Interesting discussion. As Aimee said, it's not the bite that can give you Chagas disease, it's what they do from the other end.
The _first_ time I got bitten by a kissing bug was in 1973 in Rio Frio Cave in Belize. Bit me on my calf and hurt like hell, which is unusual. Back at Barb MacLeod's house, she told me all about Chagas disease, and that one of the first symptoms could be facial swelling. A week or two later we were camped in the Caves Branch Cave system when I woke up in the morning and one side of my forehead was swollen the size of a baseball. I tubed back to the entrance and spent a sleepless night wondering if I should fly back to the states. Fortunately (?) the swelling was caused by 12 beefworms in my head, which Barb squeezed out over the next week or so. She had to rest a lot because her thumbs hurt.
Then in 1976 I was again camped in the Caves Branch system with Tom Miller. Woke up in the middle of the night to see two kissing bugs at least an inch long waddling away from me, so engorged with my blood that they could barely move, and the blood visible through their swollen bodies. I snatched them up and put them in a collecting bottle. Kissing bugs are very common in most Belize caves (and most other tropical caves?), and over the years I spent a total of several months camped in them. Plus over a year living in thatch huts. Probably had the not-so-little buggers crawling over me many times while I was asleep.
Hadn't thought about it much until y'all mentioned irregular heart rhythms as being one of the possible long-term symptoms. For over 10 years I've had what my electro-cardiologist calls "a really weird arrhythmia". Went through a number of heart procedures like cardioversions and cardiac ablations, and haven't had a problem for over one year now. But I never considered the possibility of Chagas Disease.
In the immortal words of Barbara MacLeod from The Reduviid Song: Never let a reduviid take a dump in your eye; If you get kissed bv the kissing bug you can kiss your ass goodbye! Now you've listened to my story and you ought to know why, Never let a triatomid take a s*** in your eye. LowGun
