De(bed)bugging: help is on the way.

Long time Pink Slip readers know that I have been on the bed bug case for a good long while. My first post was way back in 2008, and I’ve been at it since, with subsequent posts on bed bug tracking dogs, and even a public service announcement penned after my husband and I got nipped by the pesky pests on a September 2010 trip to NYC. For months, we lived in a State of Fear that we had brought one back with us – a pregnant one, of course – and  infested our condo. Hundreds of dollars (and a full two months) later – new pillows, bedbug proof pillow cases and mattress cover, a bed bug detector, cedar spray – we finally got a good night’s sleep.

Still, I know that some in my family persist in their belief that I remain obsessed with bed bugs.

Thus, my Christmas gift this year from my wonderfully good-humored niece Molly was a stuffed bed bug, pictured here, posed on my otherwise bed bug free duvet cover.

While I wholeheartedly deny that I am obsessed with bed bugs - absurd, that – I will concede that I keep up with the latest bb news with admittedly keen interest. Recognizing this, my brother-in-law Rick e-mailed me when he saw an article in a recent Economist that help may be on its long overdue way.

At first, the article painted a grim picture about the “vampiric” little buggers that can “drink seven times their own weight in blood in a night”, that continue to plague hoteliers (and flat-dwellers) in New York City, and that are growing concern to hotel staff (and guests) elsewhere. But while everyone is looking for bed bugs – and I can sympathize and empathize with those on the hunt – they’re difficult to find:

Even trained pest-control inspectors can miss them. What is needed is a way to flush them into the open. And James Logan, Emma Weeks and their colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Rothamsted Research think they have one: a bed-bug trap baited with something the bugs find irresistible—the smell of their own droppings.

I’ll all for whatever works, and:

The reason the bugs are attracted to this smell is that they use it to navigate back to their hidey-holes after a night of feeding.

Having discovered that shit happens to be a good way to woo bed bugs, Dr. Logan has designed a trap. Since the team is understandably hoping to cash in on their idea, the details are scant. But it sounds like it might be like those mouse-traps with the glue pan. I once trapped a kitchen mouse with one of these, and I have to say that, once I found the little critter squirming around trying to free itself, I wish I’d chosen the trickier but quicker old-fashion spring the trap and break its neck approach. I assure you that one does not feel good putting a glue-stuck mouse in a couple of plastic bags and crushing it underfoot.

Trapping bed bugs in glue I would feel less guilty about. They’re only around today because we had to protect the environment by banning DDT. They’re the collateral damage of this ban. To hell with them.

I hope I never need to use one of their traps, but I am thrilled that the London researchers are doing something to de-bug the world.