It’s essential to tell your doctor and pharmacist if you’re taking any supplements, over-the-counter drugs or herbal remedies, as they may affect how your prescribed medications work.
Soon after moving to my new apartment in 2011, I woke with my arms inflamed. I told myself the itchy red spots were spider bites, but I’d heard of incidences of bedbugs
in the neighbourhood. Lying in bed one morning, I felt a pinch. I tore off the blankets. There it was: a critter about half the size of a ladybug by my pillow.
In the months that followed, I scrubbed my floors and baseboards. I vacuumed furniture, spread talcum powder and put everything through the dryer. I had two unsuccessful professional exterminations and lost hundreds of dollars on dryer bills and on replacing the furniture and bedding I had discarded to be extra safe.
It’s a familiar experience for many Canadians-bedbugs are on the rise nationwide. In 2013, research firm COMPAS Inc. surveyed 67 Canadian public health inspectors and found that, in the previous three years, reports of infestations had increased anywhere from 20 to more than 40 per cent.
Preventing bedbugs
Susan Harding-Cruz, manager of the City of Hamilton Public Health Services’ vector-borne disease program, says you can avoid bringing bugs home. She suggests checking belongings for the critters when you enter your house, since bugs can be picked up in public places.
When staying at a hotel, Harding-Cruz recommends peeling back the sheets to examine the mattress for bugs, paying close attention to the seams and corners. You should always keep your luggage away from the bed and off the floor. Once back home, wash your clothes in hot water immediately, then put them in the dryer on the hottest setting. Leave them in for an extra 15 minutes after they’ve dried.
Identifying the problem
Bedbugs are brownish red with 1.5- to 10-millimetre-sized oval bodies. If you suspect you have them, Avery Addison, owner of Addison Pest Control in Toronto, says the best way to prevent an infestation is to catch it early.
Check underneath your mattress. “People look at the top of the bed and find nothing,” says Addison. “Then they flip it over and there’s nothing but bugs.” Another sign is the droppings critters leave, which look like blood-red, pencil-tip-sized speckles on the mattress.
Still not sure? Place glue mousetraps or containers of mineral oil underneath the bed frame’s legs to snag critters travelling onto the mattress. If you catch any, call in the professionals.
Are bedbugs harmful?
Bedbugs don’t spread diseases, so for many the worst physical side effect is a skin infection from scratching. But for some, infestations can lead to social stigma, as well as anxiety, sleeplessness or depression. “It starts to consume your thinking,” says Harding-Cruz. In order to cope, she urges sufferers not to self-blame or hide the problem. “People shouldn’t feel alone,” she says.
Zapping the bugs
If you have an infestation, call an exterminator. Bedbugs are resilient. Addison says that DIY solutions like store-bought sprays often wear off before the critters need sustenance again (they can go more than a year without feeding). Sprays or diatomaceous earth won’t be as powerful as professional interventions and may even spread the bugs around your home. When a company is thorough, in one visit it’ll spray to poison them, use powder and do a heat treatment. Many skip the latter, says Addison, and the problem returns.
After multiple unsuccessful exterminations, I said goodbye to my place and left the infestation behind. To avoid a repeat, I chucked bedding, furniture and clothes. I moved into a beautiful, bedbug-free house, and today I still call it home.
Can your mobile phone pose a risk to your health? Over the years, it’s been accused of causing insomnia, decreased sperm count and distracted driving. Now, in a recent open letter from scientists, the technology is being held accountable for cancer tumours.
When you’re making calls, texting your friends or accessing the Internet, and even when your mobile device is just checking in with nearby phone towers, it emits radio-frequency waves, a form of electromagnetic radiation. Unlike radiation that wreaks obvious havoc on human health, these waves don’t carry enough energy to ionize the atoms that make up our bodies. In fact, they have even less energy than visible light, which is itself another kind of electromagnetic radiation. So the idea that our wireless gadgets could cause cancer may sound pseudo-scientific.
On May 15, 2015, a group of more than 200 scientists from around the world signed a letter to the United Nations expressing their concern that safety regulations aren’t doing enough to address potential health risks from mobile phones and devices. Even if adverse effects from radio-frequency radiation (RFR) haven’t been firmly established, they haven’t been ruled out, either.
The letter points out that in 2011, the World Health Organization‘s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) declared RFR “possibly carcinogenic to humans,” based on limited evidence of a link between heavy cellphone use and glioma, a type of brain cancer. The “possibly” category is a way for IARC to hedge its bets when “a positive association has been observed … for which a causal interpretation is considered credible, but chance, bias or confounding could not be ruled out with reasonable confidence.” Other items classified the same way include gasoline exhaust, coffee and working at a dry cleaner.
For the time being, there’s room for arguments from all sides on the question of whether RFR is hazardous, and if so, just how much exposure it would take to increase cancer risk. (In the biggest cohort study to date, only the group with at least 1640 total hours of cellphone use over 10 years or more showed a rise in glioma tumours, and it was a modest one.) But most everyone would agree that we need more investigations and that, as tobacco has taught us, it would be best if they were independent. Several of the studies so far have had industry funding, which makes their evidence trickier to weigh.
If you don’t want to wait for the slow march of science, you can always play it safe in the meantime by using headphones or your device’s speakerphone rather than pressing it against your head. “It has several antennas inside, and by holding it a short distance away while they’re active, you’ll be cutting down on your exposure,” says Magda Havas, an associate professor at Trent University in Peterborough and one of the signatories of the appeal to the UN. You could also save your longer gabfests for land lines or in-person meetings, using mobile phones only for the quick, on-the-go convenience we’ve grown to love.
Worshippers of the sun god Ra, the Egyptians were just one of several ancient peoples to revere rays. Few modern societies understand this better than Canada, a country enthralled by its summers.
But if we’re to commune safely with the sun, certain rituals must be performed, from slathering sunscreen (SPF 15 or higher) on exposed skin to covering one’s head. And yet the proportion of Canadians who reported using protective clothing as shields from ultraviolet rays decreased significantly between the First National Sun Survey in 1996 and the second one in 2006. Over time, people were also less likely to hear about the UV Index, a tool that can help you plan protection.
Our lapsing sun-safety habits have repercussions: melanoma, the most serious form of skin cancer, increased between 1986 and 2010 by an average of 1.5 per cent annually in women and two per cent in men. At current rates, one in 59 Canadian men and one in 73 women will get melanoma during their lives.
Nor can we overlook children, over half of whom spend at least two hours in the sun on a typical summer day. It’s estimated that kids who get five or more sunburns double their risk for melanoma later in life. The disease is also more common in people with very fair skin, freckles, naturally red or blond hair, or more than 50 moles.
Darker-skinned people have a built-in defence against UV rays; however, they, too, can get melanoma from overexposure. They’re also more susceptible to acral lentiginous melanoma, a virulent variety that typically appears on the palms of the hands and soles of the feet.
Thanks to its visibility, melanoma has one of the highest survival rates of all cancers, with 53 per cent of cases first noticed by patients and 17 per cent by family. With so many people spotting the tumours before they spread, the five-year relative survival rate is 89 per cent.
Despite being one of the only cancers on the rise in Canada, skin cancer is also among the most preventable. “Protecting yourself can easily become part of your daily routine,” says Gillian Bromfield, director of cancer control policy for the Canadian Cancer Society, “so that’s the good news.”
