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Bed bugs have probably been plaguing people for ever, particularly in warmer countries. In fact Aristotle wrote about them in 400 BC, but they were not prevalent in the United Kingdom until after the Great Fire of London in 1666. People deduced that bed bugs lived in wood because the bed bug plagues only commenced after 1670; they believed that the bed bugs that had come in with timber imported to reconstruct London.

They have been there ever since, with the exception of about fifty years between the 1940′s and 1995. A similar pattern can be seen in most of the developed Western world, because after the Second World War there was a concerted effort to clear out the old bomb-damaged city slums and start again. As they went through the cities clearing and cleaning they spread tons of DDT which virtually wiped out bedbugs and some other widespread household pests.

The authorities in the United States also went on the rampage with DDT with a similar result. Then something occurred and we can be quite specific about the date: in 1995 reports of bedbug infestations started flooding in again.

One district 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 incidents 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 issue.

Bedbugs feed by inserting two tubes through the host’s skin, one squirts in a sort of saliva that contains anticoagulant and anaesthetic and the other draws blood. This saliva can cause irritation in some individuals in the form of lumps, which may or may not itch. Having lots of bites can result in anaemia.

The biggest risk most people run is secondary infection from scratching with dirty finger nails. In 2008, the World health Organization reported that there was some evidence that bedbugs might cause asthma and that being bitten often may make the victim more prone to other diseases.

Bedbugs have all the appropriate equipment and behavioural patterns to be able to spread diseases, but there have been no known instances to date. However, knowing that there are bedbugs around can cause some people to be paranoid about them, which frequently results in insomnia and irritability.

If you find bedbugs in your hotel, you should report it to the manager and if you stay in rented accommodation you should advise 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 proliferate from one house to the next very quickly.

Many old terraced houses are not completely sealed off from one another enabling bedbugs to roam and set up new colonies and bedbugs can be taken home from hotels in your suitcase or clothing. Bedbugs are a matter for public concern, but they are not life-threatening.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently concerned with bed bugs spray. If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.

If you wake up one morning with prickly lumps on your body, you will probably think that you had been bitten by mosquitoes or ants the night before, but there is also a possibility that bedbugs have got at you. If this occurs in your own bed, then you have problems. If you are in a hotel, go and make a complaint to the manager.

You can be sure that most hotel bosses will take complaints about bed bugs very gravely, because it is well known that the numbers of bedbugs are increasing fast and have been since 1995. It is also everyday knowledge that huge compensation awards have been made against hotels. Some of them were worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Most so-called ‘bed bugs’ will only feed on people if their preferred host, often poultry, are not available, but there is one that only sucks human blood and that species is called Cimex lectularius.

Cimex lectularius was virtually extinct in the developed world by the late 1950′s because of the extensive use of DDT in homes and hotels to kill all insects such as ants, bed bugs, silverfish, millipedes and cockroaches.

However, there has been a massive resurgence in the number of bedbugs since 1995. In fact, between 1995 and 2001, one report on bedbugs in London reported that incidents of bedbug call-outs had doubled every year.

The recovery in bedbug numbers has been ascribed to global travel and immigration from Asia and Africa. However, it is also likely that they were never completely wiped out and that they have become resistant to modern pesticides. There is not much you can put down or spray around now that will kill bedbugs.

So, what do bedbugs look like? Well, there are lots of different types of bed bugs, but most of them are brownish, unless they have just fed and then there is a red tint to them. However, they can also be white to yellowish. Sometimes, they look banded because bedbugs are covered with short hairs which reflect light like a stripy lawn.

Bedbugs have a beak-like mouth-piece with two tubes. One tube squirts spittle into you and the other sucks blood out. The saliva contains anti-coagulant and a pain-killer, so that you do not know that you have been bitten until long after the bedbug has gone home.

Some people never know, because they are not allergic to the saliva, others get a bump or slight swelling almost immediately, but sometimes the swelling can take a week to come out. These bites may or may not be itchy.

If you travel a lot, or if you go to parts of the world that are less involved with hygiene, you must be careful about not taking bedbugs home with you. They will not remain on your body, but they may lay eggs in your clothing or hole up in your suitcase. Therefore, either before you go home or immediately on arrival have your clothes washed at a temperature above 46c and blast your suitcase with a jet of steam or hot air.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently concerned with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further details.

You cannot say with any certainty where bed bugs are living; you cannot even speculate, just by looking at a building. You could be seated in a chair in a fine hotel waiting for someone to come down or you could be having tea at a friend’s house and you are equally as likely to pick up a bed bug.

The developed Western world has not been through this sort of situation for about sixty years. However, since 1995, bed bugs have been increasing practically unbridled and we are approaching the situation people were living in before the Second World War. That is a very sad state of affairs indeed.

Particularly when you appreciate that before the war, you could lay a little poison down and kill them. These days, you cannot, because some bedbugs have become resistant to a lot of the insecticides normally available to family households. So, in one way we are worse off than we were 60 years ago and unless something comes to our aid, it will only get worse.

Although bedbugs wreak most mayhem in a bed, that is not normally where people get them from. They also live in the creases of material in the seats of buses, trains, taxis, hotel rooms, restaurants and even airplanes. However, bedbugs are not taken home attached to your skin like a flea or a tick.

Instead they will crawl into a hem or a pocket or under a collar, drawn by your body heat or breath and either go to sleep or lay eggs. A female can lay 300 eggs in a single day – not a great deal by insect terms, but do you want 301 bedbugs in your bedroom wardrobe by the end of next week?

I am certain that you have realized how hard it is to totally avoid the risks of picking up bed bugs and carrying them home. Bed bugs have natural predators, but it is arguable that you would rather have bed bugs than the insects that prey on them – cockroaches, ants, spiders and centipedes – and insecticides are not always successful.

The one thing that certainly kills them, besides being trodden on by a size ten army boot, is heat. No stages of the bedbug’s life can survive temperatures above 45c.

This may be noteworthy, because modern washing powders are intended to get clothes clean at 30c, thereby saving electricity, but they also unintentionally save the lives of the bedbugs on your clothing as well. You can make sure that your clothes are bedbug-free by washing them at 46-50c and you can kill existing bedbugs in your house by steam cleaning it, which is the professional way of exterminating an infestation of bedbugs.

It is time for people to be aware of this fairly new threat to their well-being. The key things you can do are: acquaint yourself with what a bedbug looks like and have your clothes laundered at temperatures above 46c if you think that you may have been exposed to an infestation of bed bugs.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is at present concerned with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please visit our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further information.

The resurgence of the population of bed bugs over the last fifteen years has been blamed on the higher number of people going on long-haul holidays and the enlarged amount of immigration from Asia and Africa. It is not that individuals carry the bed bugs back on their bodies, but bedbugs may have laid eggs in the travellers’ clothing or the bedbugs may have taken refuge in the suitcases.

In this way they are taken home, and being very hardy to temperature change they thrive in their new home country. If the carriers are holiday makers, then the bedbugs could easily be unloaded into the hotel. This is how bed bugs can be distributed unwittingly by humans.

You see, bed bugs do not prosper in a dirty environment of necessity. Bed bugs do not mind whether you dropped a bit of potato on the floor last week and did not pick it up. They do not eat what we eat, even if they are starving. They only eat blood.

If you exist like this, then you will attract mice or rats, cockroaches and ants, but not bed bugs. It is a mistake to think that bedbugs like grime and rubbish. They most likely prefer it quite clean to be honest, but they do need cracks and crevices to hide in, but there are plenty of those in most rooms.

They like to get behind the skirtings and other woodwork. They also like broken plaster, loose wall paper and damaged mattresses. Because they are so thin, they can get into almost any crack. This means that any hotel can be stricken with bedbugs, the Ritz, the Carlton, Holiday Inn – any of them.

This is the problem for us. If it was only run-down, shabby hotels that had bed bugs, we could avoid them, but you just cannot judge a book by its cover.

There are methods of checking your room though. Look out for small bugs that look a bit like an apple seed. Look in the seams of the chairs and check the mattress, if there are any rips in it, have it replaced.

You can also test by lying on the bed to warm it up and then throw back the bed clothes swiftly. You may spot a few fleet-footed insects running for cover. They are bedbugs.

Obviously, the first thing you have to do is warn the hotel manager. If you are not satisfied that he or she is taking you seriously, move or / and ring the environmental health department of the local authority.

Whether you find bedbugs or not, they still may be about to snag a ride home with you, so spray or dust your suitcase with a powerful insecticide before you fly home and to be really safe, have your clothes boil washed, because bedbugs cannot endure temperatures above 45c.

If you cannot arrange this on the last day of your holiday, make certain you do it when you arrive home, but make sure that you do not give anything you have brought with you a chance to escape and multiply.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently concerned with bed bugs extermination. If you are interested in this, please go over to our website now at Picture Of Bed Bugs for further details.