Bed Bugs Can Be Brought Home From Your Vacation or Business Trip.

The holiday season is fast approaching and the last thing you want to deal with when you get home besides your dirty laundry are bed bugs. Bed bugs are great hitch-hikers and can find their way to your home in your luggage or the clothing you wear home.

Be Proactive.

“Bed bugs found on vacation”.

You arrive at your hotel and check in. When you enter your room for the first time, leave your bags at the door and pull the bed or beds away from the wall and inspect the mattress, box spring and head board. Look for black spots which could be faecal spots, look for exoskeletons or the discarded skin, dead bed bugs or live bed bugs. If you find something that you feel doesn’t belong on the bed then you have every right to ask for another room and don’t feel bad about saying they may have bed bugs in that room. Believe me, you are doing the hotel management and the brand name a favour by alerting them to the potential bed bug infestation awaiting unsuspecting guests. If the room passes inspection then bring your bags in and place on the luggage rack provided or the dresser. Do not leave your bags on the floor. Some travellers actually put their bags in the bath tub.

You can inspect every inch of your hotel room and still pick up bed bugs.

You and your travelling companion can spend hours inspecting your room and find nothing. This could be one of two reasons. One, the bed bugs are hiding in the carpeting or under the base boards or two, the room is clean. So you find nothing and you feel good about your due diligence so you go down stairs to the lounge and sit down for a snack or beverage and unbeknownst to you, a hungry bed bug is waiting for someone like you to sit in the lounge chair. It starts climbing on you and finds its way to your pocket or the cuff of your pants. Perhaps you take a taxi or public transit during your stay or you take in a movie. If your number comes up and it’s your time to bring home a bed bug, there is really nothing you can do to stop them from following you home. There is however something you can do to stop them from getting into your home.

When You Get Home, The Bug Stops Here.

If you live in a house with a garage, bring your bags into the garage. Have a house coat waiting for you there. Undress and Take all of your belongings or at least the stuff that can go into the dryer and place the articles into the dryer on high heat for twenty (20) minutes on high heat. This will kill all stages of the bed bug. Don’t overload the dryer. Do a few loads. Then after everything has gone through the dryer you can wash your whites and colours separately. You can bring bed bugs home on your shoes. I find loose shoes will sometimes jam the dryer and stop it from spinning. Your shoes should be placed in a laundry bag or in a pillow case.  If you don’t want your dress shoes scuffed you should place one shoe per pillow case. Place your empty luggage in a plastic bag and close with a twist tie or knot and leave it in the garage until needed again. If you live in an apartment or condo you should undress when you get into your unit and if you have a clothes dryer in your unit you do the same thing as above.

Bed Bugs Are Here To Stay.

The bed bug pandemic is only going to get worse. There is no silver bullet, no magic pesticide or repellent that will wipe out bed bugs for good. You will always find someone who is ready to point fingers because someone has bed bugs. “It’s your fault, you brought them in” or ” I didn’t have them before you came here”. The fact is, finger pointing is not productive in the war on bed bugs. It could have been you who brought them in from your friend’s house etc. Everyone has to take ownership of this problem and instead of pointing fingers what you should be doing is working together to combat the parasites and returning your home to a pest free environment.

Not All New Bumps or Welts Are Caused by Bed Bugs

Remember, if you were travelling down south you could have received those bites or welts from mosquitoes or fleas or just by sitting in the grass and touching a weed that you react adversely to. And doctors have totally dropped that ball on this issue. I have seen doctors tell their patient that the welts on their body are caused by bed bugs when they aren’t even bites or saying that hives or chicken pocks are bed bug bites. The truth is that even if you go to a dermatologist, the doctor can tell you that the marks on your body are caused by an insect with piercing/sucking mouth parts such as the bed bug has. The same mouth parts found on fleas or mosquitoes but the doctor can’t tell you from which insect it was. There is one way to determine if it was bed bugs and that is with a protein analysis. When a bed bug bites you it’s not the hole that they drill that you react to but rather the anticoagulant they inject into you that makes the blood flow up their straw easier. It is the protein within the blood thinner that you react to and that protein in the bed bug is different than that of the flea or mosquito but no doctor will give you the test. I don’t even know if there is a test out there at all.

If you get home from vacation and you have marks on you and want to know for sure, we do what we like to call a “Peace of Mind” inspection. We bring one of our specially trained dogs in to inspect your home and with about a 95% accuracy we can tell you if you have them or not.

Please contact us at [email protected] or visit our website at: www.puritypestcontrol.com

Purity Pest Control was the first company in the world to train and deploy dogs for the purpose of detecting bed bugs.