Conference Panel Shares Memorable Roach Encounters

I received a call from a landlord in Waukegan, Illinois. He was at the hospital with one of his tenants; a four-year old girl was having ear problems, and she couldn't communicate about the pain she was suffering from. The doctors went in and took out an adult female cockroach with 36 other roach nymphs that had hatched, they were eating on her eardrum. We're here to help people. And that's a situation I got a chance to help somebody.

I work in Indiana, mostly in public housing testing new products and technologies, like remote monitors. At one of the worst (locations), there were a lot of pets and pet bowls – and almost all of them were infested by cockroaches. We heard Dr. Faith Oi talk about One Health. Here there was a lot of transmission of pathogens happening between those pets and cockroaches. We asked the residents to put the food away for a week – to only bring it out when the pets were feeding - and that helped resolve the problem. Not immediately, but within about two months.

The worst case I can recall from a residential situation started off as a spider problem. We were contracted by the city to go into a home to deal with the spiders - the public works people wouldn't go in the home because there were too many spiders. There were too many spiders because they were feeding on cockroaches, and that was by far the worst problem in there. It was heavily infested with cockroaches and webbed over with spiders. We went in with vacuum cleaners and boxes of bait.

One of my worst cases with German cockroaches was also one of my first. In 2019, it was probably my second week working in Dr. (Dini) Miller's laboratory. We received a call from Virginia Commonwealth University Medical School. They had a patient, an elderly woman, who was coming in for her appointments, and they were pulling bed bugs off her. Social services contacted us, and we end up going to this woman's house. There were German cockroaches in almost every single room and every single nook and cranny, living out in the open. Side by side were bed bugs in just as many numbers. We ended up using that woman's house as our first case study, testing out whole home heating equipment. It ended up working fantastic on bed bugs. Cockroaches can die from heat and using (heat equipment) is a great way to get the temperature up to that thermal death point for everything. So, standing in that 135℉ room with cockroaches and bed bugs dying all over the floor, I thought “I could have a career in this.” I always thought that would be the worst case I saw…but they keep on coming.

 

First off, if I am going to start a heavy metal band, Thermal Death Point is going to be the name. The place where I saw the most cockroaches in my life was before I actually started as a pest control technician. As an undergrad at UF (University of Florida) you have the opportunity to do community service. I worked for a food bank for a semester, and our job was to go in and knock out the cockroaches from all of the boxes of food that were then going to be put onto the food bank. I still, to this day, I've never seen so many cockroaches in boxes. My horror story as a technician was how I mishandled an issue. We had a situation where it was a really nice home with affluent customers who were appalled at having German cockroaches. (After three months of unsuccessful control attempts and callbacks) I went back with an experienced technician. He asked me if I asked the client about any changes in living conditions. I said, “No, it's German cockroaches, and they are in the kitchen - that is the problem.” So, he asked the client about any changes in living conditions. They said, “My son just came back from college, and he's got a couch that he used to have in his dorm room that's now in the living room area.” The couch was where the German cockroaches came from. So, my horror story was cringy from the sense of not really paying attention and understanding the problem.