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With climate warming, U.S. residents face risk of contracting Chagas disease. |
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UVM: Lori Stevens, a biologist at the University of Vermont, and her colleagues, found that 38 percent of the kissing bugs they collected in Arizona and California contained human blood. This upends the previous understanding of insect experts and doctors that the eleven species of kissing bugs that occur in the US don’t regularly feed on people. “This finding was totally unexpected,” says Dr. Stephen Klotz, head of the infectious diseases department at the University of Arizona medical school and a co-author on the study. And more than 50 percent of the bugs the research team collected also carried Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease.
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