Bed bugs also known as Cimicidae are tiny parasitic insects. This is because they normally prefer to consume human blood as well as that of other animals. In other words, these insects survive by feeding only on the blood of warm-blooded animals. Bed bugs recognized as pests were to a very large extent eradicated back in the 1940s in developed nations of the world, but have since then resurfaced and prevalently increased since the mid-1990s or thereabout. Although the exact reason for this increase has not been established many reasons have been adduced for this. They include: due to more foreign travel, increase in the resistance to control measures like the use of pesticides among others.
Now as bedbugs bite, they also inject or introduce a chemical, which performs the role of an anesthesia on the site of the bug’s bites. Most often you will not feel anything as the bugs feast on your blood. Which explains why they may bite hundreds of times at night without you waking up or feeling a thing. However, the way people respond to the chemical injected differ as the bedbugs bite. Some are seriously allergic to this chemical breaking out with bed bugs rash. And it is possible for the rash together with the welts that may appear along with the rash to last some weeks before fully clearing up.
So how does one recognize bed bugs rash? Good question since it is possible for people to mistake rashes caused by other household insects for this particular rash. Alright the first sign of rash due to bites from bedbugs is the existence of many small or multiple raised bumps present on your skin. Usually they will always turn up in a crowded pattern or even in one row because of the habit of bed bugs in feeding on one location for more times than one.
The next common sign that you should look out for in determining whether your rash is as a result of bed bugs bites is that you will have large quantity of such rashes daily, particularly on your legs, back as well as arms as these are usual places where bed bugs bite. For a lot of people the red bumps that accompany the bite only show some hours or even days after the bite took place. Soon the bite sites start to itch and you should not give in to scratching as this will likely result in inflammation and severe infection of the concerned area.
Another question you may like to find answer to is how long will the bed bug rash last? To this question there is no one answer fits all as this depends on the concerned individual affected. Some people are very sensitive to allergies and so might develop rash that are highly itchy, while other people who are not may not develop any rash at all. Generally, rash will often last for 2 or maybe 3 days and then fade away slowly. In other cases it may last longer and medical intervention could be required.