

(The Cleveland Clinic site advises that if one is bitten and knows it, it’s good to carefully wash the area with warm water and soap. I think I’d add some strong antiseptic. And not wash the bite itself — might wash the poop into the bite.)

Texas A&M University seems to be the center of research into kissing bugs in North America. They’ve been collecting kissing bugs from all over the U.S. for the last 13 years. They have determined that one or more of the 11 species of kissing bugs are found in 23 U.S. states — everywhere south of the New York-Pennylvania border. There’s a map at their informative website.

“Eleven different kinds of kissing bugs are in the United States. Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona are the states with the most different species and most findings of kissing bugs. Scientists have found that about 50 percent of kissing bugs are infected with the Chagas parasite,” says the Texas A&M site.

Useful information or not? There’s no way of knowing. Saying that 50 percent of them carry Chagas is of no real help. What’s the incidence in the U.S.? In Ohio? Are the bugs extending their range? In my experience they seem to be, but any statistician will tell you that there’s no statistical significance if the sample size is 1. If 100 percent of the bugs in Ecuador are carriers and 0 percent are in the U.S., and you average them out, you could end up with high average incidence overall and no local danger. (Gene Hackman wouldn’t care, were he in a position to have any opinions, that hantavirus is very rare.)

The Texas A&M site continues: “No one knows exactly how many people in the United States have Chagas disease. Scientists think that in the United States there are at least 300,000 cases of Chagas disease in people, and there may be more than 1 million cases. . . . After the T. cruzi parasite enters the body, about 1 out of 3 people develop the chronic phase of Chagas disease. The chronic phase can take many years to develop —- some people have the chronic phase for decades after the parasite enters their body. In the chronic phase, people may experience heart problems or other symptoms.”

While the bugs attack people, they go after and infect pets, too, particularly dogs. They tend to get the disease less from bug bites and more from eating the bugs, eating the meat of infected animals, and blood transfusions — yes, it is transmitted through blood, too. If a mother dog has Chagas, chances are her pups will, too.

Wildlife are subject to kissing bug bites and infection resulting from them. Which is a way the disease is spread also from bug to bug.

For what it’s worth, if you have Chagas disease and are bitten by a noninfected bloodsucker, it will get infected by your blood and can now spread it to others. Kissing bugs have a two-year lifespan and feed many times during their lives.

If the belief that the majority of Chagas victims in the U.S. are from Central and South America is true, it is likely that the number of victims in the country will increase due to the influx of people from those countries during the last half decade getting bitten here after their arrival, though this may take years to establish because of the lengthy time that passes between infection and diagnosis — and, as noted, it is frequently not diagnosed at all. (There are efforts to encourage testing and record keeping, but their effectiveness is unclear.)

So it was bad news for me to find this very bad bug in my house.

It was worse news Saturday afternoon, when I found a second one, pictured at the top of this column, in the bathroom sink. I do not know how it got there. They move fairly quickly — not cockroach fast, but they don’t amble along, either. Also, they can fly.

We’re told that it is not common to see the Eastern Bloodsucking Conenose at all, because they’re nocturnal. Less common is seeing it indoors. And we’re told that during the day they tend to hang out together in groups.

One is an oddity. Two is an infestation. It’s unlikely that I have happened upon all of them.

A close friend in Japan, upon hearing of my first find, suggested that I might want to sleep under a mosquito net. She is probably right. I’m starting to think that my recently developed habit of working during the night and sleeping during the day might have some instinctive wisdom to it.

For now, I’m learning how quickly one learns to imagine crawling things on one’s body.