What Can You Do About Bed Bugs in Your Laptop?

Photo: Josh Valcarcel/WIRED

The worst has happened: youve got bed bugs. There are good methods (though expensive!) to control bed bugs in and on furniture and luggage, and you can wash clothing and bedding. But what about all your STUFF?

Toys, photos, your iPhone, and your favorite bedside lamp?Anything with small nooks and crannies can harbor a bed bug, including keyboards, computers, books, and CD cases. If you bag up your books and personal keepsakes, treat for bed bugs, and then put your stuff back without any additional treatment, you can re-infest your living space. Adult bed bugs can live for over a year without feeding. Thats a really long time to keep all the random detritus of your house in bags.

The only treatment for bagged bug-infested stuff is to put no-pest strips in the bag, and leave the bags sealed for at least 2 weeks. However, dichlorvos, the main ingredient, is toxic enough that the CDC recently issued a safety advisory. Dichlorvos also smells terrible, and makes many people nauseous.

Bug Wars: A New Hope Last week I got a press release about a new product that might solve the problem of treating your potentially-contaminated stuff including electronics. Its called Proof and derived from the neem tree (Azadirachta indica), an evergreen that produces smelly compounds that deter insect feeding. Neem oil is sold as a topical spray to kill bed bugs (trade name Cirkil).The new procedure is called Rag in A Bag; you spray 40 milliliters (3 tbsp) of the neem oil solution onto a washcloth, and then toss that in a plastic bag containing the items to be fumigated. Wait a week, and the bugs are all dead.

Sounds awesome, but is it legit? Bed bug control products are a HUGE market, and there is a lot of bogus stuff for sale that wont kill anything but your wallet. Two years ago, several bed bug spray manufacturers were cited by the Federal Trade Commission for making fraudulent claims about the effectiveness of their herbal products. Bed Bug Foggers are known to be ineffective against bed bugs, but you can still find them on store shelves everywhere.

Im normally quite skeptical about new products claiming to control bed bugs, but the PR email I got contained the name of an entomologist I recognized Dr. Dini Miller, author of many useful publications on bed bugs, and well-known urban entomologist. I called up Miller to get the scoop on how she tested the new protocol.Her lab has bed bugs in culture, so she was able to test bed bugs known to be highly resistant to conventional pesticides. (Disclosure: Miller did not receive salary or stipend compensation from the pesticide manufacturer, but did get reimbursed for equipment expenses.)

Miller put groups of 10 nymphs (immatures), 10 adults, and over 90 bed bug eggs in with common household items: electronics,stuffed toys, picture frames,shoes, purses, andbooks.When I asked how she tested the computer items, Dr. Miller said, and this is a direct quote: We wrapped up bed bugs in pantyhose and put them in a disk drive.

How to put bed bugs in your computer, the scientific way. Image: Shannon Lentz

Dont worry, thats normal. Pantyhose is a critical tool in the entomological research armamentarium. Its cheap, its flexible, its resistant to puncture, and most insects are too big to crawl through the pores of the fabric. Its perfect for making cages to hold small bugs.

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What Can You Do About Bed Bugs in Your Laptop?