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Finding New Weapons to Kill Bedbugs
from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
The brown bugs, each about half the size of a pencil eraser, lie in glass petri dishes--a few on their backs, legs in the air. They died within seconds of scurrying across a piece of paper containing drops of a chemical. The next step is to find out whether that same piece of paper will kill insects that crawl over it two, three or four months from now.
This lab is the front line in the federal government's chemical warfare on a scourge that has become resistant to many insecticides and is raising anxiety--and welts--in bedrooms, college dorms and hotel suites across the country: bedbugs.
Among those leading the attack is Mark F. Feldlaufer, an entomologist at the Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory on the Agriculture Department's sprawling research center in suburban Maryland. His mission is to find compounds that kill the bloodsuckers ...
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