While the rest of the world continues to fear Ebola in West Africa, a disease found much closer to the United States has started creeping across the borders of the nation.

Chagas disease, a relative of Dengue and Chikungunya virus found mainly in rural areas in Latin America, is caused by a virus found inside a triatomine bug more commonly known as the 'kissing bug.'

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According to the U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Chagas disease patients have been reported in Texas, Virginia and Louisiana together with about 8 million more in Latin America.

As of most recent reports, the CDC stated that there are enough number of cases of Chagas disease in the U.S. to establish a clinic devoted to detecting and treating the illness with roughly 300,000 people reported infected.

Medical personnel at Olive View-UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles as well as in New York City and Georgia have begun screening patients who recently travelled to and from Latin America.

Because the disease has not been classified as endemic, many health experts fail to diagnose or even consider Chagas, also known as American trypanosomiasis, in the United States, thinking that people could not have contracted the virus.

However, medical studies revealed that about 40,000 pregnant women in North America might have been infected with the disease at any given time, leaving 2,000 congenital cases that resulted from mother-to-child transmission.

The kissing bugs, called as such because they tend to feed on people's faces, catch the virus from infected animals or persons and transmit it to other people through their feces.

Symptoms of Chagas include fever, fatigue, body aches, diarrhea, vomiting, enlarged lymph glands, pallor, swelling, difficulty breathing, headache, muscle pain and chest or abdominal pain during the early stages though patients with more severe cases may have cardiac arrest as well as megacolon.

Though symptoms of Chagas commonly fade away within a few weeks or months, the infection will persist if left untreated.

Even if the disease cannot be transmitted with casual person-to-person contact, it can be caught through blood transfusion, organ transplantation, congenital transmission, accidental laboratory exposure and consumption of raw food contaminated with the kissing bugs' feces. 

Tagschagas, dengue, Chikungunya, Virus, Disease, CDC, Disease, kissing bug