Emiliana Rodriguez recalls watching friends play soccer late at night as a child. One of the players passed away while the game was still going on.
Since Rodrguez, a native of Bolivia, didn’t know what had happened, she started to fear the night, and the silent killer known as Chagas, a “monster” she had been told, only emerged at night.
Rodrguez’s acquaintance was one of the 12,000 people who perish each year from Chagas, a distinct kind of monster known as a “silent and silenced disease” spread by nocturnal insects and affecting up to 8 million people annually.
Emiliana Rodrguez, 42, still has Chagas disease, which she describes to as a “monster,” despite moving from Bolivia to Barcelona 27 years ago.
“The terror frequently struck at night. I occasionally didn’t sleep,” she admitted. “I was worried that I would fall asleep and not awaken.”
Eight years ago, when Rodriguez was expecting her first child, she discovered she was a Chagas disease carrier.
In recalling the passing of her friend, she continued, “I was paralyzed with shock and remembered all the stories my ancestors told me about people suddenly dying. I thought, “What’s going to happen to my baby?”
Rodriguez, however, underwent medication to prevent the parasite from infecting her pregnant child via the placenta. The test result for her infant daughter was negative.
Before her daughter was diagnosed with the silent killer, Elvira Idalia Hernández Cuevas, a mother of an 18-year-old in Mexico, had never heard of Chagas.
Teenager Idalia from Mexico contracted Chagas disease while donating blood in her community close to Veracruz. Chagas is a disease spread by triatomine bugs, sometimes known as kissing or vampire bugs, which feed on human blood.
According to Hernández in an interview with the Guardian, “I had never heard of Chagas, so I started to research it on the internet.” “When I read that it was a silent murderer, I was horrified. I was clueless as to what to do or where to go.
She is not alone in this; many people are unaware that these bothersome insects might spread disease.
The initial human case of Chagas disease was found in 1909 by the Brazilian physician and investigator Carlos Ribeiro Justiniano Chagas.
The Americas, Europe, Asia, and Oceania are now part of the Chagas disease’s geographic range, which has grown in recent decades.
In low-income homes in rural or suburban areas, kissing bugs come out of hiding when people are asleep at night.