Researcher sleeps with bedbugs for five years and tests sprays on his own arm

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The scientist who has chosen to sleep with BEDBUGS for five years dailymail.com

A researcher has spent five years sleeping alongside the roughly 60,000 bedbugs he has bred, and straps some of them onto his own arm to test whether new insecticide sprays actually work.

The arrangement is as literal as skin in the game gets. The researcher's colony provides a live test bed where each spray can be measured against a real bite rather than a laboratory proxy, and his own arm supplies the feeding surface. Whatever the sprays do or fail to do, he learns about it directly and immediately.

Bedbugs have staged a global resurgence over the past decade, driven in part by resistance to the pyrethroid insecticides that once controlled them. That resistance is exactly what makes spray-testing on live, resistant insects valuable: a product that kills a susceptible laboratory strain proves nothing about the bugs in an infested mattress. The researcher's setup closes the gap between the two.

Whether the market for such a facility grows is another question. Pest-control firms have an obvious commercial interest in claims that their sprays work, and regulators set standards from offices far removed from any biting insect. A researcher who feeds his own test subjects nightly is in a position to report results that neither party finds convenient.