How can bed bugs spread from person to person

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Learn more about the types of cookies we use by reviewing our updated Privacy Policy. How easily do bed bugs spread? How far can bed bugs travel? Way 1: How fast do bed bugs spread from room to room? Way 2: How do bed bugs spread from house to house? Movement of items: Bed bugs can move from one site to the next by traveling on luggage, clothing, bedding, boxes and furniture. They're prevalent anywhere that has a high rate of overnight guests, including universities and hospitals.

Crawling: Bed bugs don't fly, but they can crawl at a pretty high speed with six legs. Traveling three to four feet per minute on most surfaces, they're capable of moving at speeds equivalent of the average adult sprinting relative to their size.

This makes it easy for bed bugs to travel between floors and rooms, and quickly tuck into a new hiding spot before being seen. Breeding: After feeding, bed bugs head back to their hidden locations to digest and mate. If the conditions are right, an egg can mature into an adult in as little as a month and a half, and each bed bug could live anywhere from four months to over a year. Bed bugs are focused on feeding and breeding and will invade and multiply at lightning speed as a result.

Way 3: How do bed bugs spread from person to person? How to stop the spread of bed bugs? Environmental Protection Agency says the following strategies are the most effective for keeping an infestation from spreading: Place any infested household items in a tight, sealed plastic bag, and take them out of your home immediately. Use heat treatment, cold treatment, steam or the help of a pest management professional like Terminix to treat these items.

Vacuum common bed bug hiding spots, including the cracks and crevices of walls and baseboards as well as the areas around electrical outlets and light switches and the seams of furniture and mattresses. Discard the vacuum bag in a sealed plastic bag. Seal all mattresses with plastic covers. Ideally, use a light-colored plastic cover to make it easier to spot bed bugs or bed bug eggs on your bed.

The best way to prevent bed bugs is regular inspection for the signs of an infestation. This information is not meant to be used for self-diagnosis or as a substitute for consultation with a health care provider. If you have any questions about the parasites described above or think that you may have a parasitic infection, consult a health care provider.

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She will lay about eggs over the course of the first month. Since her laying is spread out, by the end of the month there will be roughly 50 or 60 nymphs developing bed bugs and eggs waiting to be hatched.

By the end of the second month, the adult population will have grown to around 10 breeding adults with about developing bed bugs in various stages, and numerous eggs. At this point, you should start to notice small reddish-brown color dots on your bedding and mattress, and may start to see small dark specks of dirt, as well as other minute particles.

Catching bed bugs at this stage is beneficial, as things start to get out of hand by the end of the third month. The bed bug population explodes during the third month of infestation.

By now the colony has grown to over breeding adults, 1,s of developing nymphs, and eggs. In addition, some of the adult bed bugs will start to migrate to other rooms within the home, since they can survive for several months without a meal. Attractive traps can also be used in highly infested locations [ 18 ]. It is always best to vacuum first to reduce the overall bedbug population, but complete success is unlikely without remnant insecticides for residual protection against bedbug survivors.

Fumigants, which are too frequently used by nonprofessionals, do not penetrate deeply into bedbug hiding places, fail to provide any residual protection, and can pose an immediate health risk to the user. Aerosolized insecticides against cockroaches, for example, are quick killing agents that can be accurately applied meticulously to specific areas eg, mattress or cracks and crevices in furniture.

The best option is a remnant insecticide, which is spread by a professional in all hiding areas identified during the inspection process. Sometimes, it may be advisable to treat adjoining rooms, even when no bedbugs were found during the inspection [ 12 , 16 ]. Some methods can minimize the risk of infestation or expansion: regular inspections, hygiene procedures, and general education of the population. Complementary measures include modifying room temperature, destroying nearby bat or bird habitats, eliminating peeling paint and plaster, and caulking cracks and crevices in walls and furniture [ 16 , 19 ].

After identification of bedbug bites, skin and infectious transmissible diseases are the 2 main medical concerns of human contact with the bedbugs [ 20 , 21 ]. Hosts are usually bitten at night.

Because bedbug saliva contains anesthetic compounds, bites are painless and usually not felt until several hours later. Other compounds are also injected: anticoagulant factors eg, factor-X inhibitor , vasodilatory compounds such as nitric oxide , and proteolytic enzymes eg, apyrase , which are all substances that participate in the ensuing local hypersensitivity reactions [ 6 ].

The typical skin lesion is a pruritic erythematous maculopapule, 5 mm to 2 cm in diameter, with a central hemorrhagic crust or vesicle at the bite site, similar to arthropod bites.

Atypical forms vary from asymptomatic or pauci-symptomatic to purpuric, vesicular, and bullous lesions. The bedbug-bite distribution frequently follows a line or curve Figure 5 A and 5B. Lesion numbers range from several to many, depending on habitat-infestation intensity, and are preferentially located in unclothed zones Figure 5 C. Sometimes, the eruption mimics urticaria Figure 5D.

Exceptional anemia [ 21 ] or anaphylactic reactions have been reported. Lesions resolve spontaneously within 2—6 weeks, but permanent postinflammatory hyperpigmentation may ensue [ 22 — 25 ]. Presentation of bedbug Cimex lecturarius or Cimex hemipterus bites: forms vary from asymptomatic or pauci-symptomatic to purpuric, vesicular, and bullous lesions. The typical skin lesion is a pruritic erythematous maculopapule that is 5 mm to 2 cm in diameter with a central hemorrhagic crust or vesicle at the bite site, similar to other arthropod bites A.

A series of bites in a line is characteristic of bedbug bites B. Lesion numbers range from a few to numerous, depending on habitat-infestation intensity, and are preferentially located in unclothed zones C. In some cases, the eruption mimics urticaria D.

Hiding places of begbugs Cimex lecturarius or Cimex hemipterus. An efficient search-and-destroy operation against bedbugs A must start by removing the mattress B and box springs C , then by exploring the floor close to the bed D and curtains E, F to identify and destroy eggs, nymphs, and adults.

Bedbugs have been suspected of transmitting infectious agents; over 40 microorganisms have frequently been considered strong candidates [ 6 , 7 ]. In contrast to that for mosquitoes or ticks, the literature evidence level for disease transmission by bedbugs is very heterogeneous and sometimes incomplete. Several steps are mandatory to demonstrate the causal relationship between a vector and a disease. The first is vector competence—that is, an attempt must be made to demonstrate by laboratory experiments an arthropod's ability to acquire an infectious agent from another animal or infected blood, to maintain or amplify it, and then to transmit it to another animal [ 26 ].

Only successful demonstration of all of these abilities permits consideration of the vector as competent, but this remains insufficient to designate an arthropod as an effective vector for a defined infectious agent.

Vector competence is invariable for a defined arthropod—pathogen couple. This type of study, which is conducted in the wild, enables assessment of the potential vectorial capacity with a mathematical algorithm that includes the number of infected arthropods and the number of bites per night and per person [ 26 ]. Vectorial capacity varies for a defined arthropod—microbe couple.

In considering bedbugs as vectors of infectious diseases, older studies in scientific literature mainly consist of logical but not evidence-based postulates [ 7 ]. Epidemiological links between human-disease prevalence in a population and bedbug presence, or infectious agent detection in wild bedbugs, without data concerning acquisition, multiplication, or transmission, led some authors to examine bedbug vectorial capacity [ 7 , 27 ].

Table 1 lists 45 pathogens reportedly found in bedbugs without considering study quality and classifies bedbug—pathogen couples according to their vectorial competence eg, acquisition, maintenance, and transmission and vectorial capacity eg, reasoning and detection in the wild criteria, with a summary of each study's results.

Classification of 45 microbes bacteria, fungi, parasites, and viruses in alphabetical order. For each pathogen, studies are classified according to vectorial competence acquisition, maintenance, and transmission and vectorial capacity reasoning and detection in the wild. We intentionally listed a maximum of investigations without considering their quality to compare the process of studies. For each cell, no means negative results or failure, yes means positive results or success, and a blank cell means no published study was found.

Q fever is a cosmopolite disease transmitted by aerosolization of C. In the s, bedbugs were successfully infected by feeding on infected guinea pigs [ 29 ]. In an epidemiological study conducted by the same author at the same period [ 30 ] around Leningrad Russia , C. The results of the first study suggested that the insect was able to acquire, replicate, transmit to progeny, and excrete C. Thus, hypothetical vectorial competence of possible pathogen transmission to another animal has to be considered.

An apparent relationship between high Q fever prevalence in the Leningrad population and bedbug infestation could be an epidemiological argument supporting vectorial capacity, but it remains questionable, because many confounding factors may intervene; for example, it is known that ticks are also a potential Q fever vector [ 31 ]. Finally, the potential ability of bedbugs to transmit C.

Wolbachia spp among Anaplasmataceae bacteria are obligate intracellular bacterial symbionts that change the reproductive capacities of many arthropod and filarial nematode hosts. This effect has enhanced medical and scientific interest in view of new therapeutic options.

Wolbachia spp have been detected in most tested C. Transovarial transmission to future generations has been established. Thus, arguments supporting bedbug vectorial competence and capacity to spread this ubiquitous microorganism exist, but its human pathogenicity remains unknown. More knowledge is needed before Wolbachia spp can be used as a weapon to control bedbugs eg, through sterilization, which is required for symbiosis [ 32 — 36 ]. Aspergillus spp, along with various other molds eg, Penicillium spp and Scopulariopsis spp and bacteria eg, Enterobacter spp and Staphylococcus spp , have been found on bedbugs.

Like any biting or walking insect such as cockroaches , bedbugs can be very good transporters and thus can participate in spreading molds [ 37 ]. Phoresy is the passive transportation of some pathogens by a carrier. To our knowledge, only such passive carriage could be a route of fungus transmission by bedbugs, but a real epidemiological impact remains to be proven.

Bedbugs and kissing bugs have many similarities: both have reflexive feces excretion after a blood meal, which is an important behavioral feature responsible for transcutaneous T. Indeed, scratching pruritic bites facilitates mechanical entry of parasites contained in bedbug feces into bite sites. Moreover, Latin American biotopes of the 2 bugs live in proximity in the wild and around or in houses, and contacts between the 2 insects are frequent, mostly in rural areas or poor districts, where T.

Pertinently, T. Moreover, in experimental laboratory studies, after eating an infectious meal, the bedbug had acquired the parasite, which replicated and was detected in feces [ 39 ]. Transstadial transmission has also been proven, and Azevedo et al [ 39 ] studied bedbug salivary glands to precisely describe their ultrastructure, as T. Thus, arguments supporting vectorial competence and capacity exist in the literature, and bedbug transmission to humans would not be unlikely.

To date, T. According to the literature, HBV is the best candidate for transmission by bedbugs.