EDITORIAL The 1899 United States Kissing Bug Epidemic

Carlos Chagas is credited with the discovery of Chagas disease because of his 1909 published findings of the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite isolated in the blood of a Brazilian patient [1]. Fol-lowing his discovery, reports of Chagas disease from across Latin America were published, clas-sifying these countries as endemic with continual transmission occurring [2]. The United States has long been considered a non-endemic country due to the opinion that transmission between local vector populations and humans is non-existent or infrequent [3]. We recently published an extensive review with published reports of routine human exposure to nocturnal Triatominae vector bites and continual reports of autochthonous transmission to Texas locals over the past 60 years [4]. In the midst of performing this historical literature review, we came across a reference to the original source of the term “kissing bug. ” Accessing the historical archives that were available online for five different urban newspapers, we searched for news-paper articles that included the key words “kissing bug ” and were published between January 1, 1899, and December 31, 1899. What we unearthed was an unexpected “outbreak ” of kissing bug assaults that were reported in newspapers across the nation. Ten years before Carlos Cha-gas described Chagas disease (in 1909), the US experienced a multi-city hysteria caused by th