kissing bugs

Those of you wise enough to buy my Parasites Handbook (a must-have in this day and age of the “world village”) will know I wrote about a new menace heading north in the Americas. It’s carried by so-called “kissing bugs”, which bite you round the mouth while you sleep and infects you with the Chagas disease creepy parasite: the American trypanosome. More than 8 million people have been infected by potentially fatal Chagas disease, most of them in Latin and Central America. But more than 300,000 live in the United States. An editorial, published the Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, said the spread of the disease is reminiscent of the early years of HIV.

Those of you wise enough to buy my Parasites Handbook (a must-have in this day and age of the “world village”) will know I wrote about a new menace heading north in the Americas. It’s carried by so-called “kissing bugs”, which bite you round the mouth while you sleep and infects you with the Chagas disease creepy parasite: the American trypanosome. More than 8 million people have been infected by potentially fatal Chagas disease, most of them in Latin and Central America. But more than 300,000 live in the United States. An editorial, published the Public Library of Science’s Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, said the spread of the disease is reminiscent of the early years of HIV.

In their award-winning television documentary program, The Body Snatchers, National Geographic reported, “Parasites have killed more humans than all the wars in history”. [Season 1, episode 17] Parasites are probably the most diverse of all biological forms and yet, by definition, they remain implacably hostile to humans. Of the 7.8 billion acres of potential arable land on Earth, only 3.4 billion acres can be farmed; most of the rest cannot be developed because of parasites (malaria, trypanosomiasis, schistosomiasis and onchocerciasis). That’s more than half the farmable land of our planet unavailable to us, because of these critters, at a time when humans need food resources like never before. In Africa alone, an area the size of the USA cannot be farmed because of trypanosomes and many millions in South America have never had a healthy day in their lives because of this fiendish parasite. But are parasites a curse of the undeveloped Third World? Not a bit of it… Dr. Frank Nova, Chief of the Laboratory for Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Health, states, “In terms of numbers, there are more parasitic infections acquired in the US than in Africa.”

In their award-winning television documentary program, The Body Snatchers, National Geographic reported, “Parasites have killed more humans than all the wars in history”. [Season 1, episode 17] Parasites are probably the most diverse of all biological forms and yet, by definition, they remain implacably hostile to humans. Of the 7.8 billion acres of potential arable land on Earth, only 3.4 billion acres can be farmed; most of the rest cannot be developed because of parasites (malaria, trypanosomiasis, schistosomiasis and onchocerciasis). That’s more than half the farmable land of our planet unavailable to us, because of these critters, at a time when humans need food resources like never before. In Africa alone, an area the size of the USA cannot be farmed because of trypanosomes and many millions in South America have never had a healthy day in their lives because of this fiendish parasite. But are parasites a curse of the undeveloped Third World? Not a bit of it… Dr. Frank Nova, Chief of the Laboratory for Parasitic Diseases at the National Institute of Health, states, “In terms of numbers, there are more parasitic infections acquired in the US than in Africa.”