'The Kissing Bug' Challenges Which Diseases Matter — And Why
Through the story of her aunt, who died of Chagas, Daisy Hernández raises damning questions about which diseases get attention — and whom we believe to be deserving of care.
Daisy Hernández was a child in the early 1980s when her mother's youngest sister, Dora, traveled from her native Colombia to the United States to seek treatment for a disease that left her stomach so distended that people assumed she was pregnant.
In Colombia, doctors had resected Dora's colon — they told her she had "enough for ten people" — and gave her a colostomy bag, but she still needed several more abdominal surgeries when she came to live with Hernández's family in New Jersey. The family line on what had made Dora so sick? "She ate an apple."
Hernández didn't learn until much later that her aunt's disease was caused by a parasite spread
