The roaches tumble forth from their hideout, scattering around the glass enclosure in startled confusion. Eventually, they all grow still. I extend a trembling hand, and she drops a fat specimen it into my open palm. Pereira gently takes the roach and returns it to its slumbering friends.
Me holding a cockroach in my own personal hell Later, I send a photo of myself holding the roach to my boyfriend. Only a fellow phobic would understand. Glove or no glove, I held a cockroach, and I survived. Cause for alarm One early morning during my teenage years, I groggily got out of bed and reached for a box of cookie leftovers on my bedroom floor.
I took a big bite, and — while chewing — casually noticed a large chunk of chocolate icing was still in the box. It was a tremendous American cockroach. A roach that had, for all I know, dredged itself in raw sewage and rotting meat, not to mention toting along its own natural garden of microbial terror.
I spewed out my mouthful, splattering my white and pink flower-patterned wallpaper with dark streaks of chocolate-infused spittle. Those stains never did come out. People have long suspected that cockroaches are mechanical transmitters of disease — they walk through rot and faeces and filth and then deposit those germs onto other surfaces.
Several years ago, however, Koehler and one of his students helped prove that cockroaches could at least plausibly transmit harmful bacteria. Bacteria such as salmonella and E. Bacteria can also survive a trip through a cockroach gut, so faeces scattered throughout a kitchen or home are like little land mines of potential disease.
Spreading disease, however, likely is not their biggest impact on our health. Proteins found in cockroach faeces, regurgitates, skin and body parts are potent allergens for many people, as proven when entomologists often become acutely allergic to their research subjects.
Likewise, some people who seem to be allergic to coffee or chocolate are actually just aversely reacting to ground up cockroach parts sprinkled into those products.
People breathe in whiffs of cockroaches on the subway and in restaurants, on the bus and in the street. For many, especially those who live in large apartment buildings with inadequate pest control, their homes are also perfumed with these invisible allergens. Are roaches causing higher rates of childhood asthma? Children are the most impacted victims of cockroach allergies, which have also been associated with asthma attacks.
The distribution of asthma is not at all even across New York. He and his colleagues travel to homes across the city and vacuum up dust samples in kitchens and beds. In his white, sterile lab, he analyses the contents of those vials for cockroach parts. There are surely other factors, but Perzanowski has found that kids who live in neighbourhoods with higher rates of asthma are about twice as likely to be allergic to roaches. Roaches, in other words, are more than just a source of irrational fear.
They may be making us unwell. The question is, what can we do about it? The coming war I douse the roach in a stream of Raid, taking perverse pleasure in its dance of death. Try as it might, the roach can no longer get a grip on the plaster wall.
It topples backward, antennae flailing, wings unfolding, running in frenzied figure-of-eights as if searching for a way out. But it will find no respite from the neurotoxin.
Minutes later, it has bucked itself onto its back, its abdomen curled into itself, the closest a roach could come to a foetal position. Life occasionally reasserts itself with a deceptive spasm of the legs, but I know this roach is toast. Naively, we thought we could stop them. Back in the s, we assumed the war was won when bait traps hit the market. After decades of inefficient home treatments, we had finally developed a method that seemed to completely devastate the enemy.
The hoards were pushed back, the cockroach problem all but eliminated. We humans became complacent. Assuming the problem had been taken care of, fewer entomologists dedicated their studies to roaches, and funding for roach-related research and poisons shifted to other pests, like bedbugs.
But that success will likely be short-lived. In the early s, a darkness began to re-emerge in kitchens and bathrooms across the country. Whispers of a growing enemy proliferated at entomological conferences across the country. The roaches, experts realised, had begun to fight back. Baits were no longer as effective as they once were. Last year, researchers discovered at least one of the problems: cockroaches have evolved a glucose aversion.
The sweetener that roaches originally found irresistible now registers as bitter. Koehler believes that we will never defeat the roaches. As he points out, those insects were already doing well for themselves for hundreds of millions of years before we showed up.
We just gave them the extra boost they needed for global domination. Most likely, they will outlast us, too. When our species finally bites the dust, cockroaches will be there to feast on the rotting remains. In Depth Insect. If all else fails, you can put your mind at ease by calling in a pest professional who can help determine if your property is more vulnerable to a roach problem and suggest a treatment plan.
If you are worried about roaches in your home, you probably also have other related questions, too, like how can I have cockroaches when I keep my home clean? On top of contaminating our food with their feces, as we already mentioned, roaches can cause allergies, asthma and eczema in some people.
And, of course, they are also capable of transmitting a number of nasty diseases. Unfortunately, cockroaches can move into even the cleanest of homes. What attracts them? Available food is the single most powerful reason cockroaches enter our homes. This means that cleaning up clutter is also an integral part of making your house less hospitable to cockroaches.
After putting all food in the fridge or in sealed containers and cleaning all kitchen counters and floors, you might assume that your house is finally safe from cockroach infestations and that any roaches hiding out will quickly die out or leave. Cockroaches can survive for days—and even weeks—without food. During this time, they hide out in dingy, dark, damp, well-protected parts of your house.
So, even if food is out of their reach, you still might find roaches scurrying around in the basement, garage, garbage bin areas and generally any other hidden areas of the house.
You might be surprised to learn that roaches are more dependent on water than food. In fact, a cockroach can only survive a week without water, which is often why these creatures come into our home and commonly spotted in bathrooms.
Unlike bed bugs, cockroaches do not typically hitch rides in clothes or furniture. That being said, it is possible for a homeowner to unknowingly bring in cockroaches inside if they happen to be hanging out in cardboard boxes or appliances such as toasters, microwaves, computers and video game systems.
This is particularly true if the items in question are used or were stored in a place like a garage or basement. Warm, humid hidden spots in your yard can provide an ideal breeding ground for these creatures. Others imagine cockroaches invading their homes, nibbling on their leftovers, or possibly spreading diseases. To some people, the smell of cockroaches alone can be nauseating. Interestingly, you may also inherit the gene responsible for katsaridaphobia or the fear of cockroaches, said Assoc Prof Lim.
The reason why people suffer from irrational phobias could also have been inherited from the experiences of their ancestors. For example, being trapped in a malfunctioning train or elevator may cause an adult to develop a fear of confined spaces or claustrophobia. The best way to kill a cockroach without getting too close to it?
Then, you progress to looking at photos, then to seeing dead cockroaches in containers, maybe seeing pinned cockroaches in a museum, and eventually, looking at the real thing.
Augmented reality may also play a role in exposure therapy, such as the one that was developed and tested by Universitat Jaume in Spain. It used a VR Google headset to project virtual cockroaches onto the real-life scene in front of the user.
And the results were encouraging. In therapy, we often use visualisation to help clients overcome specific fears in specific scenarios, so augmented reality is the high-tech version of it. On the other hand, if the individual chooses to focus on the fact that the virtual cockroaches are not real, the augmented reality-aided therapy may not work, said Assoc Prof Lim.
But for extreme katsaridaphobia, the results may be more favourable as these patients may be too overcome by their fear to tell real cockroaches from virtual ones.
Ms Hwee, who has a cockroach phobia since she was seven years old, said you can try to desensitise yourself by using the same exposure method. From dashing out of a room when a roach shows up, she is now able to kill one and pick it up with tissue. Assoc Prof Lim agreed. The trick is to do it in gradual, incremental steps over a period of time, said Ms Hwee, as rushing through the exposure process can backfire. Then, progress to killing one and the next one within the year.
Once you have made the first kill, the subsequent ones will feel easier. And if you have worked up enough courage, there are game or horror apps that use augmented reality to let you push your phobia further.
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