Animals such as tayra, new world monkeys, sloths, porcupines, and coatis may be incubators for a parasite that causes Chagas disease, according to a recent study conducted by researchers from the University of California-Riverside (UCR).
Despite affecting approximately 8 million people worldwide, relatively little is known about the transmission of the disease aside from it being spread through the bite of insects called kissing bugs.
“There are 152 species of kissing bug, but we don’t know much about most of them, including the animals they feed on that can act as reservoirs for the parasite,” Christiane Weirauch, professor of entomology at UCR, said. “Overall, the existing data is piecemeal, scattered, and biased toward a handful of heavily studied and well-documented species, while little data exists for insects that are found in very secluded habitats.”
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, kissing bugs become hosts of the parasite that causes Chagas, called Trypanosoma cruzi, by biting an infected animal or person and passing it through their feces. When the bug bites an infected animal, it defecates simultaneously, enabling the parasite to enter a new host through the animal’s mucus membranes or skin lesions caused by the bite.
In some instances, animals inadvertently infect themselves when they eat other animals who are already infected with the parasite.
For their study, UCR researchers were able to identify new hosts by studying the blood of tree-dwelling animals, which were isolated directly from kissing bugs. Their sample included 64 kissing bugs collected between 2005 and 2015 throughout Central and South America.
A DNA analysis of the collected samples revealed a wide variety of hosts without a bias toward ones that were already known to be common hosts.
UCR researcher Eric Gordon said the findings will help public health officials develop new methods to control Chagas disease.
“Education and pesticide application around homes has helped reduce the impact of kissing bugs associated with homes and domestic animals, but now more and more cases of Chagas disease are driven by species most often associated with more rural hosts,” he said.