New York City Battling Public Bedbug Infestation

According to New York City health officials, one out of every 15 New Yorker battled bed bugs in the last year. They have announced a plan to fight the spreading infestation, which has been discovered in theaters, clothing stores, office buildings, housing projects, and even upscale hotels.
Bed bugs are small (5-7mm), oval, non-flying insects that feed by sucking blood from humans or animals. Adult bed bugs are reddish brown in color and can live in any area of the home, but are most common in areas where people sleep, including mattresses, box springs, and bed frames. While they are often thought of as only living in areas of poor sanitation, they do live and thrive even in clean environments.
Health officials have reported that bedbugs have rapidly multiplied throughout New York and many other US cities in recent years. Across the country, the National Pest Management Association notes a 57% increase in calls over the past five years for bedbug infestation.
Read: Bedbug Infestations on the Rise and Here to Stay
Bed bugs, once thought to be eliminated because of widespread use of the pesticide DDT in the 1940’s and 50’s, are thought to be on the rise because of the decreasing use of pesticides and due to immigration and travel from the developing world. Crowded living quarters can also facilitate the spread of bugs.
People who have bedbugs often never see them. The most obvious signs are bites which appear as small red skin bumps, blood on bed sheets and their waste, which looks like black pepper. They are known for being extremely difficult to eradicate, and can go a year without feeding.
One major roadblock to stopping the spread of bedbugs is lack of knowledge about prevention and misinformation about treatment. Acting on a report by a government advisory board, New York City is re-appropriating $500,000 of health department money to begin the first phase of a “bedbug battle plan.” Some of the money will go toward creating an online portal where New Yorkers can find information about avoiding bedbugs as well as how to treat their homes.
Read: New Disposable Cover Keeps Bed Bugs at Bay
Some tips for dealing with bedbugs:
• When you travel, look for signs of bedbugs in your hotel room. Check the bedding, headboard, upholstered furniture and drawers where clothing will be stored.
• In the home, check cracks and crevices with a bright flashlight. A hot air dry can also flush them out of their hiding places.
• In addition to checking bedding, check clothing, suitcases, and pocketbooks as well, as bed bugs can use them as a way to travel from one place to another.
• Bedding, linens, curtains, rugs, and clothes from infested homes must be washed in hot water.
• Mattresses, furniture and floors must be vacuumed. Dispose of the vacuum bag (or the debris from a bagless vacuum) in a sealed plastic bag.
• Hire a certified exterminator to apply pesticides is also recommended.

Sleep On It, Your Memory Will Improve

“I’ll sleep on it” is a phrase people say when they are going to think about something, but what if sleep actually helps you remember new information and improves your memory? Researchers at the University of York and Harvard Medical School suggest that sleep may have such an effect on memory.

Sleep helps people remember new words and enhances memory

Results of the new study are important because it is the first time scientists have been able to observe how sleep has a role in reorganizing new memories and to understand a critical factor in the transfer of information in the process. Researchers utilized two groups of volunteers in their study.
Volunteers in one group were taught new words in the morning and tested on their memory of the words after learning them and then again in the evening, with no sleep in between. These individuals did not improve in their memory of the words during the re-test in the evening.
Volunteers in a second group were taught new words in the evening, after which they immediately took a test. These individuals then slept overnight in a lab and had their brain activity monitored using an electroencephalogram (EEG).
When the volunteers in the second group were retested in the morning after a night of sleep, they were able to remember more words than they had recalled immediately after learning them the night before. They also were able to recognize the words faster, which suggests sleep strengthens new memories.
When researchers evaluated the volunteers’ brainwaves, they found that deep sleep rather than rapid eye movement sleep or light sleep strengthened new memories. Further evaluation showed that volunteers who had more sleep spindles during sleep were better at integrating the new words with existing knowledge.
Sleep spindles are brief and intense bursts of brain activity that indicate information is being transferred between different memory areas in the brain; specifically, the hippocampus and the neocortex. The hippocampus stores memories separately from other memories, while the neocortex contains memories that are linked with other knowledge.
Results of this study suggest that if you “sleep on it,” you could improve your memory. Dr. Jakke Tamminen, the study’s lead author, points out that “New memories are only really useful if you can connect them to information you already know.” He and his team found the “brain activity during sleep that organizes new memories and makes those vital connections with existing knowledge.”