I can imagine it would be in those parts.
Back when I was in South America, very little research had been done on Chagas disease simply because it was a disease of the rural poor and almost no one in the metropolitan areas were affected. We were told that the Chagas beetle lived in the thatched roofs of these poor rural population’s huts, so don’t sleep in those huts.
We were also told that a person with Chagas disease couldn’t pass the disease to another person unless the disease first passing through the Chagas beetle. The Chagas beetle had to feed on a person with Chagas disease, the diseased person’s blood was then changed in the Chagas beetle’s digestive system into a form that could infect humans, and this was then passed to another person when the Chagas beetle defecated on him.
If you’ve been seeing these beetles in Texas for many years now and they never caused any problems for you, it’s probably because these beetles hadn’t fed on a person with Chagas disease. With the current flood of illegal aliens, and many of them carrying Chagas, that’s going to change.