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They're very good hitchhikers. They'll hitchhike in anybody's clothes, bedding,
boxes that students
move in and off campus. So they're very good at hitchhiking around and that they can live for several months without feeding.
So they can create a problem over time.
Bed bugs can harbor within their bodies
diseases, but there's no known cases of them actually transmitting disease. They can pick up a disease,
but they're not known to transmit it.
So right now I can't
tell you that there's a known case of a disease being transmitted to a human by a bed bug.
Two cases is a very small number considering the size of this campus and number of students that come and go. A few more
cases might pop up,
but again as I mentioned
we're handling it proactively, we're not being reactive.
When people are bitten by bed bugs, some have really strong reactions with many large red welts
and lesions. Other ones have very little reaction.
So you can see photographs
of people that have hundreds of large red welts,
but several have been bitten many times that have almost no reaction.
What we want students to do, especially coming on and off campus, is to make sure that
all their clothes, all their bedding and everything they bring on campus is completely clean and washed in hot water
so they're not transporting things,
not just bed bugs, but other
pests on and off campus.
So it's mainly a sanitation
cleanliness issue.