The Kissing Bug: The True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease

Hernández (A Cup of Water Under My Bed), a creative writing professor at Miami University of Ohio, blends family memoir, scientific inquiry, and journalistic exposé in this poignant study of Chagas disease, an insect-borne tropical parasitic infection that can cause lifelong heart and intestinal problems if left untreated. After the death of her aunt Dora, who came to the U.S. from Colombia to seek treatment for her intestinal issues, Hernández poured her grief into exploring the history of Chagas disease. She lucidly describes the parasitological research that brought it to light in the early 20th century, and documents the chronic presence of insects, including the “kissing bugs” that spread the disease, in poor households in Latin America and the U.S. Profiles of other immigrant families who struggle to access adequate health care, and discussions of experiments on Black asylum patients in the 1940s and price-gouging by pharmaceutical executives add weight to Hernández’s searing indictment of the U.S. medical system, which fails to routinely screen for the infection, despite knowing that it is widespread and that presymptomatic treatment is the only cure. This vivid, multidimensional account brings an ongoing medical injustice to light. (June)