Category Archives: Bed Bugs Canada

By giving blood weekly to her life partners bug experiment, SFU scientist Regine Gries has all but given us the gift of freedom from bed bug torture. Credit: Simon Fraser University, Greg Ehlers

VANCOUVER, British Columbia Regine Gries has been bitten by more than 1,000 bedbugs each week for the last five year and she allowed it to happen.

In fact, Gries welcomed the 180,000 bites.

Now her literal blood sacrifice has paid off. She and her husband Gerhard, both biologist at Simon Fraiser University in Vancouver British Columbia, say they have figured out how to attract and repel the bloodsucking parasites.

It turns out bed bugs communicate by odor. The researchers have been able to identify that histamine effectively repelled the creepy creatures.

They also discovered five odors that attract bedbugs and could be used to draw them into death traps.

Thats where Regine Gries blood comes back into the story. She sacrificed her own skin night after night as part of the experimentation process to feed the bugs they were using in their research.

But her blood, sweat and probably tears may all have been worth it for people plagued by the beasts.

A Victoria British Columbia company, Contech Enterprises, is now developing what is being called the first affordable bait and trap for detecting and monitoring infestations.

Contech expects it to be commercially available next year.

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Woman allows thousands of bedbugs to feed on her over 5 years, makes incredible discovery

Home > Advertising & Internet > Travelers Update on the Bed Bug Wars: Importing Pheromone Traps

How many hotels have you stayed in this holiday season? Or maybe youre more modern and stay at Airbnb locations. A few of you may even have stayed at relatives homes?

Speaking of bed bugs, last week researchers at Simon Fraser University (British Columbia, Canada) published new research indicating that they had isolated Bed Bug Pheromones, which attract and allow trapping of bed bugs. Turns out these lovely little creatures are programmed to five different compounds: four attract bed bugs (dimethyl disulfide and dimethyl trisulfide, (E)-2-hexenal, (E)-2-octenal, 2-hexanone) and one less-volatile component (histamine) that causes bed bugs to stop walking and settle in upon contact.

The result is a fairly simple (and inexpensive) trap that both attracts and stops bed bugs. The researchers (Robert Britton, Gerhard Gries and Regine Gries) estimate that traps can be made for about ten cents, although they did not specify whether that is Canadian or U.S. Well just call it about the same cost as the wad of gum you found stuck on the bedpost at your last stay.

You can read more on wired.comor if you happen to subscribe to Angewandte Chemie at this link.Or at the Universitys press release.

I know you are envisioning a whole new level of boyhood ant farm inspired toys and the untapped market potential. When you start buying your traps and bait in bulk out of Canada, ever thought about what kind of rights and laws come into play? Turns out there is a treaty for that called the United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods. Honestly, at this point it is probably enough just to know it exists and that if your business buys things from a foreign business and the transaction triggers the laws of a country that has ratified the treaty, it will govern your transaction. A lot of common provisions (that somehow always get left out) are covered by the treaty, such as when the contract is formed, whether the buyer has to pay, damages if a party breaches, reduction in price for non-conforming goods, etc. You can always exclude the treaty, but you have to specifically write your intent to exclude it in your agreement. Like I said, this is one to remember when you get ready to buy goods from a foreign company and then go look it up.

Heres the Wikipedia versionof the treaty. This is the treaty-like version.

Seriously, look at how complicated the competitors solution is:

Wishing you safe travels for the New Year!

~TechAttach

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Travelers Update on the Bed Bug Wars: Importing Pheromone ...

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 Toronto, Ontario, Canada, Bed Bug ...

If you're dealing with a bedbug infestation but you don't want to bomb your home with nasty chemicals (that might not work anyway), you've got a new option. Researchers from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Canada, have discovered a new, safe weapon against bedbugs that is a total game changer: A bedbug trap based on pheromones.

"This trap will help landlords, tenants, and pest-control professionals determine whether premises have a bedbug problem, so that they can treat it quickly," says Gerhard Gries, PhD, study author and professor of Animal Communication Ecology at Simon Fraser University. "It will also be useful for monitoring the treatment's effectiveness."

More From Rodale News: 5 Ways to Beat Bed Bugs

What's astonishing is the researchers' dedication to the cause. Gerhard's wife and fellow researcher, Regine Gries, MSc, used her own arms every week for five years to feed over a thousand bedbugs so that they could continue their research. Regine was the host because she is surprisingly immune to the bites and only suffers from a slight rash rather than the insane itching and swelling that most people face.

(This writer personally had an encounter with bed bugs. Let's just say the bedbugs won.)

More From Rodale News: 8 Bug Killers That Aren't Worth Your Money

Bedbug infestation is a serious concern, as these nasty biters are found everywhere including low-income housing, five-star hotels, movie theaters, libraries, and public transportation.

The researchers are currently working with Contech Enterprises Inc. to develop effective and affordable traps and infestation monitoring kits to be commercially available by next year. Contech is a Canada-based company that makes environmentally-friendly garden and agriculture products, such as insect lures and nontoxic animal repellants.

While the researchers develop a home product, Regine will continue to be buffet for the crawlers. "I'm not too thrilled about this," admits Regine, "but knowing how much this technology will benefit so many people, it's all worth it.

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kill bed bugs - The New Way to Kill Bedbugs | Rodale News