Say you want to dress up as the world's scariest animal this Halloween. You don't need fangs, claws or horns. All it takes is a couple of pipe cleaners, some Halloween fairy wings and a few other supplies.
One particularly gross bug has a romantic nickname: the kissing bug. Its proper name is the triatomine bug."They're the nightmare insect," says Brown."They crawl across ceilings at night, drop onto a person, follow the CO2 [carbon dioxide] trail to the mouth and feed on the mouth," says Brown.
If it's not bad enough to have a one-inch bloodsucking parasite on your mouth, the kissing bug adds insult to injury."It turns around and poops on the feeding site." The person wakes up, scratches the bite and gets infected from the bug's excrement. The bugs, which pick up infections from animals, are a particular problem in poor, rural areas, mostly in Latin America, where people might keep animals in their houses. In most people, symptoms are mild, including headache, muscle pain and fever. But up to 30% of patients sufferTsetse flies infect humans and cattle, carryand shuttle the disease back and forth between the species, particularly in rural areas in sub-Saharan Africa.
Fleas ride on the backs of rats, prairie dogs and other rodents that carry plague and transfer the disease when they suck the blood of humans. In addition to threatening poor populations living in close proximity to rats, they're a problem for Siberian rabbit hunters, says Brown. Black flies carry river blindness, a disease that causes itching, rashes and eye disease that can lead to permanent blindness. About