SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

Dogs That Detect Bedbugs

from the New York Times (Registration Required)

Cruiser made four house calls on a recent rain-soaked Tuesday. There were two happy endings and two unhappy ones, a fairly typical outcome for a typical day in the life of a bedbug-sniffing puggle.

"Except that there's nothing typical about this business," said his handler, Jeremy Ecker, 35, whose six-month-old company, the Bed Bug Inspectors, has vetted hotels, college dorms and Midtown office buildings, suburban homes, bare-bones Brooklyn rentals and tony Manhattan co-ops.

... Bedbug-sniffing dogs, adorable yet stunningly accurate--entomology researchers at the University of Florida report that well-trained dogs can detect a single live bug or egg with 96 percent accuracy--are the new and furry front line in an escalating and confounding domestic war.