With her new book, Hernández — now a journalist and associate professor at Miami University in Ohio — translates for the nation the story of the devastating disease afflicting her aunt and 300,000 other Americans. “The Kissing Bug: A True Story of a Family, an Insect, and a Nation’s Neglect of a Deadly Disease” is part memoir, part investigative thriller ... The tragedy Hernández describes is not just the fact of this awful disease that leaves 40-year-olds in end-stage heart failure, but the medical ignorance and systemic racism that add to the damage ... The neglect of immigrants is one of the book’s gravest concerns ... [Hernández's] book shines a light on this neglected harm, like the sun forcing kissing bugs into retreat.
Daisy Hernández’s The Kissing Bug inhabits the interstitial space between a memoir, the story of a struggling migrant family forced to deal with a bizarre and devastating disease, and a thoughtful exploration of both the science and the socioeconomic realities of Chagas disease, also known as American trypanosomiasis ... The Kissing Bug blends the results of Hernández’s research with her family’s history as well as the author’s personal experiences. The beauty of The Kissing Bug is that it’s nonfiction that packs as much heart, tension, lyricism, and horror as some of the best contemporary fiction ... The Kissing Bug is an important, well-researched, and timely book that shines a light on the hitherto ignored history of an extremely damaging disease that has been marginalized because of the people it affects ... The way she presents these truths makes this a necessary read for anyone concerned about health crises across the world.
In The Kissing Bug, Daisy Hernández recounts watching her aunt die from a little known or understood disease. Years later, Hernández set out to learn more, and entered into a harrowing medical mystery ... Written with compassion, but also drawing on interviews and extensive research, the book strikes political and sociological notes, revealing ugly truths about how the medical system responds in different ways to well-off patients and high-profile disorders, electing to overlook less glamorous diseases that affect poorer, more vulnerable populations, where the afflicted are less likely to arouse compassion ... The Kissing Bug is the engrossing account of a family medical mystery that led to a compassionate investigation of an underattended disease.
Through piecing together her own family's story, the history of Chagas, and the stories of other patients' illnesses, Hernández raises damning questions about which infectious diseases get attention and whom we believe to be deserving of care ... By starting with the personal, Hernández allows readers to comprehend how a bug bite rendered a woman sick for most of her life ... Hernández is trained as a reporter, and she approaches the quest to learn about kissing bugs with journalistic tenacity ... While meticulously researched, this section of the book lags as we lose the thread of how these insects, and the policy decisions around this disease, impact patients ... hits its stride in the last section, when Hernández tells the stories of poor and uninsured Chagas patients who face barriers in receiving appropriate care ... reminds us that our work at balancing health inequities cannot stop with controlling COVID domestically.
A deeply personal, unsparing analysis of how neglected diseases disproportionately affect marginalized peoples in the world’s richest country—and why they need not ... The author highlights how poverty, policies that limit health care for immigrants and marginalized peoples, and the worldwide neglect of public health infrastructure all contribute to the 10,000 deaths among the 6 million cases of Chagas disease in the Americas ... The author’s Tía Dora, who lived with and died from Chagas disease, changed Hernández’s life. Her story, ably rendered by the author, should open readers’ eyes to a persistent plague. A compelling indictment of our failing health care system and the people falling through its ever widening cracks.
Hernández [...] 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 ... This vivid, multidimensional account brings an ongoing medical injustice to light.
