Bed bugs are bed bad. People’s entire lives have been overturned by these (increasingly common) blood-sucking, itch-inducing pests. Thankfully, they’re not disease vectors, but I would rather not share my home with a roommate who wants to eat me, thank you very much. 
 
 Scientists have noticed an expansion in bed bug cases across the world, in no small part due to increased international travel. But one team wanted to know how the bed bugs managed to hitch a ride, and how to prevent the spread. It turns out that part of the answer lies with the dirty laundry inside your travel bag. 
 
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 “There are a lot of good studies out there focused on trying to understand how bed bugs are attracted to humans and how they get around apartment blocks, but no one has really talked about how they get into the house in the first place,” study author William Hentley from the University of Sheffield in the UK told Gizmodo. “Stopping people from bringing bed bugs home can be a big step in preventing them spreading throughout the world.” 
 
 Scientists already know that human odor attracts bed bugs, though not which chemicals in the odor specifically. But for the newest study, researchers prepared a mock bedroom with laundry bags containing clean and dirty clothes—in other words, there were no humans in the room. The critters were “twice as likely to aggregate on bags containing soiled clothes compared to bags containing clean clothes,” according to the paper published today in the journal Scientific Reports. Contrary to the researchers’ hypothesis, the amount of carbon dioxide in the room did not affect their results—the CO2 source would represent a human, since some bugs like mosquitos are specifically attracted to the carbon dioxide you exhale. 
 
 These results were enough to convince the researchers that bed bugs could travel throughout the world by hitching a ride in luggage containing dirty clothes. 
 
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 As a caveat, this was an experimental room and not real life, said both Hentley and Toby Fountain, an evolutionary biologist from the University of Uppsala in Sweden who was not involved in the study. But still, said Fountain, the authors “demonstrate a striking pattern that bags containing clothes with human odor were more frequently used as refuges than those without. This result emphases the importance of making sure luggage and other belongings are made as inaccessible to bed bugs as possible when staying in increased risk places, for example by making sure bags are fully closed and secured and kept away from the bed.” Hentley agreed with this advice. 
 
 So there you have it. When traveling to possibly bed bug-contaminated locations—like, say, that sketchy-seeming hotel—keep your luggage on metal racks (bed bugs don’t like crawling on metal, said Hentley) or put your whole suitcase in a plastic bag to avoid picking up the horrors that are bed bugs. 
 
 [Scientific Reports] ||||| Bed bugs love your stinky laundry. Here’s how to keep them away 
 
 On the surface, bed bugs seem ill-equipped for world domination: They can’t fly, jump, or swim; they can survive only on blood; and the world’s foremost apex predators—humans—want them all dead. Yet the parasitic arthropods have recently undergone what scientists are calling a “rapid global expansion,” taking over new territories and growing in number and range. And according to a new study, their globetrotting is made possible in part by an unusual form of transportation: our stinky laundry. 
 
 “It’s a good study,” says Richard Cooper, an entomologist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who was not involved with the work. He says it makes sense that the bugs are attracted to human odors, even on clothing. 
 
 Though they aren’t known to transmit disease, bed bugs (Cimex lectularius) can leave behind itchy bites and cause allergic reactions. In the middle of the 20th century, the pests had been largely eradicated from large parts of the developed world, but bans on effective pesticides in the 1990s, along with cheap air travel, have allowed the bugs to come creeping back. 
 
 Unlike ticks or lice, the apple seed–sized bed bugs aren’t travelers: They don’t stay on their hosts for long, and they rarely leave the beds and couches where they feast. So how were they getting onto planes? 
 
 “To me, hitchhiking seemed like the best explanation,” says William Hentley, an entomologist at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. “That then led me to this question of whether they’re attracted to our clothes and the smell of humans.” 
 
 To figure out whether the bugs were indeed stowing away in our laundry and luggage, Hentley and his colleagues tested whether the insects were attracted to soiled clothing. They set a cage full of bed bugs in the middle of a room and placed two cotton bags at equal distances—one filled with clean clothes and the other filled with dirty socks and T-shirts collected from volunteers. The researchers released the bed bugs from the cage and let them wander freely for 96 hours. 
 
 At the end of the experiment, about twice as many bugs were attracted to the dirty clothes as to clean ones, the team reports today in Scientific Reports . That jives with prior experiments that have shown that bed bugs can smell more than 100 compounds produced by human skin—many of which could easily linger on clothes for multiple days, the researchers say. 
 
 They also tested whether increases in carbon dioxide—long thought to signal a nearby meal—made the bugs more or less likely to go for the smelly clothes. When added to room, the gas seemed to trigger foraging behavior, but the bugs weren’t any more likely to go for the dirty clothes than they were initially. That suggests that carbon dioxide prompts the bugs to forage, but it doesn’t help them home in on the smelly laundry, the team concludes. 
 
 So what can you do to keep the six-legged parasites out of your suitcase when you travel? Hentley is careful to point out that he hasn’t studied these techniques scientifically, but he recommends simply putting your bags up on the metal luggage racks in a hotel room, because the bugs can’t climb up smooth surfaces. If no such rack is to be found, keeping your soiled garments in an airtight bag should help mask the smell. But bear in mind that if you’ve previously put dirty clothes in your luggage, you might need to wrap up your whole suitcase, he says. 
 
 Cooper agrees that plastic bags might work, but he doesn’t use them himself. “The biggest thing is not keeping your luggage on the bed,” he says. Another option: putting your bags into a portable heating chamber whenever you get home and washing and drying your clothes on high heat. “Heat is the Achilles heel of the bed bug,” Cooper says. ||||| CTVNews.ca Staff 
 
 
 
 
 
 A B.C. family who says they were bitten all over by bed bugs on a flight to England is now getting an apology from the airline. 
 
 New Westminister resident Heather Szilagyi, her seven-year-old daughter Molly and her fiancé, Eric Neilson, were on an overnight British Airways flight from Vancouver to London earlier this month, when Szilagyi says she noticed bed bugs on the seat in front of her. 
 
 Having worked in hotels most of her life, Szilagyi says she could instantly identify the creature she first spotted crawling out from behind the TV monitor on the seat in front of her as a bed bug. 
 
 "I wanted to grab it but they're quick, and it crawled back inside, behind the screen," Szilagyi told CTV Vancouver on Wednesday. 
 
 She saw another bug on the seat when they received their in-flight meals, and then a few more later in the flight. 
 
 Szilagyi says she discreetly alerted a flight attendant to the insects, but, while the attendant apologized, she did not seem surprised. 
 
 “She was like, ‘Oh ok, sorry about that. We're sold out. We don't have anywhere to move you’,” Szilagyi said she was told. 
 
 With nothing more to be done, the trio had to close their eyes and get some sleep. 
 
 "It was nine hours of knowing that I was probably going to get bit, but not being sure,” Szilagyi said. “But there wasn't really anything I could do about it. I was surprised I was able to relax, but what can you do?" 
 
 The next day, after they arrived at their final destination of Slovakia, the bite marks appeared and she says she and her daughter were “absolutely covered” in them. 
 
 “Me and my daughter are both really sensitive to insect bites, so she was just covered just all over. I've still got a really infected one,” Szilagyi said. 
 
 Szilagyi began trying to contact the airline to alert them to the problem and to ensure they weren’t put on the same plane on the flight home. 
 
 “We were not asking for a refund. All we were asking for was a flight on a different plane, to make sure it was a different plane, to make sure that the plane that was infested with bed bugs was taken care of,” she said. 
 
 But she says she became frustrated trying to get through to a customer service agent. She says the airline’s customer service line is open only a few hours a day, in a different time zone. When she tried to call, a recorded message said the line was too busy and her call was dropped. 
 
 Finally, Szilagyi took photos of their bites and posted them to Twitter, tagging British Airlines. 
 
 The airline responded and they heard from a representative a couple days later. But she says many people online accused them of lying about where they had gotten the bites. 
 
 "It's horrible for me because all these people think that we're just wanting attention and wanting to sue a company, but this is not what I want to be known for. I don't want to be 'bed bug girl’,'" she said. 
 
 British Airways upgraded the family to business class for the flight home, and offered an apology to the family. 
 
 "We have been in touch with our customer to apologize and investigate further," an airline representative said in a statement. 
 
 "British Airways operates more than 280,000 flights every year, and reports of bed bugs onboard are extremely rare. Nevertheless, we are vigilant and continually monitor our aircraft." 
 
 Szilagyi and her family say they’re going to be more careful to look for bugs on flights they take in the future. 
 
 With a report from CTV Vancouver's Maria Weisgarber
– Nobody wants to bring home bedbugs after being on the road, and now scientists have some practical advice on how to avoid that fate. A new study in Scientific Reports shows that the little critters are drawn to the scent of dirty laundry, and the lead author translates that into traveling tips. For starters, put your luggage up on metal racks in a hotel room because bedbugs won't be able to climb up the smooth surface, says entomologist William Hentley of the UK's University of Sheffield, per Gizmodo. You might also store your dirty clothes in a separate airtight bag. If the hotel has no metal racks, consider storing your entire suitcase in a plastic bag, which may seem like a pain, but nothing compared to the chore of ridding your home of bedbugs. "Soiled clothing left in an open suitcase, or left on the floor, of an infested room is more likely to attract bed bugs," the authors write. "When packed into a suitcase, they will accompany their host back home." They figured this out by unleashing bedbugs in a room and leaving them be for 96 hours. Roughly twice as many bugs ended up in a cotton bag filled with dirty laundry as opposed to a bag of clean clothes. A Rutgers entomologist who wasn't involved with the study tells Science it's legit and offers some advice of his own. "The biggest thing is not keeping your luggage on the bed," he says. Travelers also should wash and then dry clothes at the highest temperature upon returning home, he adds, because "heat is the Achilles heel of the bedbug." (Another study suggests the bugs prefer certain colors.)