Let me get this straight. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the same agency that lectured every parent in this country into oblivion for two straight years about following the science, has been sitting on the fact that a deadly parasite is now endemic in the United States. Endemic. That means it lives here. It breeds here. It is not going away. And they just casually dropped this in a September report like it is a weather update.
Chagas disease. Ever heard of it? I had not either. It is caused by a parasite called T. cruzi, and it rides around inside something called a kissing bug. Cute name. The bug bites your face while you sleep, then defecates near the wound. You scratch the bite in your sleep, you rub the parasite into your bloodstream, and then it sits there. For years. For decades. Until one day your heart is enlarged, or you go into heart failure, or you drop dead. Dr. Shaun Yang at UCLA put it plainly: it “kills the heart very slowly.”
Here is the number that made me put my phone down and stare at the wall. Experts estimate 300,000 people in the United States are infected. Forty-five thousand in Los Angeles County alone. And fewer than 2 percent of them know. Fewer than 2 percent. The chief of infectious diseases at UCLA Health, Dr. Judith Currier, said most people living with Chagas disease are unaware of their diagnosis, “often until it’s too late to have effective treatment.”
So I have some questions for the manager.
Where was the CDC on this? They labeled the United States “nonendemic” for years. Their own website said it. The scientific literature said it. Pest control companies said it. Meanwhile, kissing bugs have been identified in 32 states. Nine of the eleven species found in this country carry the parasite. Locally acquired human infections have turned up in eight states: California, Arizona, Texas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, and Arkansas. The bugs are in our walls, in our dogs’ kennels, in our wildlife. But sure, let us keep calling it nonendemic because the paperwork was easier that way.
And here is the detail that should make every parent in this country furious. Texas was the only state that required veterinarians to report Chagas disease in animals. They logged 431 canine cases between 2013 and 2015. Dogs, cats, a horse, a rat, three chimpanzees, and a walrus. Then they stopped. You know why? Because it took too many resources to keep track. They looked at a spreading parasite that infects dogs and humans along the Rio Grande, looked at the paperwork, and said, “This is a lot.” So they just quit counting.
Jurriaanlinsen (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsImagine if I tried that with my kids’ school attendance. “Sorry, tracking who showed up was really resource-intensive, so we just stopped. Hope that works for everybody.”
The blood supply has been tested since 2007. One in every 27,500 donors tests positive. That is not nothing. That is a steady drip of infected blood being caught at the donation center because somebody at the lab level was paying attention, even if the public health messaging level was asleep at the wheel.
Dr. Joanna Schaenman at UCLA said that with global warming, scientists are concerned the borders for endemic infections are shifting northward. The bugs like mud and adobe walls, cracks, places with pets and rodents. Dr. Yang noted that if the bugs have a choice, “they like to bite humans better.” Comforting.
The CDC’s own September paper says that labeling the U.S. as non-Chagas-endemic “perpetuates low awareness and underreporting.” You do not say. They finally admit their own classification was keeping doctors ignorant and patients undiagnosed, and they frame it like a bureaucratic footnote instead of what it is: years of institutional failure that let a silent killer settle into 32 states while nobody with a title wanted to say the word endemic out loud.
I did my own research. I read the CDC report. I read what the UCLA doctors said. And I am asking the same question every parent in my group chat is asking right now: what else are they not telling us?