Just adopt your bedbugs today and get used to them. /s
this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2023
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These assholes will hitch rides on your clothing and in your pockets. So be mindful if anyone you know says they might have them. Don't sit on their furniture, and don't let them sit on yours.
If you already have them at home, I can only wish you the best of luck. The next six months to year of your life will be living out of plastic bags.
It's mainly a problem if you live in shared housing or an appartment block with shitty neighbours.
Experts + coordinated efforts and it's quite easy to solve. Heat, steam, pesticides, diatomaceous earth(especially around chair/bed legs), regular vacuuming, regular tumble drying, matras covers, and plastic bin bags left in the sun.
People exagerate how difficult it is. If it was as difficult as some people say, hotels would no longer exist. Every hotel has problems with bed bugs on occasion.
When you travel, have the contents of your suitcase in a plastic bin bag. Avoid hotels with carpeting. Bed bugs hate tile floors, really hard to move across them. Also, if you have tiles at home, you can simply use bleach to mop the floor. The fumes alone already kill plenty of the buggers.
Some decent advice right here. In many years of regular hotel stays, I have had exactly two encounters with them. There was no issue with cross-infestation. They don't travel that easily, as you say.
What gets me is that prevention is so easy-peasy, in theory:
- no carpets
- foam or other cavity-free mattress
- impervious mattress cover
Done. And yet hotels still have these monstrous sprung mattresses, which accumulate dust and mites and are basically black boxes for infestation of all kinds. Usually protected by a single layer of dirty synthetic fiber. Yuck.
The whole carpet thing also annoys the fuck out of me.
I mean, it was fashionable once upon a time.
But now? It stains easily, harbours bugs and mites, and is ridiculously labour intensive to clean. Tile, high quality vinyl or laminate please.
I see you've never had them.
Oh look, a none story
Yeah...
"An alarming number of calls... about fears that outbreaks in Paris could spread to the UK."
That's really not worth the calls OR the news article.
ReindMe! 30 days
Great
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A council said it had received an "alarming number" of calls to tackle bedbugs amid fears that outbreaks in Paris could spread to the UK.
Luton Borough Council issued guidance on what people should do to prepare their homes for "treatment"
Writing on its website, the council said: "The pest control service is currently receiving an alarming number of bedbug jobs on a weekly basis."
Bedbugs have been reported in cinemas, trains, hospitals and schools amid national panic over the issue in France, with many cases focused on Paris.
Dee Patel, an entomologist, told BBC Three Counties Radio that lavender deterred bed bugs.
He also advised washing at high temperatures, vacuuming often and freezing sheets which stops the bugs from breeding.
The original article contains 271 words, the summary contains 121 words. Saved 55%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Dee Patel, an entomologist, told BBC Three Counties Radio that lavender deterred bed bugs.
"Lavender oil masks their scent pattern and they can't cope with it," he said.
I don't know about their scent pattern, but that's an essential oil.
Maybe mix it with an insecticide.
Essential oils restore insecticide effectiveness against bed bugs
Gaire and Gondhalekar first tested the pyrethroid insecticide deltamethrin and a series of essential oil compounds on non-resistant bed bugs and a resistant Knoxville strain of bed bugs. A single dose of deltamethrin meant to kill 25% of bugs killed that many non-resistant bed bugs, but it took 70,000 times more to kill 25% of the Knoxville strain.
“Deltamethrin is so ineffective in the Knoxville strain of bed bugs that if you’re using it in the field even in large doses, you’ll get almost no control,” Gaire said.
The active ingredients in essential oils — thymol from thyme, carvacrol from oregano and thyme, eugenol from clove, and others — worked equally against resistant and non-resistant bugs. A dose meant to kill 25% killed that many of each type.
Gondhalekar said bugs’ nervous systems normally open and close sodium channels to pass signals through neurons. Deltamethrin binds to those sodium channels and keeps them open so that neurons cannot stop firing. That repeated firing quickly uses up the bug’s energy and kills it.
But resistant bed bugs possess multiple mechanisms to resist pyrethroids, including overactive levels of an enzyme called cytochrome P450, which degrades deltamethrin. The essential oil compounds, Gaire and Gondhalekar reported, bind to and deactivate that enzyme and allow deltamethrin to do its job on the bed bug’s nervous system.
Gaire and Gondhalekar combined a single dose of deltamethrin with a single dose of essential oil compounds that would be expected to kill 25 percent to 50 percent of the resistant bed bugs. Instead, it killed more than 90 percent of the resistant bed bugs.