Fate of Trypanosoma cruzi, the causative agent of Chagas disease, in bed bugs after oral ingestion or intrathoracic injection
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The parasite Trypanosoma cruzi, transmitted by kissing bugs, causes Chagas disease in millions of people in Central and South America. Here we studied potential transmission of T. cruzi by common bed bugs, Cimex lectularius. Trypanosoma cruzi populations in bed bugs were monitored after oral ingestion or intrathoracic injection, with parasite presence in tissues and excreta analyzed microscopically. Natural feeding and defecation behaviors were also observed. After bed bugs ingested T. cruzi-infected blood, the T. cruzi population in their anterior midgut steadily declined during days 1-7 but increased in their posterior midgut/hindgut and in their feces during days 4-7 and 7-10, respectively. No live or dead T. cruzi were observed in the bed bugs' proboscis, salivary glands, and hemolymph, suggesting they did not breach the midgut. When bed bugs were injected intrathoracically with T. cruzi at a low concentration (103 parasites/mL), no parasites were found in the hemocoel, but some were found up to one week after injection with a higher concentration (106 parasites/mL). As T. cruzi was absent from the salivary glands of bed bugs, oral transmission during feeding is highly unlikely. As bed bugs did not defecate while feeding and invariably defecated away from their feeding site, transmission of T. cruzi via bed bug feces - in a mode similar to kissing bugs - is also unlikely. Human consumption of food contaminated with infected bed bugs is a possible, but untested, mode of transmission.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".