Sentences with phrase «kissing bugs»

A year later, researchers collected an additional 49 kissing bugs from inside and around the outside of the woman's home and found nearly half the bugs had fed on eight different humans.

During the night, insects called kissing bugs emerge by the hundreds from hiding places in people's mud and stick homes to bite their sleeping victims.

Although kissing bugs can bite any time of the year, they are most likely to bite in dry months of summer.

To investigate the threat of Chagas disease in the U.S., Dorn and colleagues collected kissing bugs in California and Arizona.

Although doctors officially have recorded only seven cases of new human infections in North America, a new study found that five of 13 kissing bugs collected from California and Arizona had bitten a human host — and many of the bugs they collected were infected with Chagas.

Rosa Maldonado, associate professor of biological sciences at The University of Texas at El Paso, holds a vial filled with kissing bugs.

Consider as well those diseases thought of as «just» tropical because they are transmitted by tropical vectors: malaria transmitted by mosquitoes, sleeping sickness spread by tsetse flies, and Chagas» disease (associated with edema, fever, and heart disease) spread by kissing bugs.

There is also a chance that, as conditions become more favorable with milder winters, Mexican kissing bug species may migrate north, Dorn and Stevens point out, although currently this scenario is only speculation.

A Chagas disease epidemic is not likely in North America, but kissing bug bites do cause severe allergic reactions for some victims

Dr Genta said: «The discovery adds a new element to kissing bugs life cycle and will impact knowledge of the transmission of Chagas disease and the control strategies for this disease.»

Scientists have devised a clever form of bug - to - bug combat to fight Chagas» disease, a potentially fatal muscle infection transmitted by the aphidlike kissing bug.

After the lights go off, kissing bugs crawl into bed with the slumbering inhabitant and take a blood meal, often sucking around the victim's mouth or eyes.

Besides kissing bugs, he says, this technique might be used to hijack a variety of other insect disease vectors, from mosquitoes that transmit malaria to deer ticks that transmit Lyme disease.

Transmitted by bloodsucking kissing bugs, tropical Chagas disease — which afflicts millions in Central and South America — may affect more people in the U.S. than previously thought.

North America has so far been spared from this plague for a number of reasons: The 11 species of kissing bugs endemic to the U.S. South and Southwest tend to defecate after leaving their unwitting hosts, reducing the likelihood of spreading the parasite.

The disease is spread by triatomines, also called kissing bugs for their tendency to bite on the lips to suck blood.

Unlike mosquitoes that transmit malaria through the bite, kissing bugs drop feces on the subject while filling up with blood.

Kissing bugs breed in pack rats» nests.

I owe my Staphylococcus aureus infection in my ankle skin to kissing bugs in all probability.

I am very familiar with kissing bugs.

In endemic areas such as Guatemala, for example, researchers usually find 25 to 30 percent of kissing bugs to be infected.

He discussed his idea with co-researcher Dr Fernando Genta in Brazil, who extended the idea to kissing bugs.

«What bloodsucking «kissing bugs» like to eat.»

Researchers have overturned a century old assumption that «kissing bugs» only feed on blood.

Here the parasite is spread primarily by Triatoma dimidiata, a type of «kissing bug.»

As we encroach more and more on the kissing bug's habitat and remove their usual blood meal sources, such as rodents, says Dorn, the insects — attracted by light — are moving into houses to tap new food sources.

Trypanosoma cruzi, the protozoan responsible for Chagas disease, bides its time in a kissing bug's gut.

Unlike a mosquito, however, it is not the kissing bug's suction mouthparts that transmit disease — it is its feces that teem with T. cruzi.

«Central America «kissing bug» carries two main subtypes of Chagas disease parasite.»

Once inside, the bacterial Trojan horse began pumping cecropin A into the kissing bug's bowels, which are also home to Trypanosoma cruzi, the culprit behind Chagas» disease.

A team at Yale University, Rockefeller University in New York City, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta engineered a strain of the bacterium Rhodococcus rhodnii, which lives in the gut of the kissing bug, to produce an insect antibiotic called cecropin A.

The researchers exploited an unappetizing feeding habit of kissing bugs — they eat each other's feces — by peppering faux feces with the engineered bacteria.

Like cockroaches, kissing bugs are nocturnal insects that hide in cracks and crevices during daytime or when lights are on at night.

But getting bitten by a kissing bug isn't the only way to contract the disease.

The parasite Trypanosoma cruzi (T. cruzi), which causes Chagas disease can be transmitted to humans by blood - sucking insects known as «assassin bugs» or «kissing bugs.»

In all, the researchers trapped 39 kissing bugs (Triatoma rubida) and tests revealed that 24 bugs — or 61 percent — were infected with T. cruzi.

The biologist is currently investigating the prevalence of T. cruzi in kissing bugs, street dogs and cats found in El Paso, Texas, an urban city on the U.S. - Mexico border with more than 675,000 residents.

To prevent parasite transmission by the kissing bug, the biologist says it's important to be aware of the presence of the bugs in the house and yard because pets like dogs and cats are also vulnerable.

When researchers messed with the kissing bug to sabotage tyrosine breakdown, either by disabling genes or chemically blocking the enzymes, the bugs died after dining, Oliveira and colleagues reported in Current Biology in 2016.

The enzyme shuts down tyrosine breakdown, not just in the kissing bug but also in a kind of tick and in the female Zika - spreader Aedes aegypti mosquito.

Of all the amino acids detected in that huge drink, only tyrosine meets a massive special array of enzymes ready to break it down as it washes into the kissing bug gut, researchers showed in 2014.