Deadly Insects Attack Victims At Night, Killing Them Quietly And Needs To Be taken Seriously Now

As a young child Emiliana Rodríguez recalls watching friends play a nighttime game of soccer, where one of the players suddenly dropped dead on the field. Not knowing what had happened, the Bolivian-born Rodríguez grew fearful of the night, afraid of the silent killer called Chagas, the “monster” she was told only comes out at night.

But Rodríguez underwent treatment to prevent the parasite from reaching her unborn child through vertical transmission. After her baby girl was born, she tested negative. Meanwhile, in Mexico, Elvira Idalia Hernández Cuevas had never heard of Chagas until her 18-year-old was diagnosed with the silent killer. Idalia, 18, was donating blood in her hometown, near Veracruz in Mexico, when her sample was screened, resulting in a positive diagnosis for Chagas, a disease caused by a blood-sucking parasite, triatomine bugs that are commonly known as kissing or vampire bugs. "I had never heard of Chagas so I started to research it on the internet," Hernández said in an interview with the Guardian. "I was terrified when I saw it described as a silent killer. I didn't know what to do or where to go." She's not the only one, many people are unaware of the vectorborne illness caused by these pesky pests. Chagas is named after Carlos Ribeiro Justiniano Chagas, a Brazilian physician and researcher who identified the human case in 1909. Over the past several decades, Chagas disease is known to be prevalent in Latin America, North America, Europe, Japan and Australia.