Bugs at North Mianus school weren't bedbugs

The bugs found last month at North Mianus School weren't bedbugs after all, but instead a rare, closely related type of insect that feasts on the blood of birds.

The vampire-like critters are called chimney swift bugs (cimexopsis nyctalis), according to a letter sent by the school district to North Mianus parents last week.

The bugs are named after the type of bird from which they usually feed.

"It is in the bed bug family, but is not a `bed bug,' " states the letter, which was obtained by Greenwich Time. "It does not feed on humans; it feeds on birds. These bugs are very small and have very similar characteristics and are often confused with bed bugs."

Dr. Gail Ridge, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station's Department of Entomology, alerted the district about the type of bugs found in the school after the department received samples following the discovery.

The insects are not often seen, said Ridge, who explained that the department maintains an extensive collection of insects found in Connecticut. The last chimney swift bug sample to be collected dates back to 1942, she said.

"They're fast little runners," she said. "They have very short beaks, designed to go through the skin of birds. Basically, it's a portable straw."

Exterminators were called to the school Jan. 30 after the discovery of what were believed to be bedbugs, which feed on human blood. The first discovery came on Jan. 25, the same day the school district held a bedbug forum during which Ridge was a featured speaker.

The North Mianus findings were the first such discoveries of bedbug-like insects since last year, when bedbugs were found at Hamilton Avenue School on four separate occasions.

In a departure from their name, the insects found at North Mianus School were left behind not by chimney swifts, but by pigeons nesting in the school's exhaust and chimney.

"The chimney offered a vertical route for (the bugs) to move," said Ridge, who is also chair of the Connecticut Coalition Against Bed Bugs.

"It was kind of a treasure trove," she said of the discovery.

District spokeswoman Kim Eves said in late January that workers from Parkway Exterminating, based in Valhalla, N.Y., searched and treated the impacted area of North Mianus School. The insects were first found in a staff bathroom, and two days later, three other live bugs were found in a classroom, in and around carpet squares stored near a wall that separates the staff bathroom and the classroom. The exterminators discarded the carpet squares and also opened up a section of the wall between the two rooms to steam clean and vacuum it, Eves said.

The high heat from steam cleaning kills bedbugs and is often used to treat large areas, such as schools.

The school's vent and chimney were cleaned this week by an exterminator while students are on winter break, according to the letter from the school district. The exterminator will install a mesh barrier on the vent and chimney to prevent further nesting of birds.

The bathroom and classroom were closed Feb 1., Eves said.

"All expectations are that the students will be back in the classroom Tuesday," she said.

Active bedbug monitors placed in the school following the discovery revealed no evidence of insects Feb. 6, according to the letter.

Monitoring of the attic will continue until there is no further evidence of chimney swift bugs, according to the letter.

http://www.greenwichtime.com/news/article/Bugs-at-North-Mianus-school-weren-t-bedbugs-3338906.php#ixzz1mjqAzBBI

Bed bugs protect their sperm from bacteria

Bed bugs protect their sperm against sexually transmitted infections by producing germ-busting ejaculates, scientists have found.

Bacteria covering bed bugs' bodies are transmitted to the female, along with the sperm, during mating.

The new work shows that without the protection of antibacterial agents in the bug's ejaculate, 40% of sperm die.

The results were presented at the 13th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology.

Bed bugs, and the related bat bugs that live in African caves, are renowned for their bizarre sex lives.

'Traumatic insemination'
Males, instead of penetrating the female's vagina, pierce her underside and deposit sperm inside the female, where it swims through the insect's blood system to the ovaries to fertilise the eggs.

Female bed bugs protect themselves against the diseases that males transmit with a structure on their bellies that guides the penis into a mass of germ-fighting cells.

Males, it seems, have also evolved a way to fend off the effects of sexually transmitted infections, evolutionary biologist Oliver Otti from the University of Sheffield, UK, told conference attendees in Germany.

Suspecting that males load their ejaculates with proteins that protect sperm, Dr Otti carefully extracted sperm from a number of male bed bugs, being sure not to mix it with the seminal fluid that usually makes up the rest of the ejaculate.

He then mixed the sperm with a "soup" of micro-organisms that he had collected from the outer skin of the bed bugs.

To half of these samples he added lysozyme, a bacteria-killing enzyme known to be active in bed bugs, and saw that 40% more sperm survived in its presence.

Females didn't gain any protection from these introduced bacteria-busting enzymes, he explained; the presence of lysozyme in the ejaculate seemed to be purely to protect sperm.

But other work by Dr Otti's colleague Michael Siva-Jothy, who is also based at the University of Sheffield, shows that females protect themselves from the infections introduced during sex with their own lysozymes.

In fact, females ramp up their lysozyme activity just before they are about to feed. Dr Siva-Jothy explained that this is probably because in the bed bug world, feeding is generally always followed by mating.

"Wounding is a very frequent event during and after copulation, and generally genitals are not that clean, " Dr Otti told BBC News.

He explained that the research that has focused on human sexual transmitted diseases has tended to ignore the microbes that coexist with us on our skin; these microbes are likely also transferred during sex.

"It is not clear what the cost of having them around is," Dr Otti added.

The advantage of studying bed bugs, he said, is that we share many components of our immune system. As a result, scientists can learn much from manipulating the bugs' sex lives to study the consequences on lifespan and offspring production - some of these trade-offs could be relevant to humans.
By Jennifer Carpenter Science reporter, BBC News, Tuebingen, Germany
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14716106

Google building infested by bed bugs

They are reddish-brown, smaller than an apple seed, have a taste for human blood and when they bite they itch like hell. And now the onward march of the common bedbug has extended into cyberspace.

The search engine giant Google confirmed today that its 9th Avenue offices in Manhattan have been infested with the bugs. Parts of the headquarters, a futuristic space renowned for having a Lego room and scooters for staff to move around, have been found to be harbouring the parasites, prompting the wags at Gawker media group to wonder whether its possible for them to spread via the internet.

Google is the latest victim of an epidemic that has been rampaging through New York over the summer and has the city that normally prides itself on its permanent state of cool in a veritable panic: the blood suckers have wreaked havoc everywhere from the Empire State building to hospital wards, the prosecutor's office in Brooklyn and Time Warner's Manhattan headquarters.

Nobody is immune to the threat, from theatre-goers to dwellers in posh Manhattan condominiums and shoppers. Hollister, the teen clothing store, had to close its flagship outlet in SoHo after employees complained they were being bitten.

The outbreak at Google was disclosed by one of its marketing staff who posted the news on her Twitter feed. "Jeepers, I am not immune to the bedbug panic. Bedbugs have been found at work."

The feed has now been taken down.

Across the city, there has been a two-thirds increase in the number of bedbug cases reported over the past two years, with almost 13,000 calls to the city's helpline over the past 12 months. Last year, a survey suggested one in 15 New Yorkers had become victims, a proportion that is likely to have risen since. Experts put the spread down to the decline in use of the chemical DDT, which was banned in 1972. The US environmental protection agency warned last month of an "alarming resurgence" of bed bugs that was overwhelming public health authorities.The agency has promised to search for a new generation of safe pesticides strong enough to eradicate them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/03/google-infested-bed-bugs

Google building infested by bed bugs

They are reddish-brown, smaller than an apple seed, have a taste for human blood and when they bite they itch like hell. And now the onward march of the common bedbug has extended into cyberspace.

The search engine giant Google confirmed today that its 9th Avenue offices in Manhattan have been infested with the bugs. Parts of the headquarters, a futuristic space renowned for having a Lego room and scooters for staff to move around, have been found to be harbouring the parasites, prompting the wags at Gawker media group to wonder whether its possible for them to spread via the internet.

Google is the latest victim of an epidemic that has been rampaging through New York over the summer and has the city that normally prides itself on its permanent state of cool in a veritable panic: the blood suckers have wreaked havoc everywhere from the Empire State building to hospital wards, the prosecutor's office in Brooklyn and Time Warner's Manhattan headquarters.

Nobody is immune to the threat, from theatre-goers to dwellers in posh Manhattan condominiums and shoppers. Hollister, the teen clothing store, had to close its flagship outlet in SoHo after employees complained they were being bitten.

The outbreak at Google was disclosed by one of its marketing staff who posted the news on her Twitter feed. "Jeepers, I am not immune to the bedbug panic. Bedbugs have been found at work."

The feed has now been taken down.

Across the city, there has been a two-thirds increase in the number of bedbug cases reported over the past two years, with almost 13,000 calls to the city's helpline over the past 12 months. Last year, a survey suggested one in 15 New Yorkers had become victims, a proportion that is likely to have risen since. Experts put the spread down to the decline in use of the chemical DDT, which was banned in 1972. The US environmental protection agency warned last month of an "alarming resurgence" of bed bugs that was overwhelming public health authorities.The agency has promised to search for a new generation of safe pesticides strong enough to eradicate them.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/sep/03/google-infested-bed-bugs