Taking the Bite Out of the Bedbug, But Safely

The good news is that you're such a hot topic, 30 Rock dedicated a good portion of an entire episode talking about you.

The bad news is that you're a bedbug, and newfound pop culture buzz notwithstanding, everyone would still like to kill you.

Bedbugs have been an increasingly notorious problem over the past few years, particularly in New York City. Infestations are widespread and tough to deal with. But fortunately, the highly toxic path of extermination may actually be less effective than cleaner, safer methods of preventing the problem, or of eradicating the problem that has moved in uninvited.

As Scientific American reports, cities such as New York that are replete with aging building stock are vulnerable to bedbugs. They will take advantage of nooks, crannies, cracks and crevices that form and widen over time, they move into them, move around through them, make sweet bedbug love within them and have countless litters of more bedbugs therein.

But some simple housekeeping arrangements combined with nontoxic eradication methods have been determined to be as effective, and sometimes more effective, at removing pests or preventing them from coming in in the first place.

Scientific American reports that such alternative pest control methods that fall within integrated pest management techniques can be top performers. That's according to recent findings staked out collaboratively by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Columbia University and the New York City Department of Housing, who have looked at the bedbug problem in addition to problems posed by other unwanted hangers-on such as cockroaches, mice and rats.

Such nontoxic tactics as raising the bed, filling in cracks and crevices, and applying harmless common substances that bedbugs don't much care for in the places that they love all combine to be just as or even more effective than hiring an exterminator to fumigate a living space with a brew of chemicals that will kill bugs, but that may also cause a range of respiratory or other health problems.

No one wants the bedbugs to bite, of course. But the cure shouldn't bite either.

Photo courtesy of Centers for Disease Control, via Wikimedia Commons