Bed Bugs And Environmental Health
Posted by Owen Jones in Uncategorized, tags: animals, bed bugs, disease, family, health, holidays, home, home improvement, hygiene, insects, other, outdoors, parenting, UncategorizedBed bugs have almost certainly been pestering people for ever, especially in warmer countries. In fact Aristotle wrote of them in 400 BC, but they were not common in the United Kingdom until after the Great Fire of London in 1666.
People believed that bed bugs lived in timber because the bed bug plagues only commenced after 1670. It is supposed that the bed bugs that had come in with wood imported to rebuild London.
And they have been there ever since, with the exception of around fifty years between the 1940’s and 1995. A comparable pattern may be traced in most of the developed Western world, because after the Second World War there was a determined effort to clear out the old bomb-ravaged city ghettos and start again.
As they went through the cities clearing and sanitizing they used tons of DDT which virtually killed off bedbugs and some other common household insects.
The powers that were in the United States also went on the rampage with DDT with a similar result. Then something occurred and we can be fairly precise about the date: in 1995 reports of bedbug infestations started pouring in again.
One region of London reported infestations of bedbugs doubling each year from 1995 to 2001 and the US National Pest Management Agency reported a 71% rise in bedbug cases between 2000 and 2005. A pest control company in North Carolina said that a quarter of the hotels it surveyed between 2002 and 2006 had a bedbug problem.
Bedbugs feed by inserting two tubes through the host’s skin, one pumps in a sort of saliva containing anticoagulant and anaesthetic and the other sucks blood. This saliva can cause irritation in individuals in the form of lumps, which may or may not itch. Having plenty of bites may result in anaemia.
The greatest danger most people run is secondary issues from scratching with dirty finger nails. In 2008, the World health Organization gave the belief that there was some evidence that bedbugs may cause asthma and that being bitten often might create the victim more liable to other illnesses.
Bedbugs have all the right equipment and behavioural patterns to be able to spread diseases, but there have been no known cases to date. However, knowing that there are bedbugs around can cause individuals to be paranoid about them, which often leads to insomnia and tetchiness.
If you discover bedbugs in your motel, you should report it to the manager and if you live in rented accommodation you ought to tell the landlord. If it is your own place you should seek advice from the local Environmental Health Agency attached to the council, because bedbugs can spread from one household to the next very fast.
Many old terraced houses are not completely separated off from one another enabling bedbugs to roam and set up new colonies. Bedbugs can also be carried home from hotels in your suitcase or clothing. Bedbugs are a cause for public anxiety, but they are not life-threatening.
Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on numerous topics, but is at present involved with how to test for bed bugs. If you want to know more, visit our website now at Pest Management at Home.
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