Bed bugs: from holiday to home

From The Times today:

"“Bed bugs are having a global resurgence,” William Hentley, from Sheffield University, said. “There’s quite a lot of research looking at how they disperse in apartment buildings, but very little is currently known about how they get from one country to another.”

"We assumed they hitchhiked on humans, but how? For an experiment published in the journal Scientific Reports, he and his colleagues decided to investigate. They had a hunch that the weak link may not be humans, but their smelly luggage. Members of his laboratory spent a day wearing clothes, then piled them in a heap in a room with an infestation. In an identical room they did the same, but with clean clothes.

“We found twice as many bugs on bags containing dirty clothes,” Dr Hentley said. Thanks to the smell, they “found what they thought was a human host.” Then the human takes the bag home, and the bed bugs spread."

I notice they found bedbugs in all the clothes, dirty or not.

We normally take a plastic bin bag and store dirty laundry in that. Probably the slippery sides would be a deterrent .. if we ever frequented the kind of establishment likely to house cimex lectularius.

"Dr Hentley said that when he travels he now keeps a tightly sealed bag, and tries to put it on metal luggage racks, as bed bugs can’t climb shiny surfaces."

The bane of our lives is usually the whining mosquito.

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Weird fact from the Wikipedia page: "DNA from human blood meals can be recovered from bed bugs for up to 90 days, which mean they can be used for forensic purposes in identifying on whom the bed bugs have fed."

Here's my tip, which depends on a successful genome to facial appearance mapping. Collect blood-DNA from the collected insects, transcribe each separate genome and reverse-engineer facial appearance. Compare with photos of the prime target. You've identified his or her genome.