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Bedbugs are not really BACK - because they've never really GONE!

They are minute mites which eat the skin cells we shed and which live in beds and carpets and other furniture. So they travel. If you buy a new bed they will travel onto the new bed from your carpet.

To keep them relatively under control you need to hoover your bed, carpets and other furniture regularly. It's also worthwhile buying anti-dustmite bed covers, bedding and pillows, which can be washed regularly. I have read that people who don't hoover regularly can actually have bedbugs which grow so big you can actually SEE them! Yuck!!!

Another good reason to hoover is because it is the dustmite droppings which people become allergic to and which make you sneeze, not the dustmites themselves.

As a BTW, in the last house we lived in, I kept being bitten by animal fleas! Yuck!

I told the nurse about it and said I didn't know where they were coming from! It turns out the previous tenants had cats, which had fleas, and they laid millions of flea eggs in the carpet. Apparently they can lay there, in a type of suspended animation, for years! Then I came along and turned up the heating to keep my asthmatic daughter warm . . . . . and the little buggers all started to hatch! Yuck!!!

Gross! I hate bugs and creepy-crawlies! Yeuch!!! :p

Ghads! I got bit by one of those nasty ticks once, mean old bugs...............

chonsigirl wrote: Ghads! I got bit by one of those nasty ticks once, mean old bugs...............


Yeah, me too! They bury themselves right down in your skin and the only way to kill them, I'm told, is to burn them! Yeuch!

Only bad thing about summer, lots of bugs!

(Don't read this post if you're suseptible to suggestion...............)

I was in Tanzania...on the Serengeti plain...at an "upper class" lodge, which means the sheets should've been clean!

In the middle of the night, I woke with a FIREY ITCH on the right side of my body! Out in the middle of the African night...you don't have electricity....so, I got out my flashlight and looked at my skin.

OUCH! HUGE WELTS! HUGE! ALLLLL over the right side of my body!

I had some DEET, so I laid down on the bed and sprayed it onto me and up into the air!

Great idea...except that it didn't work---too late, as I'd already fed the beasts.

Itching uncontrollably, I got up and spent the rest of the night in a chair.

The following morning was my last day on that trip...we took a game drive...went out to see the marvelous landscape and see all the animals. I was soooo uncomfortable!

Finally, David, our driver, asked what the problem was. Modesty be damned....I pulled up my shirt and pulled down my shorts and showed him the enormous WELTS which covered my skin.

"KUNGUNI"....he said. (Interesting, because, in Swahili, "kunguni" means "antelope"....much in the same way that we use the word "crabs" to talk about body lice. They do run quickly.)

After numerous drives/transfers (it's a long way from the Serengeti to Arusha to Amsterdam to New York to Los Angeles) I got onto a KLM flight and immediately asked for ice to stop the itching/swelling.

The Dutch flight crew were marvelous..they brought me ice packs all the way to Amsterdam, where I found an emergency hospital at Schipol airport! The staff there gave me GREAT DRUGS and I slept all the way to LAX.

I should tell you that I spoke to the manager of that lodge in Tanzania and told him to freeze the mattress in my room....to kill the kunguni.

He denied any possibility of kunguni....told me I had a pollen allergy.

Bureaucrats exist alllll over the world, friends! :wah: