“Memorial Day means the start of summer and a holiday weekend filled with family fun, sun and travel for many Americans,” noted Missy Henriksen, vice president of public affairs for the NPMA. “Unfortunately, with travel comes the risk of encountering bed bugs, which our research proves have become more prevalent in public places, including hotels and motels, than ever before. Before packing up the car and hitting the road this year, remember to brush up on bed bug prevention tips to avoid inviting them home with you for summer vacation.”

Here are several tips from NPMA to help travelers remain bed bug-free this summer:

– At hotels, pull back sheets and inspect mattress seams for telltale bed bug stains. Inspect the entire room before unpacking, including sofas and chairs and behind the headboard. Notify management of anything suspect and change rooms or establishments immediately.

– If you need to change rooms, don’t move to a room adjacent or directly above or below the suspected infestation.

– Keep suitcases in plastic trash bags or protective covers during your stay to prevent bed bugs from nesting there.

– When home, inspect suitcases before bringing them into the house and vacuum them before storing.

– Wash clothes – even those not worn – in hot water to eliminate any bed bugs and their eggs.

– Consumers suspecting an infestation should contact a licensed pest professional.

For more information, please visit www.allthingsbedbugs.org .

EXCELSIOR SPRINGS, MO - A former teacher at Excelsior Springs High School is suing the district, saying officials at the school sprayed for bugs so much that it made her sick.

Lois Thomas said school officials sprayed a lot at the building where she used to teach family consumer science. She said the spraying continued after she told officials that it was causing her health problems.

Thomas said after her health problems began, she started to keep a record of when it would happen. The record said the trouble only happened at school.

“I’m not having the muscle spasms, the heart palpitations, the rashes,” she said. “Since I’ve left, all those things have cleared up.”

Thomas said her doctor wrote a letter to the district asking that it stop spraying pesticides in her room. The district did stop spraying in her classroom, but continued to spray in other places in the building that she used, including a teacher’s lounge.

“I did think they were spraying excessively,” she said. “At one point, there were five different sprays in 35 days.”

According to her lawyer, school records showed that the district spent $24,000 spraying for bugs during the last school year when Thomas was there. She said bugs were not a problem at the school, even in her classroom.

“If anything would have bugs, it would be where there were five kitchens and a food pantry,” she said. “We had 500 kids running around every day.”

Her lawsuit charges the district with discrimination because she said it didn’t do enough to handle the problem.

She said one administrator kidded her like she was “The Bubble Boy” who got sick from everything.

“I mean, it really wasn’t funny, because I was dealing with a lot of health issues at this point,” she said.

Thomas said her lawyer has not served the district with any paperwork announcing the lawsuit. The district did not comment about the lawsuit or the complaint.

According to a pesticide industry trade association, Missouri has no state laws governing the use and spraying of pesticides on school property.

Chicago Bed Bug Control

Malaria-carrying mosquitoes in Africa and India are becoming resistant to insecticides, putting millions of lives at greater risk and threatening eradication efforts, health experts said on Tuesday.

While existing prevention measures such as mosquito nets treated with insecticide and indoor spraying are still effective, experts said tight surveillance and rapid response strategies were needed to prevent more resistance developing.

Despite decades of efforts to beat it with insecticides, bednets and combination drugs, malaria still kills more than 650,000 people a year, most of them babies and young children in sub-Saharan Africa.

Because the disease is spread by Anopheles mosquitoes, insecticides are a vital part of controlling it.

Publishing a plan to help countries tackle the threat, the World Health Organization’s global malaria program said resistance had been detected in 64 countries.

“We think we’re ahead of the curve. The tools we have today work extremely well in almost all settings, so we don’t want people throwing their hands up in the air and saying this is a catastrophe,” Robert Newman, the program’s director, told Reuters.

“But we have identified resistance, it is a problem out there, and we need to take urgent and concerted action to make sure we maintain the effectiveness of the tools.”

The WHO recommends four main classes of insecticides, the most common of which are pyrethroids. But resistance to at least one of these classes has now been detected in all regions where the disease is endemic.

Resistence Spreads

A study published last year found that mosquitoes in one region of Senegal swiftly developed resistance to bednets treated with deltamethrin, a pyrethroid.

WHO director general Margaret Chan said the levels of resistance found in Africa and India were of greatest concern.

“These countries are characterized by high levels of malaria transmission and widespread reports of resistance,” she said in a statement. In some places there was resistance to all four classes of insecticide.

The WHO plan says each country at risk must analyze the extent of resistance and design a pre-emptive management strategy as part of its national malaria control effort, rather than waiting for resistance to increase.

Experts estimate the cost of the global plan at more than $200 million a year, including research into insecticide resistance, research and development of new insecticides, and putting in place management strategies.

“We need to think of this as a long-term investment and look at what the costs would be if we did nothing,” said Newman.

WHO estimates that malaria costs the African economy alone $12 billion every year, a multiple of the annual $1.5 billion spent globally on the fight against malaria.

“If, for example, we were to lose pyrethroids and not be able to use them any more, then malaria control could become very expensive very quickly,” Newman said.

“But if we buy ourselves many more years of being able to use them – by responding quickly when we find resistance and proactively putting in strategies to stop the emergence of resistance – then the overall price tag for malaria control … is likely to be lower.”

The German cockroach is by far the most important and usually the most common of the cockroaches. In addition to being a nuisance, the German cockroach has been implicated in outbreaks of illness and allergic reactions in many people. This species has worldwide distribution.

Habits

German cockroaches can be found throughout structures but show a preference for warm and humid places. They are usually found in kitchens and secondarily in bathrooms, but infestations often occur in rooms where people eat and drink

Habitat

German cockroaches prefer to live in cracks and crevices near food sources and spend 75% of their time in such harborages. German cockroaches prefer to live close to sources of food and water, hence their affinity for residential and commercial kitchen environments.

Threats

Cockroaches have been reported to spread at least 33 kinds of bacteria, six kinds of parasitic worms, and at least seven other kinds of human pathogens. They can pick up germs on the spines of their legs and bodies as they crawl through decaying matter or sewage and then carry these into food or onto food surfaces. Germs that cockroaches eat from decaying matter or sewage are protected while in their bodies and may remain infective for several weeks longer than if they had been exposed to cleaning agents, rinse water, or just sunlight and air. Medical studies have shown that cockroach allergens cause lots of allergic reactions, especially in children. They were even shown t cause asthma in children. These allergens build up in deposits of droppings, secretions, cast skins, and dead bodies of roaches.

Guest Post via Hulett Environmental Services

http://mediaserver.gie.net/v/3503/s/9

18 employees and friends braved the damp weather Saturday morning to run and walk the 5 Km course from the old Children’s Memorial Hospital in Lincoln Park to the new Lurie Children’s Hospital in downtown Chicago.  Smithereen’s team efforts helped to shatter the Lurie hospital’s overall fundraising goal of $1 Million.  And, of course, we had fun doing it. Team members included Carmen Ziebell (fastest walker), Sara Kantarovich, Alengta  Benjamin, Yvonne Govea, Steve Seifert, Matt Kluger (runner), Maria Khan and husband, Arbab Salahuddin, Leticia Fink and family – Andy and Diana, Cheryl Lipowski and family – Mark, Samantha and Madison,  Emily and Mark Kluger (runners) and bringing up the  rear Andy McCormack.

A dry and happy Smithereen Team – before the rain.

A happy Smithereen team finisher celebrating with a pickle on a stick

London, May 13 — Marks on a dead body could indicate violence and possible murder – but instead of a human killer, they might have been made by legions of insects.

Italian-born Stefano Vanin, forensic scientist at the University of Huddersfield, is unmasking minute creatures which contaminate crime scenes and throw sleuths off the scent and into drawing erroneous conclusions.

For example, ants which clamber over a corpse’s face can deposit marks which mimic the effects of a punch. Other tiny creatures can cause lesions to a dead body which closely resemble injuries left by a human assailant, says Vanin, the journal Forensic Science International reports.

It was the retrieval of the body of a 28-year-old man in the River Brenta, at Padova in Italy, that provided Vanin with the opportunity to add another piece to his jigsaw of knowledge, according to a Huddersfield statement.

The man had drowned – witnesses had seen him struggling in the water – and there were no signs of injury on the body. But during the autopsy, a series of small abrasions in the upper eyelids were discovered.

These were caused by large numbers of amphipods — tiny, eyeless crustaceans which had been feeding on the body and were discovered when the corpse was pulled out of the water.

This enabled Vanin and his colleagues to analyse and record the post-mortal damage caused by the amphipods. The marks were very similar to those deposited by ants on dry land.

As a result, when detectives and forensic scientists are examining future corpses recovered from fresh water, they can fall back on Vanin’s data to explain unusual markings on the body.