After a long day of sightseeing in a foreign city, you might be tempted to kick off your socks, sling your sweaty T-shirt across your hotel room room and flop down on the bed. Think again.
Dirty laundry acts as a powerful magnet for bedbugs, a study published in the journal Scientific Reports has found. Its authors have warned that a failure to securely pack away clothes while travelling may explain why populations of biting parasites have soared during the past decade.
The investigation showed that in the absence of a human host bedbugs close in on the second best option: the smell of human left behind on worn clothing.
“It is the first time human odour has been considered as a potential mechanism facilitating long distance dispersal in bedbugs,” said William Hentley, an ecologist at the University of Sheffield and first author on the paper.
The common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) went into decline in the 1980s and 90s, but has recently undergone an aggressive resurgence, with cases more than doubling in the UK during the past few years and even higher rates of infestation in the US. Some have have linked the problem to the increase in low cost air travel.
The latest work provided some insight into how bedbugs might be “hitchhiking” from one location to another. It found that bedbugs were twice as likely to aggregate on and inside tote bags containing soiled clothes as those containing clean clothes.
Bedbugs, which are around 5mm long, are visible to the naked eye. Before feeding they are a flattened oval shape and light brown, but after a blood meal, they swell up to become rounder and darker. They can survive for about six months without feeding.
Sleeping in an infested hotel room might leave you covered in bites and cast a shadow over your holiday, but it should be possible to avoid taking any mites with you, according to Hentley. “Bedbugs struggle to walk up smooth surfaces, so when I go traveling I always look for those smooth metal luggage racks to keep my suitcase on,” he said. “Failing that, I would keep my clothes in a big ziplock bag.”
