Beware of those nasty hitchhikers
Hitchhikers can be dangerous, especially when they have six legs. If you are travelling, spending nights in hotels and airports, listen up. Chances are you could carry a nasty pest home with you – one that will give you sleepless nights, red welts and endless headaches. Your potential hitchhiker is the bedbug, which has over the past decade made a powerful comeback. They are growing in numbers especially in hotels.
If you don’t believe it, Google: ‘bedbugs’, ‘hotel’, ‘Sri Lanka’, ‘Colombo’. However, it’s not just Sri Lanka that’s feeling the bite … it’s the world. This ancient insect that thrives on human blood was absent for decades – from around the 1940s to the 1990s – thanks to the extreme pest control methods of those times. But they are back.
“Bed bugs were a huge problem before professional pest control became popular,” says Raja Mahendran, who has extensive experience in pest control in Sri Lanka and overseas. “At the time, pest control professionals would come into homes and offices in the West for general pest control and spray insecticides like DDT everywhere, or municipality staff in the East would spray everywhere for mosquitoes, so the bed bugs too had no chance and were almost eradicated.”
The exterminator-type saturation bombing tended to wipe out most creatures in the vicinity. However, these practices were found to cause long-term damage not only to pests but the environment and humans, and so they were discontinued in favour of more responsible and targeted solutions.
“When professional pest control became more precise and targeted, only treating for specific pests and municipality spraying was discontinued, the bed bugs returned,” he adds.
Your travel companion
The global explosion of travel everywhere has also helped bedbugs to spread! All it takes for an infestation is one female bug in your luggage. If it’s an adult female, it will lay three to five eggs a day continuously for the rest of its life, which is about a year.
Eggs take about one to two months to hatch, and larvae go through five development stages, each requiring blood drinks. As a young adult, it will take repeated blood meals over several days, fully growing to about 6.5mm in length. A full-grown female will lay about 200-500 eggs during her lifetime.
Eggs hatch in about seven to ten days. Soon there will be tens of thousands of bugs in the house. Once there is an infestation, it’s very difficult to address the problem.
The adult bug feeds in cycles; it may take blood drinks several times its size in volume, then retreat for a few days to rest and mate before returning for another feed. Unlike mosquitoes and fleas, the bed bug is relentless since both male and female and larvae need blood leaving behind itchy welts. Although they have been found to harbour human pathogens, it has still not been biologically proven that they spread diseases like HIV and hepatitis B.
Solutions to the problem
There are two types of bedbugs, says Mahendran. For temperate countries, it’s the common bed bug (Climex lectularius) and for the tropics, it’s the tropical bed bug (Cimex hemipterus).
Because they hitchhike, they can easily spread from hotels to homes, offices and schools. They can also travel across continents. Time spent in an infested environment, a visitor from an infested environment, and rented or second-hand furniture are all ways to get them into your home. Prevention is the crucial step. If you spend time in a place with bed bugs make sure you walk away clear, check your belongings and disinfect clothes as soon as you get home. Microwaving some items and drying clothes in a tumble dryer for about 20 minutes is effective.
Like most pests, bed bugs are hardy. They have a long history. Thousands of years ago, European royalty appointed bedbug control experts who would burn sulphur to get rid of them. Desperate grannies placed the legs of beds in cans of water to keep them away. More recently, people have resorted to plastic bed sheeting because the bugs find it difficult to walk on smooth slippery surfaces.
Bed bugs are tough and can survive without a meal for months, even up to a year. They also develop resistance to chemical pesticides and extreme temperatures. “Bed bugs have increasingly been found to suffer resistance to chemical pesticides,” says Mahendran. “There are botanical solutions like orange oil, heat or freeze treatments. There are traps to attract them out of beds onto the trap. Old granny methods of putting the bed posts on to a dish of water don’t always work, but there are plastics with slippery action that do.”
Mahendran says that one should know that treatments such as the steam, heat and freeze treatments have no residual or long-lasting effects. “Cold and heat treatment have no residual effect; if you treat your bed today, another bed bug could come along tomorrow and live comfortably. So the new treatments mean more inspections and more regular treatments.”
Research findings published in the Journal of Economic Entomology have found that it takes a day or more of cold treatment to kill the bugs. Consider putting your house on ice for a few days.
Thermal treatments involve pest control professionals setting up heaters to raise temperatures in sections of the house being treated to levels that the bugs cannot tolerate. Ultrasonic devices designed to drive the bugs out of your home aren’t always effective. There are traps that attract the insects out of beds on to the trap. However, they will only address part of the problem since the eggs will also have to be eliminated.
A serious infestation will include checking not only beds and chairs but cracks in walls and linen. Bed bugs are known to travel between rooms following paths like electrical wiring circuits. Since they tend to nest in materials like fabric and paper, in dark corners – they could be found in books, wardrobes and behind paintings.
Integrated pest control approaches that involve chemical or heat or freeze treatment in combination with inspections and cleaning of all infested areas are crucial. It is important to get rid of the eggs, which are built tough and designed for survival.
“Both heat and freeze claim to kill eggs,” says Mahendran. “They may kill some if exposed enough, but I have my doubts they kill all as claimed. Insecticides certainly don’t kill eggs.”
There are other control methods – dusts containing growth regulators that cause sterility in adults or which absorb the protective wax cover on the bug’s body weakening and killing them. However, dusts have to be used with care, away from air currents that could cause them to contaminate food for example.
“What finally counts is getting to the bed bugs where they are– in cracks and crevices on furniture, walls and electrical wiring close to human contact. Its thoroughness and precise treatment that’s effective, no matter the tool,” says Mahendran.
In the meantime, remember that prevention is always the best solution. Don’t leave room for the bed bugs to bite.