Login / RegisterWatch out for bedbugs: how to deal with these pests
I hope you are not sleeping in a bathtub, stressed to the point of tears, sleep deprived, and peppered with itchy red bites and welts—courtesy of bedbugs. Watch out for these blood-sucking vermin, as they are on the rise in British Columbia—the Lower Mainland particularly. The West End and Downtown Eastside are the hardest-hit areas, and the bugs are currently making inroads into detached dwellings and Vancouver’s posh neighbourhoods, as well as the suburbs. Live bedbugs were also found in library books across the Lower Mainland in 2011, leading librarians to trash books and close branches in a bid to stop the bugs from spreading.
The bedbug problem is expected to worsen. In North America, the bug’s numbers have increased as much as 500 to 600 percent in the past decade, costing businesses and homeowners billions of dollars annually to deal with the outbreaks. Infestations have occurred in homes, hotels, hostels, hospitals, cruise ships, airplanes, trains, schools, and long-term care facilities.
British Columbia needs a broad strategy to tackle the growing bedbug problem. Ontario recently committed $5 million to help public health agencies tackle the problem, while Manitoba announced a bedbug strategy that will see every municipality participate. Some mattress retailers in Western Canada and Maritimes have ended exchange policies due to bedbug concerns.
Bedbugs are small insects with oval-shaped flat bodies and no wings. Adult bedbugs are about five to seven millimetres long (about the size of an apple seed). They are brown but darken to a blood red colour after feeding. They can live without food for more than one year. Young bedbugs (nymphs) look similar to adults, but are smaller in size and lighter in colour.
Bedbug eggs are white, about one millimetre long, and are very hard to see on most surfaces. The female bedbug lays about 200 eggs in her lifetime, at a rate of two to seven eggs per day. The eggs are laid in cracks and crevices, behind woodwork and other hidden locations, and usually hatch in six to sixteen days.
Bedbugs normally come out at night to feed, attracted by the carbon dioxide we exhale. Both adults and nymphs feed on the blood of people and animals. Bedbug bites may not be noticed right away because they typically feed at night when people are asleep. Bedbugs do not transmit any known human diseases, although occasionally bites may become infected.
Bedbugs prefer locations where they can hide easily and feed regularly, like sleeping areas. Their thin and flat bodies allow the bedbugs to hide in extremely small spaces, such as under wallpaper, behind picture frames, in electrical outlets, inside box springs, and in mattress pads. They struggle climbing metal or polished surfaces and cannot fly or jump.
How do you keep from bringing bedbugs home when you travel?
Taking the following precautions while travelling helps to ensure a bug-free stay at your hotel and to keep bedbugs from coming home with you:
• Inspect the room before bringing luggage, pets, or other items in. Do not put your luggage on the bed. Place it on a tile floor, away from any upholstered surfaces. Once you have checked the luggage stand, keep your luggage on the stand instead of unpacking your belongings and placing them in the drawers.
• Inspect the sleeping area. Slowly lift up each corner of the mattress and examine the creases and tufts of the mattress and box spring, behind the headboard, and the wall behind the bed, the pillows, bed coverings and bed skirt, the bed frame, and legs. Do not store anything under the bed. Check any chairs before you sit down.
• After your trip, unpack your clothing and check personal items such as hairbrush and cosmetic case. Wash all clothing and fabric items in hot water immediately after returning from a trip, regardless of whether you wore them or not.
How do you prevent bedbugs from entering your home?
Following these steps can help to reduce the chances of bedbug infestations in your home:
• Be careful about what you bring into your house or buy. Check every item you bring into your home for the first time, including used books, new furniture, and garage sale or antique store furniture. Be very cautious with second-hand or refurbished items. New mattresses are often delivered in the same truck that carries away old mattresses, so insist that your new mattress be sealed before it is delivered. Never take a mattress, bead frame, or sofa from a curb.
• Reduce places where bedbugs can hide. Clean up clutter and vacuum often, including under and behind beds. Seal all cracks and crevices between baseboards, on wooden bed frames, floors, and walls with caulking. Repair or remove peeling wallpaper.
• Inspect your home regularly for bedbugs. Check on, under, and beside beds, couches and upholstered furniture. Look for black or brown spots (dried blood or feces), and live or dead bedbugs. In case of infestation, bugs can also hide in picture frames, light fixtures, smoke detectors, or other wall mounted items. If you have a pet, check areas where your pet sleeps.
How do you get rid of bedbugs and protect yourself from being bitten?
Some tips:
• Bedbugs are very hard to get rid of. If you do have bedbugs, consider hiring a licensed pest control specialist. Professional operators use a variety of tools to control bedbugs, including chemical insecticide, pressurized carbon dioxide snow, and heat treatments. They also use trained dogs and multi-attractant traps for bedbug detections.
• A treatment will only be effective if physical control methods (steam cleaning, vacuuming, heating, freezing, washing, and discarding affected items) and preventative measures are used together. For households, it is best to use a vacuum with a HEPA filter to avoid putting insects back into the air. Insecticide, heat, and cold treatments should be left to the professionals.
• Enclose your mattress and box spring in zippered bed encasements. Put duct tape over the zipper, because zippers have a space where bedbugs can enter or escape.
• Use bed leg interceptors. Coat bed legs with double-sided carpet tape or petroleum jelly, or place the legs of the bed in leg protectors or glass jars with a bit of baby powder to trap the bugs on their way up or down the bed leg.
• Remove headboards completely. Replace upholstered furniture with metal or plastic, or material that can easily be cleaned with soap and water.
Rana Sarfraz is an entomologist who is currently working at the University of British Columbia.
Other important tips: check sites like bedbugregistry.com about any building or neighbourhood you're moving into; and be especially wary of old wooden buildings, since the bugs can move about through cracks and crevices and spread very easily. If they get a foothold, unless landlords evacuate the whole building to treat it, they'll just chase the problem from suite to suite...
We had a brief infestation in our building. I used glue sheets to separate the legs of the bed from the floor, and made sure no part of the bed was touching a wall or piece of furniture.
For a week or so we daily found 2 or 3 bedbugs stuck to the glue. Soon, none. A few months later, still none.
It's better for your health and your pocketbook than spraying.
A white powder, also better than a spray, is available in hardware stores. Lay it down on the floor where the quarter-rounds connect floor to wall. This physical barrier also helps. Once the bedbugs pass through the powder, they will be dessicated in a day or two.
Keep vigil.
Depending on what type of diatomaceous earth is used in arthropod control, the content of crystalline silica can be a health concern if inhaled by humans or pets.
A proper mask should always be worn when applying "flux-calcined" DE, and care should be taken not to stir up the product or create conditions (windows open with air circulating) that could cause quantities to become airborne.
This certainly doesn't make bedbugs as innocuous as the writer would make us believe. If this is as common as the article states, then City of Vancouver and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority should seriously work together to develop some strategy to clear Vancouver of this pest.
Traditional methods have extremely low efficiency. Chemicals kill bed bugs on contact. The residue is not active. Fogger bomb is useless. DE powder slowly kills bed bugs which bite and lay eggs before dying. The killing speed may be slower than the egg laying speed even though you wash, vacuum, and spray daily. The mattress encasement was developed from one of the worst ideas because a minor design change seals all of bed bugs in a bedroom instead of sealing mattress only as shown in the video.
Two factors guarantee to stop bites forever after initial easy effort. 1) You can’t find any possible bed bug attacking route. 2) People have proved that barrier method works by sleeping in a bathtub which is too slippery to crawl. Why do experts never think about the sticky barrier method? The special sticky tape is patent pending and bed bugs can crawl on any well known double sided sticky tapes.
Bed bugs may live one year at low temperatures without activity; they die quickly at room temperatures if they actively crawl every night for seeking food when they can feel the smell of sleeping people. I caught bed bugs into a glass bottle when I applied this barrier method. The last one died in 3 months.
The barrier method will not fail because it is not important how many bed bugs will be trapped. Even the tape does not catch any bug; you have won because all of the bugs can’t lay eggs and will starve. Only the barrier method and heating entire house method can immediately stop bed bug bites, but the heating method fails if bed bugs can crawl from neighbors.
To fight with mosquitoes, everyone closes windows; no one opens windows and sprays chemical daily. To fight with bed bugs, you have the similar choices. The barrier method solves the problem immediately even the tape does not catch any bug; how dummy it is to spray chemical to every bed bug and egg and fail if you miss a few of tiny targets because survived bed bugs bite and lay eggs every night
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTdOxn9MoPg
Not all biting insects transmit diseases. In order to transmit disease, an insect needs to serve as a host for the disease-causing parasites. These two examples will allow you to understand this system: The definitive hosts for malaria parasites (Plasmodium sporozoites) are female mosquitoes (Anopheles spp.), which act as transmission vectors to humans and other vertebrates, the secondary hosts. Mosquitoes first ingest the malaria parasite by feeding on an infected vertebrate, and the infected mosquitoes eventually carry Plasmodium in their salivary glands. Similarly, tsetse fly (Glossina spp.) is a biting fly that serves as both a host and vector for the Trypanosome parasites, which cause African sleeping sickness. A tsetse fly becomes infected with bloodstream trypomastigotes when taking a blood meal on an infected mammalian host. In the fly's midgut, the parasites transform into procyclic trypomastigotes, multiply there, leave the insect gut, and transform into epimastigotes. The epimastigotes reach the fly's salivary glands and continue multiplication.
Bedbugs don’t transmit any KNOWN human diseases, as they are not known to serve as hosts for human disease-causing parasites. However this doesn’t mean that they cannot accidentally transfer pathogens from an infected individual to a healthy one. But so could happen with other methods, including blood transfusion and sharing contaminated devices etc.
I also propose in the article that BC needs a regional strategy to tackle this bedbug problem. But involving health agencies could be a bit tricky, as bedbugs don’t transmit human diseases. Certainly more research is needed for effective control of this pest, including public education, quarantine, policy development, disease transmission, and eradication strategies etc.
There could be several reasons of the resistance development in bedbugs. Part of the problem is that populations in the region of original infestation might have already been extensively exposed to the same or similar chemical being used in the newly infested areas. Further, most of the exterminators in Canada use a single chemical product (Tempo, a pyrethroid-based insecticide) for common household pest problems such as bedbugs, ants, wasps and flies etc. This means that most of the target (and non-target) pest populations might be unknowingly exposed to the same chemical over and over again, which could potentially lead to buildup of the resistant “superbug” populations.
Homeowners and businesses should use caution when hiring an exterminator and insist that integrated pest management (IPM) strategy be used involving multiple tools– less risky options should be the first choice!