How Cockroaches Can Be Harmful To Your Health

Mostly Harmless

Wood roaches are an example of mostly harmless roaches. These roaches aren't known to spread harmful diseases like other pest roaches. They're just annoying. If you have a wood roach in your home, you're likely to know it because they are usually seen in the daytime (diurnal). Other pest roaches come out at night (nocturnal).

Not Quite As Harmless

American cockroaches are common pest roaches that can infest your Greensboro home, but they prefer to be outside where there is more moisture. This can make them less of a problem than other roaches.

Not Harmless At All

German cockroaches are the worst pest roaches that can get into your Greensboro home. They get in, stay in, and create many issues, including causing sickness.

It is important to know what type of cockroaches you're seeing. Not only will this help you determine the threat, but it will also help you select appropriate methods to deter and control them.

How Can Cockroaches Make You Sick?

We could write a 20-page article on all of the ways roaches can impact your health, explaining all the symptoms you may experience from each, but it is likely that you would give up about five minutes in and just decide that roaches are bad for you. A long dissertation like that is also likely to make you think that cockroaches are the scariest insects on the planet. They're not. But it is important to have a healthy respect for the threats these insects have the potential to present.

Here is a simplified outline of illnesses you may experience when cockroaches get into your Greensboro home:

• Cockroaches contaminate food, dishes, and surfaces with microorganisms on their legs and bodies. They pick these organisms up from garbage, sewers, drains, and other dirty places. Salmonella, E. coli, giardia, are just a few of the organisms they commonly spread.
• Cockroaches aggravate asthma symptoms and increase hospital visitation for related symptoms.
• Cockroaches can cause a rash when they walk across your skin at night while you're sleeping.
• Cockroaches are connected to conjunctivitis and other bacterial diseases.
• Cockroaches aren't prone to biting people, but they can bite accidentally when they feed on dead skin cells in eyelashes and eyebrows or around the mouth.
• Cockroaches are known to spread a long list of diseases including typhoid fever, listeriosis, gastroenteritis, dysentery, cholera, campylobacteriosis, and many more.

Cockroach Illness Prevention

It's hard work to keep cockroaches from making you and your family sick, but it is work that is well worth the effort. Here are a few of our best cockroach prevention tips:

• Clean your home. Your greatest weapon against cockroach-related sickness is sanitation. When you clean and deep clean your entire home, you remove sources of decay that allow harmful microorganisms to be picked up and moved to sensitive areas.
• Get a sealed container for your kitchen trash - something that is cockroach-proof. Put your trash out weekly. Clean your receptacle routinely.
• Do routine sweeps for anything in your home that is rotting, things such as an apple left to rot in a wastebasket, a banana peel left behind your couch by your kids, a piece of food that has fallen into the gaps between the cushions in your couch, and other potential cockroach food sources.
• Consider storing your food in sealed plastic containers.
• Clean your dishes as you dirty them.
• Put pet food down only during meals.
• Get a case for your toothbrush. Roaches eat toothpaste and are attracted to toothbrushes because they have bacteria on them.
• If you have a cat box, make sure your cats are covering their waste.
• Clean your drains with a microbial agent.