Last night, Rentokil Initial technicians Michael Rolls, Mark Hardie, Lewis Jones and Marcin Antikiewicz, enjoyed a starring role in the ITV1 show, Dirty Britain. The team had a mammoth job on their hands as they cleared a house packed with bin liners, clothes, furniture, books, newspapers and household waste which should have been despatched to landfill decades ago. Whilst one of the cleaners cautiously peeked inside a cupboard to check for a rat infestation the camera zoomed in on a stained bag held at arms length by one of the cleaners. “I don’t like the colour” he said sniffing. Body fluids was the verdict. Foul this job might be to most of us, these guys are made of stern stuff. From suicide clear-up to removing maggot infested body parts the Rentokil Initial Specialist Hygiene team are thoroughly professional in their approach.  

After three days and nine van loads of rubbish the team reclaimed the stairs from 21 years of debris. Above them lay a dense concentration of debris and the unknown. Gazing at the packed filth above them they were unaware it would take another seven days, working 10 hours a day and a total of 26 trips to a municipal waste and recycling centre to empty the house of its contents.

The programme highlighted the dirty secrets the general public rarely catch sight of thanks to an invisible army of cleaners and pest control technicians who make the nastiness vanish. At a racecourse the punters drank, tossing their disposable glasses beneath the table. Outside on a cold, windy evening cleaners chased litter around the grandstand.

Across the UK there are many people doing hidden but essential work with great commitment and pride. Dirty Britain puts the men and women of this industry under the spotlight and highlights the substantial contribution they make. According to Oxford Economics 2011 the combined support services sector contributes £115bn a year to the economy and employs over 3 million people, yet rarely receives prime time recognition.

are specialist hygiene experts and provide essential services to organisations of all sizes the length and breadth of Britain. Click here for a selection of images of the team taken by award-winning photographer, Matthew Lloyd.

Dirty Britain is a two-part series which reveals the dirty secrets about the way modern Brits live by following some of the men and women who clean up after us. As well as the Rentokil Initial team, the programme also follows workers unblocking a main sewer and armies of litter pickers.

As part of a campaign to champion the invaluable work done by support service employees across the country, Rentokil Initial commissioned former Times Young Photographer of the Year Matthew Lloyd to follow 26 people across all Rentokil Initial brands. The full set of photographs can be seen at www.rentokil-initial.com/who-we-are/our-people/.

The second episode of Dirty Britain will be air on ITV 1 at 9pm on 22nd May.

Cleaning Dirty Britain is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

The pathogenic organisms of diseases including malaria, sleeping sickness, onchocerciasis, elephantiasis and yellow fever are carried human-human by blood-sucking dipterous flies. Many other diseases including cholera are transmitted by many species of flies sucking liquid from excreta then settling on human food. It is therefore essential hygiene practice for food preparation areas to employ some method of fly killer.

In his Do You Want Flies With That blog last week our entomologist, Matt Green, explained how electrified grid fly traps could increase your chances of receiving a lumps of fried Musca domestica in your lunch. A glue trap keep the flies intact when captured rather than fragmented into tiny airborne particles which could land on a counter top or on your salad. Here’s some of the more unpleasant facts about flies and why you really don’t want them landing in your food.

Gross facts about flies

• The cluster fly lays its eggs in earthworms. When hatched the larvae bores through the cuticle of the worm, devouring most of it in the process.
• Filter flies breed in sewage filters and feed from faecal pellets. They are beneficial because they prevent the fungal mat become too dense and clogging the filter beds in sewage works. However in the summer they can breed profusely and invade nearby houses and pester workers.
• The window gnat will lay their eggs in rotting fruit and vegetables within the home and can cause damage to honeycombs and is a known pest in vineyards and breweries.
• The common house fly likes to lay eggs in any vegetable or animal matter provided it is not too dry and can be readily swallowed and digested by the larvae. Stacks of fermented horse-dung, human faeces, pig and household refuge would be desirable breeding locations.
• The blue bottle lays its eggs on open wounds, the tail of animals such as sheep with soiled tails or dead animals.

Flies in your food?

Foul Facts About Flies is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

Across the globe, millions of businesses rely on the use of textiles or workwear to run their operations successfully and workwear is often critical to their operation. Initial Textiles offers a uniform manufacturing and rental service which includes laundry, maintenance and repair as well as collect, wash and return. But more importantly increasing legislation has made it essential for companies to provide and maintain workwear, especially in regards to protective wear.  If you are unsure of the legislation around workwear – Initial Textiles can help and provide advice.

But business textiles isn’t just limited to uniforms.  The European workwear & flat linen rental service market is worth €8.3b and €2.1b of that is flat linen. Restaurants and hotels get through a lot of linen and towels which need to be put through a hot wash before they are employed by their next guest or customer. There are plenty of insects like  silverfish and springtail which thrive in damp conditions so our pest control business can provide customer advice on best practice.

There are textiles beneath your feet too. Germs and bacteria can grow rapidly in a mat or rug. Not only does a filthy mat send the wrong signal (anyone want to eat in a place where they can’t be bothered to clean the mats?) to your customers and employees  it can encourage pests too. A German Cockroach can feast off the smallest of crumbs for weeks. Rodents will eat anything, even the rug itself if they think it’s tasty. A damp rug can encourage moisture loving insects like woodlice to move in.  Initial Textiles will take your soiled rugs away, give it a thorough deep clean and replace it with a fresh one before the pests and bugs get a look in.

I think our pest control technicians look great in their warm fleeces, waterproof trousers and sturdy safety boots. Do you wear a uniform to work? Would you change anything about it?

Initial Textiles is the market leader in Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg and the second largest textiles services supplier in France. There are 32 laundries in France and 12 in Benelux. Initial Textiles employs 9600 people globally across the Textile & Hygiene services division. Find out more at rentokil-initial.com.

Textiles and Bugs is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

Would you feel the same way if you knew that the zapping noise you hear is accompanied by a cloud of microparticles from the recently deceased insect raining down on the surfaces beneath the trap and bits of the insect shattering and flying off in all directions? Approximately two in every hundred house flies electrocuted on high voltage traps scatters over a metre from where it was killed. Research has suggested that fly traps should be positioned at least 2m (horizontally) to ensure a scatter-free zone around the trap (Pickens, 1989).

Furthermore, you might be eating more than just scattered electrocuted fly parts. Flies carry a wide range of bacteria on their bodies and in 1992 and 2000 two research groups looked at the generation of airborne particles from five commercially available electrocution fly traps. They found that the numbers of airborne micro-particles increased with increasing fly catch, as you might expect, but also that moths generated a much higher number of particles dues to their stronger wing beat and scale fragments from their wings. The other important point from these two studies was that air movement dramatically increases the number of particles detected and the numbers of insect fragments that leave the unit (Ananth et al, 1992; Urban & Broce, 2000).

Watch this video to see what happens when a fly comes into contact with an electric fly killer

ZZZZzzzzzzzt!

Salmonella in your salmon bagel?

ZZZZzzzzzzzt!

Escherichia in your tuna empanada?

There are situations where electrified grid fly traps are the right tool for the job. Controlling flies in a cow shed of a chicken coop as examples. In those situations preventing flies from entering the buildings is not practicable and there is no need to undertake any monitoring- it’s pretty obvious that flies are a problem in these cases. Around human food preparation areas…? There are always better options than falling lumps of fried Musca domestica adding extra protein to your chunky salsa salad.

These traps are common in food preparation areas: their presence is often mandated by best practice guidelines the business is following. The reason they are mandated is to reduce risk of food contamination from flying insects. House flies are capable of transmitting a number of pathogens to our food that can cause disease.  However, this risk is reduced far more effectively by glue traps than by high voltage traps because the flies remain intact when captured rather than stunned, maimed or shattered when they come into contact with a high voltage grid. Therefore, using ultra-violet traps with adhesive surfaces reduces the risk of contracting a fly borne disease near food preparation areas.

Not only is it safer, but our research has shown that flies are caught twice as quickly with these catch surfaces than the same traps using electrified grids.

No more flies in your chicken salad.

Do you want flies with that? is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

In 1820 there were 5,000 to 10,000 windmills in the UK. These creaking, rotating, food processing towers dotted the landscape in every county across the UK. Today only a handful have survived. Some still work and produce flour, and where’s there’s flour and grain you can rest assured the pests will be lurking close-by if not in the stored food. Today detecting signs of rodents or finding insects in food could close down a factory, but not so in the Victorian era. The flour mite was probably considered a natural additive.  Employing a cat or a terrier was a common method of mouse control.

A few weeks ago I visited Dobson’s Windmill in Burgh-le-March, Lincolnshire. The five sail windmill was saved from decay by the fact that its sails turn clockwise, rather than the more usual anti-clockwise. A mill with an even number of sails has the advantage of being able to run with a damaged sail and the one opposite can be removed without resulting in an unbalanced mill. Dobson’s mill was built in 1813 to mill grain harvested from the surrounding fields for flour. But the downside of running a mill is keeping the pests out. Field mice would have a field day inside a mill.

I asked the mill curator how the Victorian’s managed to keep the mice out. His reply was short, “They didn’t. Everything went in and got ground up.” Thank goodness for modern health and safety regulations.

National Windmills Weekend is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

In London, they say that wherever you stand you are never very far away from a rat. Apparently the whole city is crawling with them. They are there, you just can’t see them. Well in Sydney, it would seem that wherever you stand, you are never very far away from a huntsman spider and ten thousand cockroaches.

Since returning to Sydney after ten years in rat-infested London, my love affair with a poorly-remembered and romantically-reconstructed Australian wildlife is well and truly over. When our sulphur-crested cockatoos are not eating the solar heating tubes on our roof, they are in cahoots with the local colony of possums. Despite several attempts at blocking the holes in our roof and evicting the possums, the cockatoos and the possums are working together to peck, bite and gnaw new entry points. I’m all for the symbiotic nature of ecosystems and I’m all for team work, but this is ridiculous. In the mornings, after changing multiple babies’ nappies, I also have to wipe down the possum wee stains from our walls. Joy.

Then there are the cockroaches. No one told me the city had been overtaken by cockroaches. Big, small, flying and scuttling. Why are there so many god damn cockroaches in Sydney? Have they mutated and developed a resistance to all known cockroach-killing chemicals as well as nuclear war? And just when I thought I was coming to terms with the cockroaches (as well as developing lighting-fast reflexes with a bottle of Raid), our annual pest inspection by Rentokil revealed that we have termites.

Yes, termites. More on that later. I have to go kill a cockroach with my bare hands. I am hardcore like that.

Blog written by Shankari Chandran, a parenting blogger based in Sydney. You can visit Shankari’s blog here: http://duckformation.wordpress.com

Pests and Pestilence is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

Last week I found a lone silverfish behind the radiator in the study. I’ve now been working for Rentokil long enough to know that there’s never just one. I’ve just spotted the slow silverfish who didn’t scurry away in time.

Silverfish may not be dangerous or transmit disease, but they definitely are irritating. They are nocturnal and shy away from the light, so you may not even know you have them until the damage has been done. They eat matter that contains polysaccharides, which include glue, paper, sugar, hair, carpet and dandruff. Librarians often despair of them because they can be tricky to get rid off. Curators also need to be vigilant as they can damage pictures. In times of desperation silverfish may eat synthetic fibres,  dead insects or even their own moulted exoskeletons. They can also live for several months without eating anything at all. They are very hard to treat because they hide in tiny cracks and crevices. A spritz with insecticide may help keep them at bay.

Booklice are as vile as they sound. The tiny insects are usually only slightly bigger than a pin head. They are often found in the pages of old books, as they feed on moulds and mildews that grow on the glue in the bindings or on leather. These moulds and mildews need moist areas to grow in, which is why book lice are found in damp, dark places.

Springtail come in various shades of mould; yellow, purple, red, green, gold, black, white, even patterned, mottled iridescent or metallic. Springtail lay eggs singly or in clusters. After about 10 days, the eggs hatch into juveniles and in six days mature to adults. Adults live up to one year.

Another persistent pest of damp places,Woodlice prefer to live under rocks, and can breed in decaying organic matter. These creatures aren’t bugs as such; they are actually land-dwelling crustaceans, and they need to remain damp in order to breathe through their gills.

The ultimate all-natural organic way to get rid of pests in damp places would be to introduce centipedes. Centipede‘s are insectivores, and they particularly enjoy snacking on silverfish. They like the damp too.

Insects Which Love Damp is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

Today the Forestry Commission posted an alert about the oak processionary moth which is at most risk to the public in May and June when they shed their toxic hairs before pupating into moths. Each caterpillar has over 600,000 hairs that cause itchiness, inflammation and respiratory problems when humans are exposed to them. The hairs can be blown on the wind or left in the silken, web-like nests which the caterpillars build in oak trees. If you see such nests, similar to the one pictured right by the pine processionary moth, do not touch them as it can cause itchy skin rashes, eye and throat irritation.

The oak processionary can damage oak trees by feeding on the leaves, in some cases leaving the trees severely defoliated and vulnerable to other threats. So far, the oak processionary moth has only been sighted in the South East of England.

The Oak Processionary Moth most likely came into Britain as over-wintering eggs on semi-mature trees imported for planting in landscaping projects. It began breeding in several locations including the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and Richmond Park.

The oak processionary only nests outside but in the home the creamy coloured common clothes moth and the brown, mottled brown house moth can ruin clothes, fabrics, furs, leather and carpets. The damage is done by the maggot-like larvae so prevention of a moth problem is important.

If you are packing away your winter woollies make sure the garments are clean as dirty or soiled clothing is particularly attractive to moths. The insects like to lay eggs in dark and rarely disturbed areas so often the damage is done before you realise. Lofts are a risk because moths are attracted to bird nests that may be in the eaves of the house. Keep textiles stored in sealed plastic bags or suitcases. Get rid of moths before they hatch by regularly vacuuming under dark, quiet places like furniture to remove moth eggs before they hatch. This is particularly important if there has been a previous infestation or if you have noticed increased levels of moth activity.

May is Moth Season is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

I lived in a small stone-built cottage up a track at the back of an old farm in Ireland. It was picture book rural idyl and I enjoyed the peace of the countryside uninterrupted. Well, not quite interrupted as one day a small scuttling noise in the corner of my bedroom suggested trouble was afoot. Trouble, in this case, had four feet and a furry tail.

At first, I tried to ignore the problem. A house mouse, after all, was probably something that went with the territory – surely all country cottages had a mouse or two in residence. Unfortunately, I had more than a mouse or two – there was an entire family of the little rodents camping in my home. Trying to live in harmony with my little furry squatters proved to be a big mistake. Emboldened by my acquiescence the little critters soon came out and played merry hell. They would run around the room as a pack, sticking carefully to the edge of the skirting. Their speed was dazzling, they moved so fast that they’d often be gone by the time I looked up when the sound of their games attracted my attention.

They seemed to be taunting me, in fact I’m absolutely certain to this day that they were! They must have known I was a peacenik vegetarian as they showed absolutely no fear of me. Their courage reached a peak when they started circuit training in my bedroom every night – waiting until I was dropping off to sleep before starting their exertions. The running around the edge of the room was bad enough but things went too far when they started to run directly across my bed en masse, all while I was trying to drift off into a cozy sleep! After a couple of nights of this malarky I decided to go to war with my colony of Mus musculus.

The mice were right, I was in those days too zen to kill them myself but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to see them dead. My solution was simple, I got someone else to do the killing for me. I got a cat. Sri Cat, as I called her, was a scrawny, tough ex-stray and a she was a real killer. She was the feline answer to the Terminator and nothing could stop her from wiping out my mouse problem. One by one she caught and ate the mouse pack. She showed absolutely no mercy and less than a fortnight after she joined my household there was only one furry animal left in the cottage and that was the bearded hippy – me!

In the weeks after the mouse problem I went around the house trying to eradicate any points of entry for mice. I didn’t want them back. It wasn’t just the running across my bed that freaked me out but also the sight of Sri Cat munching on a mouse head in the kitchen. Unfortunately Sri Cat soon ran off, upset that I had deprived her of a diet of tender mouse-flesh. After my harrowing experience with the Irish mouse crew, I would cheer for Sylvester and Tom when watching those old cartoons.

Written by Glenn Le Santo,  journalist, social media guru and  live event reporter.

There’s A Mouse About The House is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog

Mice are attracted to kitchens because of food, warmth and shelter, plus there’s usually plenty of places to hide.  To keep rodents away, Deena Govender, Quality Assurance Manager of Rentokil, advises property owners and managers to block any holes which will allow rodents access to their buildings, including small cracks around pipes, which are often just big enough for a mouse to squeeze through. Gutters and overhangs where rodents can build their nests should  be cleaned out, and paper and packaging materials should be removed regularly so as not to provide nesting material.

Tips for Keeping Restaurants and Kitchen Areas Vermin Free

• Remove food waste and clean waste bins daily
• Clean properly under tables, behind fridges and freezers and inside cupboards to ensure that no food is left open to attract pests
• Remove all old equipment, paper and packaging materials daily
• Move kitchen appliances and equipment to ensure thorough cleaning.
• Food waste must be discarded only in containers designated for that purpose
• Waste bins should have tight fitting lids and should be deep cleaned regularly
• Kitchen and cleaning staff should not throw food waste down the drain or outside, as this will attract rodents.

“If rodenticides are necessary, then baits should be placed in tamper-resistant plastic bait-stations.  The closure mechanisms must be checked regularly and faulty units must be replaced immediately for safety reasons”, Govender said.

Detecting Signs of Rodents

• Damage to food, packaging materials or fabric of the premises
• Rodent droppings
• Nesting material such as cardboard and shredded paper
• Signs of gnawing
• Rub marks
• Tracks and burrows around the property

Rats can multiply very quickly and it is therefore very important that you act quickly to get rid of these pests.

Follow these tips and other invited guests including flies, cockroaches and ants will also be deterred from your premises.

Keep Unwanted Pests Out Of The Kitchen is a post from: deBugged - The Rentokil Blog