Bed bugs are tick-like parasites with round, flat bodies that resemble watermelon seeds. Their rusty color comes from their diet—blood. Although they sometimes snack on bats, pets and poultry, their primary diet is human blood. This means that these parasites can transmit blood-borne diseases from host to host.

The thought of blood-sucking bunkmates may make your skin crawl, but if you’ve got them you’re more likely to itch. Bites are usually found on the face/head, neck, arms and hands. Bites are red and may have a darker spot in the middle, and may come in small clusters or lines.

Because bed bug bites are similar to those of other insects, it can be difficult to determine whether bed bugs are actually the culprits. These nocturnal nuisances leave a literal spotty blood trail in their paths. They can also be detected by a subtly sweet, moldy smell.

Bed bugs can get in the walls, infest clothing, bedding and furniture—including your mattress, and may make a home behind your electrical sockets. Steam cleaning and laundry overhaul may help, but your best bet is to hire an exterminator. This can cost $800-$1200, but experts say it’s a worthwhile investment.

Visit ABC.com to learn more about the recent hike in bed bug cases, or go to Orkin.com to learn more about how to handle infestation.

To test the effectiveness of an appearance-based intervention, Dr. June Robinson, professor of dermatology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and her colleagues assembled a 25-page book detailing the history of tanning and the effects it can have on skin and collagen, as well as tanning alternatives. They distributed the booklets to college-aged women (18-22) who tanned as often as four times per week.

These women said they tanned for one of two reasons: To boost mood (symptomatic of seasonal affective disorder), or because they detested their skin color. Six months after reading the booklet, tanning visits among the young women fell by roughly 35 percent and some eventually gave up tanning all together. Why?

“They’re not worried about skin cancer, but they are worried about getting wrinkled and being unattractive,” Robinson said in a press release. “The fear of looking horrible trumped everything else.”

East Tennessee State University’s Joel Hillhouse, Ph.D, was lead author of the report, and wrote the booklet used in the study. He says this experiment was originally meant to serve as an appearance intervention, which means it would have less of an effect on the group with symptoms of seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

"We found the opposite,” he said. “The intervention worked just as well for people with seasonal affective disorder as for people who didn't like their skin color. That means it's a really good intervention for everyone."

That includes your daughter, your niece, or maybe even your sister. According to the Skin Cancer Foundation, the number of women under age 40 diagnosed with basal cell carcinoma has doubled in the last three decades, and the risk of melanoma increases by 75 percent if she has used a tanning bed before age 35. Talking about responsible tanning is important.

The key?

"You have to balance the positive and the negative forces that motivate someone to change," Robinson said. "First you have the fear that they will look horrible, then you offer a positive—an alternative to meet their needs."

Read The Archives of Dermatology for more about the intervention study, or visit the Skin Cancer Foundation’s site to learn more about melanoma.

Comparing Apples to Oranges: UVA&UVB Rays

According to The Skin Cancer Foundation, long-wave UVA rays make up about 95 percent of the UV rays that hit Earth. These rays aren’t as intense, but there are 30-50 times more of them, and they’re present year-round in all daylight conditions. UVA rays have deeper penetration, too, and can cause wrinkles, aging, and skin cancer.

Although the effects of UVB rays are more superficial, they can cause serious damage to the epidermis. These rays are responsible for skin reddening and those nasty sunburns you get at the beach. UVB damage is more visible, and can also lead to skin cancer.

SPF: Get to Know Your Sunscreen

“For sunscreen to be really effective in preventing skin cancer, it has to provide broad-spectrum coverage,” Dr. Henry Lim, chairman of dermatology at Henry Ford Hospital, told MSNBC. “The U.S. is the only country with no guidelines for UVA protection, so consumers here have no way of knowing.”

One common misconception about a sunblock’s sun protection factor (SPF) is that the numbers—15, 30, and clear up to 100—indicate the level of protection. In actuality, it represents the amount of time a person can be exposed before the skin starts to redden. Dr. James Spencer, a St. Petersburg, Florida, dermatologist explains:

“SPF is very misleading,” he told MSNBC. “If I were a logical consumer, I would think that SPF 30 is twice as good as SPF 15. But SPF 15 blocks 94 percent of UVB rays. SPF 30 blocks 97 percent. Past 30, there isn’t much additional benefit to be had.”

Where to go from here:

The best thing you can do for your skin is to protect against both UVA and UVB rays.   Seek shade during peek daylight hours (10 am to 2 pm), wear clothing that will cover or protect the skin, and find a sunscreen that has ingredients that protect against both UVA and UVB rays. These ingredients include dioxybenzone, ecamsule, oxybenzone, titanium dioxide and zinc oxide.

Read more about UV rays at MSNBC.com, or contact the FDA about establishing guidelines for UVA protection.

Of 229 college students from a large university in the northeastern United States that used indoor tanning facilities, four in 10 met DSM-IV criteria for tanning addiction. Three in 10 met criteria for a test similar to the CAGE test (acronym for Cut down, Annoyed, Guilty, Eye-opener). CAGE is a four-question self-test sometimes used to increase awareness of use and/or abuse of alcohol.

Students who met criteria for both also had greater anxiety and substance use than their counterparts, which leads some to believe tanning addiction may be related to stress.

"There is some growing evidence now that people use tanning as a way to cope with stressors, as way to increase positive mood, decrease negative moods, [and to] cope with environmental demands,” Catherine E. Mosher, co-author of the study, said in an interview with Health Day. “In that way it's similar to other addictive behaviors."

Sun exposure stimulates Vitamin D production in the body. Vitamin D plays an important role in bone health, but it’s also been known to boost mood. Just 10 minutes a day in the sun’s UV rays—the same rays that allow tanning beds to produce that golden glow—is enough to boost these levels.

However all of this UV exposure can cause serious skin damage. For tanning addicts, this means a significantly higher risk of skin cancer. Mosher says counseling may be one way to reduce the impulse to tan

“Counseling could be a logical intervention for these people who have excessive visits to tanning salons,” Mosher said. “If, for some people, tanning is a way to cope with emotions, then there are obviously healthier ways to do so than to go to tanning salons every week.”

Read more about Mosher’s study on Health Day, or find her study’s abstract in The Archives of Dermatology.

Researchers examined skin samples from two European men with congenital absence of or insensitivity to pain. People with this condition have few nerves in their skin, and feel very little if any pain, temperature change or vibration.

What drew researchers to these two individuals was their excessive sweating. Although otherwise normal, they were sweating three to eight times more than usual.

“For many years, my colleagues and I have detected different types of nerve endings on tiny blood vessels and sweat glands, which we assumed were simply regulating blood flow and sweating,” says Frank Rice, lead author of the study and professor of neuroscience at Albany Medical College. “We didn’t think they could contribute to conscious sensation.”

The sensation isn’t like the feel of touch. It’s a much subtler feeling, like hearing background music from a party next door. “It is only when we shift focus away from the nerve endings associated with normal skin sensation that we can appreciate the sensation hidden in the background,” Rice explains.

The first man had never experienced pain, and could not sense water temperature, skin burns, or fractures. Although being slightly more receptive to sensation than the first, the second man also could not sense second degree burns, and had had several fractures of which he was unaware. He did report being able to feel ticklishness and itching as a child.

Despite a lack of nerve tissue in the skin, both men had sensitive tissues in the sweat glands—enough to tell if things were touching them, whether things were rough or smooth, or whether some things are warm or cold.

“Since only the innervation to the blood vessels and sweat glands is intact,” authors write, “the thermal detection from deeper tissues and the blood may be misperceived as though there is a continuously high surface temperature, thereby eliciting excessive sweating.”

Researchers believe the fact that the two subjects maintained the ability to sense some sensations suggests that vascular afferents, such as blood vesicles, may contribute to conscious touch awareness.

Read the study in the online journal, Pain.

After menopause, many women experience weight gain, which increases the risk of developing metabolic conditions. For women with type 2 diabetes, weight loss and glucose management can become extremely difficult to manage. Researchers found that both CLA and safflower oil proved particularly beneficial to postmenopausal women with type 2 diabetes.

CLA, conjugated linoleic acid, is an unsaturated fatty acid found primarily in meat and dairy products of cows, goats and sheep. CLA has been known to help people wishing to build muscle, lose weight and prevent heart disease.

Safflower oil is a plant-based oil similar to sunflower oil that is used in cooking oils, salad dressings and some margarines. Safflower oil, SAF, is a colorless and flavorless source of omega-6 fatty acids, and has been known to promote healthier skin and hair, reduce cholesterol and boost the immune system.

Thirty-five women completed a 36-week study comparing the effects of CLA and safflower oil on weight and body mass. Each supplement was consumed for sixteen weeks. Participants took roughly two teaspoons of either oil daily.

CLA began to cut body fat and reduce BMI after just eight weeks. “This magnitude of reduction has not been reported in an intervention that used a linoleic acid-rich oil,” wrote lead authors Martha Belury and Leigh Norris, both from the Department of Human Nutrition at OSU.

Safflower oil, originally meant for baseline comparison, yielded exciting changes of its own. Safflower oil reduced trunk mass and increased lean muscle mass, resulting in an average loss of 6.3 percent of body fat. It also reduced insulin resistance and fasting blood glucose levels.

“I never would have imagined such a finding,” Belury says. “This study is the first to show that such a modest amount of linoleic acid-rich oil may have a profound effect on body composition in women."

Belury and associates are pleased with the results of their study, and hope to explore the effects further. They believe that CLA and safflower oil show great promise in weight and glucose management for women with type 2 diabetes.

“It is possible that further reductions in BMI are achievable with a longer length of supplementation,” the authors wrote. “The use of lower doses of CLA over longer durations of intervention may prove to be an effective weight-loss aid."

The study appears online in The Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

A new study shows that women tend to have a greater variety of bacteria on their hands than men: on average, 50% more bacterial species than men have. And both men and women tend to have many more types of bacteria on their hands than previously thought.

The study, published in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found more than 4,700 different bacteria species – most of which are harmless to people – on the palms of 51 college student participants. A typical student’s hand had around 150 different species of bacteria living on it. Only five species were found on the hands of all 51 participants. Interestingly, the right and left hand of an individual shared an average of only 17% of the same bacteria types.

Researchers aren’t sure why women seem to carry a greater variety of bacteria than men, but they speculate that it might have something to do with differences in the acidity of the skin between men and women. Men generally have more acidic skin than women, which may provide a less hospitable environment for some bacteria. Other possible explanations include differences between men and women in sweat and oil gland production, differing use of moisturizer or cosmetics, variations in skin thickness, or hormonal effects.

The study also showed the diversity of bacteria on individual hands was not significantly affected by regular hand washing. However, the study did not examine total numbers of bacteria, only the number of different bacterial species present.

To minimize risk your risk of disease, the researchers still recommend washing your hands regularly with antibacterial soap, as these cleansers seem to preferentially target potentially harmful bacterial species. If you have further questions about bacterial infections, ask the experts at Healia Health Communities.

_{Photo: Janice Haney Carr, CDC}

Many of us remember to apply sunscreen while in the sun, but do we remember hats and sunglasses? July is UV Safety Month and the American Academy of Ophthalmology (AAO) wants to remind people to protect their eyes as much as they protect their skin.