Bed bugs may not only be unwanted visitors in our homes and beds but in addition creatures harboring a hidden risk. A team of researchers has found that they might actually be producing amounts of histamine which will potentially be problematic for humans.

Bed bugs are tiny, parasitic insects that may be found everywhere in the world. At just 1 to 7 millimeters, they feed on people’s and animals’ blood and have been “spreading rapidly” in places just like the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and a few parts of Europe. They may be found even in hotels and resorts.

For his or her study, published within the Journal of Medical Entomology, a team of researchers analyzed the fecal materials that bed bugs deposit at different stages of their lives.

“Following a blood meal, bed bugs deposit fecal material indoors. The feces contain a wide range of compounds, including histamine, which serves as a component of their aggregation pheromone,” they wrote. “Histamine is a pivotal mammalian immune modulator, and recently it was shown to be present in high concentrations in household dust from homes infested with bed bugs.”

Histamine is a chemical within the human body that may alert the immune system to threats and trigger inflammation, the University of Kentucky (UK) noted in a news release. While production of it normally results in allergic reactions leading to rashes or respiratory issues, an excess of histamine has been linked to reactions resembling headaches, asthma and irregular heart rate, particularly amongst those with histamine intolerance.

The researchers found variations in bed bugs’ histamine production in several life stages, but that “overall,” they produce histamine “across all feeding life stages, populations and at various times after feeding, and that histamine excretion is directly related to blood feeding.”

And the quantity of histamine they will produce isn’t any joke, with one bed bug capable of manufacturing over 50 micrograms in per week. If there are 1,000 bed bugs in an infestation, they might produce 40 milligrams of histamine in per week, and a pair of grams in a yr, in response to the university.

“That is an amount you may actually see, and we do not see that with every other containment,” one in all the study leads, Zach DeVries of UK, said within the news release. “Once we speak about pesticides, allergens, every other thing in our home that some invading organism is producing, it is often on microscopic levels, not something where you may actually hold it in your hand.”

More research must be done to seek out out the precise implications of the findings on human health, in response to the researchers. It does, nonetheless, show that even when bed bugs aren’t known to hold pathogens and spread disease as other bugs do, they might still be carrying potential risks beyond being annoying pests and the occasional allergic response to their bites.

“It is not only the proven fact that they’re producing histamine, but they’re producing it right next to where you spend probably the most time, generally speaking, inside our homes, which is in our beds or sleeping areas,” De Vries said.

“These results will likely be used to higher understand the health risks related to histamine excretion and potential mitigation strategies of environmental histamine,” the researchers wrote.