The Kissing Bug Read online

  I thought about the dogs. People do not get infected with T. cruzi by petting an infected dog, in much the same way that we don’t generally pick up the bacteria for Lyme disease from our beloved canines. However, finding a dog harboring T. cruzi in its body suggests that infected kissing bugs are nearby. When I started digging through medical journals, I came across a study of dogs at the veterinary medical teaching hospital at Texas A&M University at College Station. In 1987, one out of fifty-five dogs at the hospital had tested positive for T. cruzi. Nearly a decade later, that number had jumped to a dozen infected dogs out of seventy.

  …

  The Texas A&M campus spans more than five thousand acres. At dusk, I drove on empty roads, following Adam and another research assistant, Justin Bejcek. It was summer. The bulk of the students had left, and the flat land shimmered in the falling light.

  We pulled up at the city’s forestry center, a square one-floor building on Rock Prairie Road. Behind the building, the field sprawled before us: a stretch of open land, a mound of mulch, a long fence. I joined Adam and Justin at the back of their truck and surveyed the equipment they had packed: the black lights, the white bedsheets strapped to poles, the plastic sandwich bags, the bottle of ethanol, and the permanent markers.

  Adam and Justin pinned a bedsheet to the fence and strung a second sheet between two trees, carefully hanging the black lights on the sheets. If a kissing bug flew toward the black light, it would clutch at the sheet, treating the cotton fabric as a rock, and crawl up the sheet toward the heat of the light, mistaking it for a warm body, hoping to bite whatever mammal it found there.

  I followed Adam to the front of the building, where he hauled the sheet across the grass, hoping a tick would latch on for another study. He told me how one time out on a ranch he’d found the kissing bugs easily. He sat on a pile of rocks, and “two or three came out.”

  I checked the hem of my pants for signs of anything with six legs but found nothing except that the fabric’s color looked dull from all the insect repellent I had sprayed on it earlier.

  Adam tugged the sheet across the grass, and I noticed how incredibly quiet this area was. The land opened in every direction, offering itself as a canvas. How could a place this generous in its beauty be harboring the parasite that had killed Tía Dora?

  …

  The kissing bug disease has been in Texas for at least a thousand years. In 2003, researchers found DNA evidence of T. cruzi in a mummy from the Lower Pecos area near the Rio Grande River, a place known for its prehistoric rock art and earth ovens. The man had probably been in his late thirties or early forties when he died, and at the end of his life, he had a distended belly. The parasite had apparently attacked the nerve cells in his large intestine, slowing down the organ’s movements, making it so that food accumulated in the man’s bowels. His meals—grasshoppers and fish, mice and bats—began to gather up inside him. (Imagine soft bones piling up at the bottom of your belly.) His colon, crowded with these partially digested foods, stretched into the area between his pelvic bones and jammed against his spine. The researchers speculated that he would have been in terrible pain for weeks, maybe longer.

  The man wore a strap around his waist made of deer hide and painted red. Maybe he was trying to keep his enormous belly close to him, trying to control a part of his body that had stopped making sense. He most likely died in the spring, and his people buried him with five woven mats and stone beads.

  …

  While Adam and Justin continued to drag the bedsheet across the fields, I swatted at mosquitoes and buttoned my shirt sleeves at the wrists. I added another layer of bug spray. The sky was beginning to turn an inky black. The sheet hanging between the trees had gathered a nocturnal community: aquatic beetles, crickets, plant hoppers, a web spinner.

  We walked over to the truck, and Adam pulled out headlamps for Justin and me. I asked, “What’s considered a jackpot with trapping kissing bugs?”

  “Rachel found sixty bugs in one hour,” Adam said, referring to his sister.

  A graduate student, Rachel Curtis-Robles had worked with Dr. Hamer to set up a program that turned ordinary Texans into “citizen scientists,” instructing people on how to identify kissing bugs around their homes and catch them and ship them to the university. By 2016, they had a collection of almost two thousand bugs. Most of the participants had found the insects in dog kennels and on their patios.

  An hour passed. We walked behind the building. There was a parked pickup truck and paint buckets emptied and turned over. Timed outdoor lights came on and arched across the building’s garage doors. We looked and found nothing and got bored. Adam and I started watching a beetle marching up to a scorpion. I felt larger than any fear I’d ever had about insects. “We’re giants in their world,” I said to Adam.

  “Here’s one!” Justin shouted, pointing to a ledge at the back of the building. We turned off our headlamps. This kissing bug was bigger than a common beetle and flatter. It sat on the ledge like it was waiting for company. I stopped taking notes. I felt the old terror in my body, that feeling that came when I would spot a cockroach in the kitchen and yell for my mother.

  “Careful,” Adam told Justin. “He’ll go under the ledge.”

  Adam retrieved a plastic sandwich bag from the truck. Justin picked up a stick, and with one quick flick of his wrist, he flung the kissing bug from the ledge to the ground and Adam scooped it up with the bag and sealed it shut. With a red marker, he wrote on the bag: “10pm, forestry center, alive, Brazos County, around building light.”

  It was the first time I had seen someone catch a bug and not kill it. The insect was the size of my thumb, and it cycled its black legs furiously inside the bag but managed only to flip on its back. A Triatoma sanguisuga, it was one of the two most common species of kissing bugs in Texas. It had orange stripes on its abdomen. I was tempted to use the word “pretty.”

  Justin, who was very tall, propped the empty paint bucket next to the building and peered at some insects on the wall that huddled in the shadows. No kissing bugs.

  We started walking around the building, our eyes monitoring the walls for any signs of movement. Adam, a few feet ahead of us, said, “Here’s one.”

  This kissing bug had tucked itself into a deep shadow. How had Adam seen it? It looked like a stain. He pounced on it with a sandwich bag, and as he zipped it up, Justin explained, “If you’re hesitant, you can’t catch it.” Despite their weak legs, kissing bugs move quickly.

  Justin spotted a third kissing bug, another T. sanguisuga, on the wall, buried in the shadows several feet above his head. The ground below us was mulch. If Justin flung it to the ground with a stick, the kissing bug would surely escape. Adam sighed. “Let’s keep looking,” he said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

  I stared at Number Three. It hung on the wall, perfectly still. It was hard to believe that in such a short time, we had found three kissing bugs, any one of which might be infected with a parasite that could leave scars on a human heart.

  The front of the building had brighter lights and more of the sharp pinching sounds that male crickets generate when they scrape their wings. I spotted roving beetles on the wall and a few crickets but nothing more. We checked the ledges. Then, Justin glanced upward.

  A fourth kissing bug hung from the wall a few feet above the garage door. Justin, still holding a stick, nudged the insect and tossed it to the paved diveway. Adam was about to pounce when Justin said, “Let her get it.”

  I startled. It was a warm Texas night with the moon pinned to the black sky, and I was face-to-face with my enemy: the kissing bug. I could lean over and bag the sucker, seal it up and swing it into the back of the truck.

  But I could not do it. “No, it’s okay,” I stammered and stepped back.

  On the ground, the kissing bug stayed perfectly still with its six feeble legs, its black abdomen and orange stripes.

  Adam didn’t know my fears or my family history. “Hold this,” he said, and ju
st like that he handed me the plastic sandwich bags with the first two kissing bugs and scooped up Number Four. Apparently, he thought Justin’s pedagogical approach—“let her get it”—was a good idea, and I was so surprised I didn’t know what to say. I lifted the bags to the light, and the two kissing bugs scrambled to the corners of their respective bags, their wings tucked, their legs pedaling. I thought of desperate people knocking on doors.

  The third kissing bug, the one we had left alone, still hung to the wall on a spot too high for any of us to reach. We searched for a ladder or a step stool without luck. The cricket songs grew louder. Adam and Justin looked at the insect some more. They looked at each other. They made the decision. Justin, the tallest, would serve as the bait.

  Leaning against the building, he shot his left arm straight up in the air, his palm facedown on the wall. The kissing bug sat perfectly still at the edge of the light. Justin stretched his arm farther. The heat of his body would attract the insect since kissing bugs have sensors on their antennae to detect body heat.

  After some time, the kissing bug shifted on the wall, clumsily, as if drunk. It headed straight for Justin’s open hand.

  “It’s really creepy,” Justin said, laughing nervously.

  The kissing bug halted, apparently offended, and began walking horizontally, still a foot or so above his hand. Directly above Justin’s pinky finger, it veered toward him. It had not taken offense. It had perhaps only been measuring the distance between itself and the inside of Justin’s warm palm. The bug moved closer, now looking very drunk, its body less than an inch long, swaying right and left, reaching within inches of his fingers.

  “You can move your hand now,” Adam warned. “That’s pretty close.”

  Justin lowered his arm. The kissing bug followed. When Justin removed his hand altogether, the kissing bug stopped, confused, a dancer in mid-step.

  Adam urged, “Try to get it a little bit lower.”

  Justin placed his hand on the wall again and slowly dragged his palm down. The kissing bug followed. “He’s missing a front leg,” Justin said.

  Before I could ponder kissing bugs with missing limbs, the plastic sandwich bag crinkled. Justin pulled his hand away. The kissing bug hesitated, and Justin snatched it up in the bag.

  We had been out only a few hours and had already caught four kissing bugs. Later, we learned that all were infected with T. cruzi.

  THE MILITARY’S SEARCH

  The United States military began hunting for kissing bugs in 1964 when a graduate student from Oklahoma State University, Warren Floyd Pippin, started his two-year study of the bugs at the Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. The work was not easy. Pippin hauled shovels, machetes, and trowels. He cleared away a cactus and dug up wood rat nests. He plucked kissing bugs from the nests and dropped them into empty ice cream cartons. Then he walked the insects back to his lab at the military base.

  There, Pippin created fake wood rat nests in an outdoor cage and studied close to seven hundred kissing bugs belonging to three species. Two species, T. gerstaeckeri and T. sanguisuga, were common in Texas and the species R. prolixus was from South America. Pippin observed how the insects fed and how they reproduced and how quickly they molted. He noted whether they had a preference for the blood of armadillos or baby white mice or squirrels. He tracked the number of eggs the females laid over their lifetimes: anywhere between 151 and more than a thousand, depending on the species, temperature and humidity. He checked the fecal matter of each kissing bug to learn if the insect was harboring T. cruzi. By his count, about 78 percent of his kissing bugs were infected with the parasite.

  Researchers today do not have to spend their days inspecting an insect’s fecal droppings for evidence of T. cruzi. They have the technology to check the kissing bug’s DNA. In 2012, the US military published a study showing that of the 140 kissing bugs collected on military bases in the San Antonio area, only 16 percent were found to be infected. This number struck me as very low. When Dr. Hamer and her team tested almost two thousand kissing bugs collected by Texans, more than 60 percent were infected with T. cruzi.

  I was still wondering if Texas was seeing a rise in the number of infected kissing bugs or only a rise in the number of experts like Dr. Hamer who were searching for them. I realized it was time to call the military and find out what they knew.

  …

  San Antonio has a public library with a collection dedicated to works of Latinx authors. It has a culinary school and an old brewery that’s been converted into a pricey hotel. In 2018, it also had the highest rate of poverty among large metro areas in the country, and as of 2013, close to 14 percent of the dogs in the city’s shelters were infected with Trypanosoma cruzi.

  It is also in the San Antonio area at the Lackland Air Force Base where the Defense Department trains its military dogs—the ones that patrol airports, sniff out explosives in Iraq, and prowl through Afghanistan, like the dog that was airlifted into Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan in 2011. The base also houses the Defense Department’s veterinary hospital for military dogs. If a dog is wounded on a mission, it returns to San Antonio for surgeries, for veterinary care, for rehab.

  The military dogs typically train for four months at Lackland and then work for at least a decade before they are retired. A great deal of federal money is involved. “A fully trained military dog costs about as much as a small missile,” a Bloomberg journalist reported. In 2016, the military had approximately 1,800 dogs in service. A retired dog handler told the San Antonio Express-News that with training and care, every military dog is worth between $80,000 and $100,000.

  Uno was one of those dogs. When the director of the military’s veterinary services, Colonel Cheryl Sofaly, began telling me about him over the phone, I immediately pictured a German shepherd, a long snout and soft ears, a personality bold enough to be named number one.

  Colonel Sofaly said Uno’s training was going well. He was two years old and healthy. Then one day, Uno’s handler opened the dog’s kennel, but Uno bounced out and collapsed. The trainer picked him up and ran him straight to the ICU. “He was in cardiac arrest,” the colonel explained. An ultrasound of Uno’s chest showed the familiar signs of the kissing bug disease: his canine heart enlarged. The organ was riddled with T. cruzi.

  No one knew how Uno had gotten the parasite. Maybe he spotted a kissing bug that had crawled into his kennel and ate it or just as likely a kissing bug fed on Uno during the night. It was not the first time a military dog had suffered from the kissing bug disease.

  In the late seventies, a Labrador retriever at Lackland developed a strange, distended belly. The veterinarians put him down, and when they sliced open the Lab’s chest, they found that part of the dog’s heart had lost its shape. The right ventricle was “flabby and dilated,” according to a published report. The veterinarians found the parasite lodged in the dog’s cardiac tissue.

  The finding did not spur the military to start testing its dogs for the kissing bug disease, but in 2006, that all changed. Veterinarians at Lackland began reporting more cases of what’s called canine Chagas disease. Testing revealed that 8 percent of the military dogs at one base were infected, which is similar to what Dr. Hamer found among shelter dogs across the state.

  Over the next decade, the military identified the parasite in seventy of their dogs, Colonel Sofaly told me. And so she and her colleagues began battling the kissing bug—cutting back shrubs around kennels, installing screens, and spraying pesticides farther into the brush.

  Are the dogs retired when they’re diagnosed? “If they’re not symptomatic, they can do any duty,” Colonel Sofaly said, except for work with the Transportation Security Administration, which brings dogs into contact with the public. Even though these dogs would not themselves generally pose a risk to people, it would be a public relations problem.

  What about the people who train at Lackland?

  About thirty-five thousand recruits come through the air force base, Dr. Thomas Croppe
r told me when we spoke in 2016. A veterinarian, he was the primary epidemiologist for trainees at the base, and he was worried because recruits were sent out on the base for a week or two at a time. The Texas landscape with its heat and sand and brush simulates the geography of the Middle East. Dr. Cropper and his team had taken new measures against the kissing bugs: spraying the recruits’ tents with insecticides, stressing the use of insect repellents among trainees, and giving them bed netting. “You don’t want to cause panic, but you don’t want to ignore something you could do a lot about,” he said.

  Between 2014 and 2016, the military screened more than forty thousand service members at the base for the kissing bug disease and confirmed that only two people tested positive. Both service members had grown up in Texas. They included an eighteen-year-old who already had early heart disease—a cardiac MRI showed the parasite had attacked his left ventricle. He’d spent his childhood on a ranch, where he had seen the kissing bugs in his family’s home. In another nine recruits, the tests were inconclusive.

  Apparently, even if the number of infected kissing bugs was growing in Texas, the insects were not posing a significant risk to people.

  …

  At Cropper’s suggestion, I phoned Dr. Roy Madigan, a veterinarian near San Antonio, who told me that he saw more kissing bugs now than when he first moved to the area close to twenty years ago. It didn’t matter that his house was in the suburbs or that it had the kind of modern windows meant to block all insects. The kissing bugs still managed to crawl inside. “My wife found one in her purse on her iPhone,” he said, laughing at the absurdity.

  I remembered reading about a family in Central Texas who reported the same observation to the CDC. After living in the exact same location for thirteen years, the family had started to see kissing bugs for the first time around 2007. They had fifteen dogs on their ranch, and one died from the kissing bug disease. Seven other dogs were infected. The family noticed this uptick around the same time that the military began screening for the disease in their dogs at Lackland Air Force Base.