Check out the new “Bed Bug Supplement” in August’s PCT: Bed Bugs: A Market Opportunity, Pest Control Technology Magazine – August 2009.
I know: the title grates on us.
It’s hard to think of your itchy, costly nightmare with a blood-sucking parasite as someone else’s “market opportunity,” but it is to our advantage as bed bug sufferers if pest control companies take their work seriously, and become as educated as they can about bed bugs.
Inside the supplement, “Bed Bugs: Vectors of Human Disease?” by Jerome Goddard, “Bed Bug Business Concerns,” (an excerpt from the Bed Bug Handbook by Lawrence Pinto, Richard Cooper, and Sandra Kraft), and some new product information under “Bed Bug BYTES” (including a free “Bed Bugs: a Public Health Pest” poster by Bayer, in Spanish and English).
By far the most interesting item to our readers (and the most helpful to PCOs, in my opinion) will be Jerome Goddard’s article, with its tables showing bed bug bite reactions, the potential for disease transmission, and treatments for bed bug bites, all as noted by various researchers.
The section entitled “Bite Reactions” (54) is particularly important for pest professionals to read; you’d be surprised how many PCOs still think that everyone reacts to bed bug bites. And yet, as Goddard notes,
It seems that the usual response to a bed bug bite appears to be no reaction with a barely visible punctum at the location of the bite.
(Emphasis mine.)
Many pest control techs assume only the room in which a person complaining of bed bug bites sleeps is infested. These under-informed types probably also don’t read PCT, but hopefully their employers do.
Keeping in mind that this is all aimed at the PCO market, it is good to see well-researched information being conveyed about bed bugs, reactions to bed bug bites, and the potential of bed bugs as a disease vector.
