It's Just One Damned Thing After Another

What's going to get you? Freak storms, contaminated water, a terrorist attack, a neighbourhood mugger, skin cancer, heart disease, brake failure - take your pick, the choice seems endless.

Well if you haven't already found one to your liking, consider Chagas, the latest thing from Latin America.

Chagas is a fatal parasitic infection commonly spread by something called the "kissing bug" which, fortunately for me, doesn't seem to live on Vancouver Island. The trouble is, it can also be spread by an infected person via blood transfusions or organ donations.

About a dozen cases have been identified in the US and Canada. But, just in time for Christmas, there's some good news. The US Food and Drug Agency has approved a test that will allow blood banks to screen for Chagas.

I thought I'd learn a little more about the kissing bug. Here's one account:

This miniature monster is more shocking than the stealthy scorpion -- more unsettling than the maniacal centipede. Uglier than those wispy bugs who look like false eyelashes or the hair-flicking tarantula who has such an undeserved bad name.

This bug is not here to eat your garden.

I'm talking about one of the Southwest's most dreaded insects -- the Darth Vader of the insect world -- the kissing bug, a.k.a., the cone-nosed beetle. (See adolescent kissing bug here.)

Usually dressed in black and wearing a shiny shield on its back, here's a pest who will appreciate your lilacs for romance, then come inside for a six-course meal of you.

Then, without so much as waking you, he'll go out and brag to his cronies about the great feed he just had, and next thing you know there's a whole line of them wanting to grab a bite, completely without regard for the fact that you were not expecting dinner guests.

They can carry diseases, leave often terrible slow-to-heal bites, and will lie in wait -- under your pillow, behind a picture on the wall, in the corner of the ceiling in the next room -- until you are peacefully snoring away.

When they greet you on the sidewalk, they make no attempt to escape your death blow. Instead they turn and approach you with outstretched forearms and proboscis, oblivious to anything but your blood a mere epidermis away. I shudder to think of them.