A New Way to Battle Bedbugs: Fake Them Out

[Buster's Uncle]

A New Way to Battle Bedbugs: Fake Them Out
Researchers at a Canadian university have used chemicals the bedbugs make themselves to attract them to a trap
The Wall Street Journal
By Daniel Akst  Jan. 2, 2015 12:05 p.m. ET



Scientists have harnessed the dreaded, hard-to-shake bugs’ own chemical signals to trap them at low cost and no apparent risk to people.  Associated Press



Getting rid of bedbugs is notoriously difficult, but sometimes people aren’t even sure if they have the critters in the first place.

Now scientists at Canada’s Simon Fraser University have harnessed the dreaded, hard-to-shake bugs’ own chemical signals to trap them at low cost and no apparent risk to people. Five key chemicals isolated by the researchers falsely signal to the bugs that shelter is at hand, while a sixth, histamine, gets them to stay put.

In experiments in bedbug-infested apartments in Vancouver, traps with about 10 cents worth of the chemicals sucked in hundreds of bedbugs night after night, according to Gerhard Gries, one of the scientists.

Finding the chemicals wasn’t easy. Dr. Gries, a specialist in chemical communication among insects, started looking eight years ago. His wife, fellow biologist and co-author Regine Gries, ran the experiments and submitted herself to 180,000 bedbug bites over five years to keep the experimental subjects alive. Unlike her husband, she gets only a mild rash from bedbug bites, not the nasty itching and swelling that afflict many victims.

Gerhard Gries said that the discovery, which the researchers hope to commercialize soon, is mainly important as a convenient, affordable way to confirm the presence of bedbugs (as opposed to fleas, for example, which also bite people) and to monitor the progress of an infestation. Just attracting the creatures to a trap often isn’t enough; a professional is frequently needed to find and kill all the bugs. But Dr. Gries says that the traps might effectively combat a small bedbug problem before it got out of hand.



Luci Gutiérrez


Bedbugs have become a global epidemic. Over the first decade of this century, according to the Simon Fraser paper, annual U.S. emergency-room visits for treating bites rose from just 21 to 15,945. Although bedbugs are not considered a major spreader of disease, they have been shown to transmit at least one deadly pathogen (a parasite associated with Chagas' disease in Latin America). Most of all, though, the die-hard bugs seem to drive people crazy.

Brooke Borel, who delves into the subject in her forthcoming book, “Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedrooms and Took Over the World,” says that DDT kept infestations down after World War II, but then the pesticide was banned. (Some bedbugs had already developed resistance to DDT and similar chemicals.)

Since then, with more global travel and a boom in the resale of household goods (abetted by the Internet), the bugs have roared back. They can go months without a blood meal and hide out in the smallest crevices. Ms. Borel says that she’s been afflicted three times, spurring her to write the book.

Gerhard Gries says that bedbugs are unlikely to develop a resistance to chemicals they themselves secrete, and if they evolve to require higher doses, this could easily be accommodated in the traps. Meanwhile, research goes on—and his wife still submits her arms to bedbug bites.

Though the pheromone discovery interests Ms. Borel, she says: “It’s definitely not the end of bedbugs.”


http://www.wsj.com/articles/a-new-way-to-battle-bedbugs-fake-them-out-1420218335?ru=yahoo?mod=yahoo_itp