Waking up in the morning and seeing bites on your body caused by bed bugs and blood stains on your bed sheets can be a horrifying experience.
Trying to get rid of these pest can also give you nightmares because bed bugs are by far and away the most difficult pest to control in today’s world. There is no simple way to eliminate bed bugs and treatments can be highly disruptive, labor intensive and expensive.
Fortunately, researchers from Simon Fraser University (SFU) are hard at work and may have found a solution for these pests – a set of chemical attractants, or pheromones, that lure bed bugs into traps and keep them there.
Gerhard Gries and Regine Gries are biologist at the university and they have been working with SFU chemist Robert Britton. This research team has concluded a series of successful trials in bed bug-infested apartments in Metro Vancouver. Their research was recently published in Angewandte Chemie, a leading general chemistry journal.
The research team’s goal is to develop the first effective and affordable bait and trap for detecting and monitoring bedbug infestations. If successful, they expect it to be commercially available in 2016.
Gerhard said, “This trap will help landlords, tenants, and pest-control professionals determine whether premises have a bedbug problem, so that they can treat it quickly. It will also be useful for monitoring the treatment’s effectiveness.”
The world has been waiting for a solution like this and if these baits and traps are proven effective overtime, it will be great news for everyone.
