No one enjoys stumbling across a cockroach in their home, especially when it is the middle of the night and you are sneaking off to the kitchen for a snack when one of those little varmints scurries out of hiding, scaring you half to death in the process. Fright factor aside, there are many reasons why these insect pests are bad to have running around your home. They pose a health risk to humans because of their rather disgusting habits, which also in turn puts your food, any kind of fabric, and books in danger of being ruined by these filthy creatures.
To start, cockroaches leave behind noxious substances everywhere they walk. During their travels throughout your home cockroaches drop bits of their faeces and throw up portions of their partially digested food at regular intervals. In addition to this, they discharge disgusting secretions from certain glands around their body and mouth. This discharge is particularly foul smelling, leaving this long-lasting “cockroach perfume” to smell up any food and areas they visit around your home.
As if that first bit wasn’t bad enough, cockroaches move fluidly from unsanitary places like sewers, drains, and latrines into human homes, carrying everything they pick from those locations with them into your home. They can spread the germs that cause diseases, playing a supplementary role in the spread of disease when they contaminate food they find and eat small portions of in your home with the germs they pick up from the unsanitary locations mentioned above. So, in short, the disgusting germs they carry around after wandering through sewers and latrines then get spread on the food they find in your kitchen, ruining that food for human consumption. They can also carry the eggs of parasitic worms and can cause allergic reactions in humans living in the homes they infest. Above all else, you want to make sure and double check your stored food for possible contamination from cockroaches, as this is the primary way they can spread disease to humans.
Have you ever noticed ruined food in your pantry or cabinets that was likely contaminated by cockroaches, or smelled a noxious odor around your home that may have come from the secretions and discharge left behind by cockroaches?
