Important Facts About Bed Bug Bites
Have you wondered why after having a restless night, you wake up with a lot of red marks all over your body? Though you might assume these bites are just caused by the usual insects like mosquitoes and fleas, it might be a totally different kind of insect. For whatever it’s worth, you may have bed bugs in your house.
There is nothing remarkable about bed bug bites. In fact they just look like any other insect bites. They appear as red, itchy welts on the surface of the skin. However, unlike other insect bites, bed bug bites tend to leave straight rows of red welts. A very common pattern of their bites is in a regular line of three, referred to as “breakfast, lunch, and dinner” by experts. The welts may not appear immediately; to some it may take weeks before the symptoms become visible. Interestingly, there are some people who seem to have to reaction to these insects’ bites at all.
The skin on your body reacts differently to bed bug bites. The skin on the face, hands, and feet seem to react the most to the bites. These bites cause no apparent harm to the one bitten so they are often misdiagnosed as symptoms of skin disorders.
Are bed bug bites dangerous?
Though these bites can be really itchy and so nasty to look at, there is no indication that bed bugs transmit diseases through their bites. When bed bugs bite, they release a chemical that acts as an anesthesia around the area being bitten. This is the reason why even if many bed bugs attack you, you will most likely not feel a thing. Most of the times, the itchy feeling only happens after the bed bugs have finished feasting on your blood. And by then most of them are already well-fed and on their way back to their hiding places.
Peoples’ reactions to bed bug bites
People have different reactions to the chemical released by the bed bugs when they bite. Some have allergic reactions right away and so rashes may occur immediately. The rash may take longer to disappear from a few days to weeks, depending again on the person’s sensitivity to the insects’ bites. If you are lucky, the itchy welt may just occur for a couple of days at most. It’s very important that you keep yourself from scratching the itchy welts. Doing so could expose your skin which makes it susceptible to infection caused by different kinds of bacteria. As mentioned above, bed bugs don’t carry diseases the way other insects do like mosquitoes. So even though the bitten skin may look nasty, depending on the number of bites and the size of the welts, people should not sorry so much that they’d be carrying diseases on their bloodstream because that is not the case with bed bug bites.
When many bed bugs bite a portion of your body, the welts may really appear horrible. The instinct of most people when they are bitten is to scratch the affected part, but you shouldn’t do that. It may only worsen the condition of your skin. What you can do is to wash the affected part with soap and water. Thoroughly wash it so that any germs or bacteria on the surface of your skin would not get inside the exposed skin. If you have baking soda, you can use it with water to make a sticky paste. Put the paste directly on the affected area and let it dry for an hour or so. Then wash clean with water. Of course, if you want, you can buy over the counter creams for your insect bites. But if it is your first time to be bitten by bed bugs, naturally, you don’t have an ointment of sorts at home. So baking soda with water would be a good initial remedy. If the itching has still not abated after this initial treatment then you may want to apply so calamine lotion on the affected area. This lotion is extremely effective at reducing itchiness.
Of course the most effective way of making sure that you will not be bitten by bed bugs again is to completely drive them away from your house. You can call expert pest exterminators to do the job for you for a certain amount of cash. However the services of these experts are not cheap. It costs a lot of money to get their services. If you are short on cash, you can always to the clean up yourself. Be sure when you do this task, you allot a big portion of your time. You can’t do a half job and expect your home to be free from bed bugs. The cleaning process should be systematic, thorough and detailed. That is why you should have a lot of time, depending of course on how big your place is. Now, if you can’t find time because your schedule just won’t allow it, for the meantime what you can do to prevent falling victim to bed bugs bites while you sleep.