Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges.

If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jhhhu.edu.

That's public health question at jhhu.edu for future podcast episodes.

It's Lindsay Smith Rogers.

Today on the podcast, your skin might crawl a little because we're talking about lice and bedbugs.

Connor McMeneman is a microbiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,

and he returns to the podcast to discuss these itchy insects, how they spread, what to do about them,

and why the key is not to panic. Let's listen.

Connor McMeneman, welcome back to public health on call. How are you?

Good thank you, Lindsay. Thanks for having me. Sure. So today we're going to talk about two really fun topics.

We're going to talk about lice and bedbugs. Before we launch into that, would you just tell us a little bit about your work at the Bloomberg School and what you study?

Yeah, absolutely.

So my research program here at Bloomberg School of Public Health focuses on mosquitoes.

In particular, we're interested in understanding how mosquitoes find humans, the mechanics of that process, and how we can

leverage that information to create new strategies to prevent mosquito bites.

But you've also done a little bit of research.

Apparently you know something about lice and bedbugs, other very irritating insects.

Yeah, absolutely.

So as an undergraduate in Australia where I'm from,

I had the honor of working on something that's closely related to head lice, the human body louse

or clothes louse, which throughout human history has actually spread a lot of nasty diseases

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