Cockroaches are found all over the world and like any areas that humans like. They incline towards area´s where food, moisture and warmth abound such as our kitchens, dining rooms and bedrooms. They prefer darkness and can crawl into amazingly small places. Cockroaches most often live in kitchens near food. They also live in bathrooms, especially near plumbing and heating ducts. During the day they hide in small cracks under appliances, behind baseboards, in boxes, and in any other tight space they can find. Cockroaches are most active at night; we can also see their eggs, which are in size and shape of kidney beans, or their faeces, which look like black pepper.
The cockroach poses one of the greatest health hazards of all households’ pests. Millions of them live in our houses, hotels, restaurant kitchens, shops, supermarkets and bars, spreading diseases which can prove fatal to humans. Many cases of food poisoning are known to be as a result of cockroach contamination.
Their filthy habits of regurgitating partly digested food, often dropping faeces as they are eating, and leaving behind a trail of hazardous bacteria over everything that they touch; this makes them one of the most obnoxious and potentially dangerous contaminators of human food. As a result, they spread disease organisms which are among the main causes of diarrhea, dysentery, Hepatitis, Typhoid, Leprosy and even Dermatitis and swelling of the eyelids.
Very often, they crawl straight out of lavatories and drains onto food which is intended for consumption by humans. The bacteria they leave behind are invisible, so we can never see them, and as cockroaches are nocturnal, they frequently go unnoticed. Even when they crawl across a kitchen table, they leave a trail of bacteria which can potentially contaminate food at a later stage when it is being prepared.
Cockroaches have been reported to spread at least 33 kinds of bacteria, six kinds of parasitic worms, and at least seven other kinds of human pathogens. They can pick up germs on the spines of their legs and bodies as they crawl through decaying matter or sewage and then carry these into food or onto food surfaces.
Germs that cockroaches eat from decaying matter or sewage are protected while in their bodies and may remain infective for several weeks longer than if they had been exposed to cleaning agents, rinse water, or just sunlight and air. Recent medical studies have shown that cockroach allergens cause lots of allergic reactions in children. They were even shown to cause asthma in children. These allergens build up in deposits of droppings, secretions, cast skins, and dead bodies of roaches.
Nobody wants them, yet they have survived for over 350 million years and despite man´s attempts at controlling and getting rid of them they still thrive. They are extremely prolific and highly successful. If just one pair of German cockroaches breed and all of their offspring survive and breed then that pair of cockroaches can expand to more than 2 million in the space of just one year!
