Although bed bugs are an unpleasant environment in their own right, they are usually only associated with the painful wounds left by these blood-sucking insects on their skin. However, scientists have now found that bed bugs pose a greater threat to people who are histamine intol

Although bed bugs are an unpleasant environment in itself, they are usually only related to the painful wounds left by these blood-sucking insects on the skin. However, scientists have now found that bed bugs pose a greater threat to people who are histamine intolerant.

Bedbugs on human skin

Histamine is a compound that is a regulator of many physiological processes that are naturally released by our bodies. In most cases, histamine is released during allergic reaction to , causing inflammation and reminding the immune system to beware of potential threats.

Under normal circumstances, the body's response to histamine is a rash, skin swelling and respiratory problems, but the effect may be worse in patients with histamine intolerant. Therefore, in 2007, scientists discovered that , if histamine is too much, these sensitive patients will experience chronic headaches, gastrointestinal problems, arrhythmia and asthma .

Now scientists have found that the threat to histamine intolerance is not only substances that cause allergic reactions, but also tiny insects hidden in our beds. It turns out that bed bugs release a lot of histamine when they feed on their blood: an insect - about 50 micrograms of this substance per week.

In other words, even a thousand bed bugs (relatively fewer, usually more) can "provide" a regular mattress user 40 mg histamine per week and about 2 grams histamine per year. Additionally, the more blood sucked by the bug, the more histamine it produces.

Bedbugs from laboratory colonies: They are not only fed blood, but also saline to compare the efficiency of histamine release

Today, there are more and more bed bugs, but people usually pay less attention to their existence because these insects do not carry any dangerous pathogens.

Now we will have to rethink our attitude towards bed bugs, because the increased histamine release will have a negative impact not only on people who spend hours on the bed bug "table" every day, but also on farm animals. So, for example, poultry houses are the favorite habitat of bed bugs, and early scientists found that histamine negatively affects chicken egg production.

Now researchers need to do more experiments with bed bugs to understand exactly how they produce histamine and other dangers that their seemingly harmless bites can cause.

This study was published in Journal of Medical Entomology .