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Sign up with Google Sign up with FacebookQ: What kind of diseases can you catch from Chinese cockroaches?
This is a serious question. I often here people saying how unhygienic cockroached are and how they spread disease, especially if they crawl over food left out at night. But what kind of diseases do they actually cause and how do you know when you've been made ill by them?
12 years 7 weeks ago in Health & Safety - China
I know this is not an answer,but do you really need to know,would just be one more thing to worry about.
Some people are allergic to cockroaches, but the main issue for health is that they may have been in a sewer or drain before visiing your kitchen. Therefore they can spread disease. They are just as happy to eat faeces as food. yuck. More info (links to PDF)
I was unable to find anything specifically about chinese cockroaches... I did find oriental cockroaches at this site, but it says they live in the Northern US. Maybe they immigrated?
Do cockroaches transmit disease?
Cockroaches are scavengers. While walking on spoiled food in garbage containers, they pick up various bacterial organisms on their legs that they can later deposit on uncovered food. Cockroaches themselves are not implicated in the transmission of any diseases. However, many disease-causing organisms can grow and multiply in their guts and can then be deposited on silverware, plates etc. during defecation. For example, cockroaches can pick up disease-causing bacteria likeSalmonella on their legs and later deposit them on foods and cause food poisoning. People continuously exposed to dust containing cockroach feces and crushed body parts become sensitized and may show allergic reaction and asthma after repeated exposure to such dust.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/html/ehs/ehscroach.shtml#oriental
Diseases they are known to carry:
Cockroach disease can affect humans. Cockroaches are known to carry diseases like dysentery, typhoid and poliomyelitis, as well as gastroenteritis. Cockroaches can live just about anywhere, and can live on fermenting products, septic dressings, hair, leather, wallpaper, feces, rotting food, and more. Because many of the products that cockroaches feed on are spoiled or simply unsanitary, it's easy to see where cockroach disease comes from. Many of the substances that they feed on are already contaminated, and as the cockroach moves from one location to another it spreads the disease along the way.