Chagas Disease in the United States (USA)

In recent years, Chagas disease has become an emerging public health interest, and new evidence suggests that a significant disease burden exists in the United States. Implementation of national blood donor screening and regionalized community screening projects have provided novel insight into the at-risk populations residing in the country. Despite the presence of triatomines in the United States being known to the scientific community for over a century, very little is known about the distribution of vectors and their influence on autochthonous human cases. This chapter reviews the 11 triatomine species naturally found in the United States and provides a summary of the clinical and epidemiologic characteristics of human disease.