13 April 2016
Bed bugs might be developing
thicker "skins" to help them survive exposure to common insecticides.
Human population growth and
international travel have helped the bug become a source of irritation in hotel
rooms around the world.
Insecticides are the most common
way to kill them, but they have rapidly developed resistance.
Now, an Australian team writing
in Plos One journal thinks it has found one of the reasons why.
Killing resistant strains of the
bug may require concentrations 1,000 times larger than those needed to
eliminate non-resistant creatures.
Infestations have spread to homes
and offices and the bugs are extremely hard to get rid of once they gain a
foothold.
They can survive for up to a year
without feeding and a single fertilised female can infest a whole building.
While they were a common part of
life in the 1940s and 50s, the introduction of DDT and other powerful
insecticides initially restricted their populations.
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