Lucrecia Ramón Barrera’s home, in the northern Argentine province of Santiago del Estero, hosts a menagerie. Several skinny dogs seek shade wherever they can. Two enormous pigs and a handful of piglets share their pen with fuzzy chicks. Dotted around the space are homemade wooden birdcages, each home to a tiny bird. And chickens run freely all around the property – including into the main house, where the 43-year-old Barrera and most of her six children sleep in a stick-topped structure that Barrera built herself. The chickens have free rein partly to keep them safe from foxes (not to mention the occasional puma that prowls around this rural zone).
It’s common for homes in this dusty area to be built without doors or roofs, without electricity and running water, and for inhabitants to share their homes with animals. Unfortunately these are ideal hiding conditions for the triatomine (also known as the ‘kissing bug’ or vinchuca locally).
Triatomines have an unpleasant modus operandi. The bugs crawl out at night to bite exposed skin, often on a sleeping human’s face, feeding on its victim’s blood. The triatomine also defecates or urinates near the bite, and when the victim scratches the bite, a single-celled parasite carried in the insect’s faeces enters the body.
The parasite in question, Trypanosoma cruzi, causes Chagas disease. A bite from a kissing bug carrying the parasite, while Barrera was asleep, is likely how she became infected.