A Better Bedbug Trap

After years of study (and thousands of bites), researchers may have discovered how to get the bloodsucking pests under control.

Over-the-counter bedbug treatments, as a 2012 study discovered, are effectively worthless. Most of the time, they fail to reach the bugs, which are burrowed deep in the folds of mattresses and rugsand even when they do, many of the bloodsuckers have built up an immunity to common household insecticides.

So whats a person to do in the face of an infestation? Call an exterminator. Freak out. Fight, or give into, the urge to set fire to all belongings.

For the past five years, though, Regine Gries has done none of these things; instead, she has welcomed the bedbugsthousands of themonto her skin for a blood feast.

Gries, a biologist at Simon Fraser University in Canada, has endured 18,000 bug bites in the quest to build a more effective bedbug remedyand as she and a team of researchers explain in a paper recently published in the chemistry journal Angewandte Chemie, they believe theyve finally discovered the chemicals that will allow them to do just that.

Bed-Bug Madness: The Psychological Toll of the Blood Suckers

Bedbugs were considered more or less a non-problem through much of the later 20th century, kept at bay with strong pesticides. In recent years, though, bedbug infestationsand, consequently, bedbug hysteriahave made a comeback. (Scientists have also discovered that the bugs may carry the parasite that causes Chagas disease, though they have yet to study their ability to spread the disease itself.)

To study the blood-suckers, Gries and her husband Gerhard, also a biologist at Simon Fraser, collected the feces and other material the bugs left after each blood meal. (Gries was chosen as guinea pig because, unlike most people, she developed only a small, itch-free rash in response to the bites.) The couple was able to successfully isolate a blend of pheromones that attracted the bedbugs, but only in the labwhen they tested the chemical in infested apartments, it had no effect.

Together with Robert Britton, a chemist at Simon Fraser, the researchers tried to figure out what their cocktail was missing. Eventually, they discovered that histaminethe same substance used in human immune responsesacted as a kind of knockout for bedbugs, causing arrestment on contact regardless of when theyd last eaten. Together with five pheromones that the team had isolated, they were able to create a two-part chemical trap, first luring the bugs and then freezing them in place.

As the researchers work to turn their discovery into a marketable tool, though, the research continuesmeaning the bedbugs stay alive, and stay hungry. Im not too thrilled about this, Gries said in a statement.

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A Better Bedbug Trap