Posted By P Williams
I work in the HSW enforcement field and I came across something a few years ago which has raised its head again recently. It is not uncommon to receive complaints from staff who work in offices, usually open plan or in particular call centres and mail sorting roms who claim to have been bitten by fleas. They show all the right symptoms ie small lumps that itch usually around cuffs, ankles, arms neck areas, face etc. The company will usually spray for fleas and put traps down. They never actually find any fleas. The cause is usually put down to someone being bitten at the weeken or the evening before whilst garden or outdoors since bites can take up to 24hrs to show or they assume that one of the employees has a cat and they have brought a rouge flea in. Where there is no evidence of an infestation, the cause is actually caused by papers fibres. The environments where this occurs can have very low relative humidity hence static levels can be quite high. The small paper fibres become statically charge and do some magic which results in them sticking into things and people. This is particulary common around photcopiers or mail sorting machines where it is put down to fleas coming in with the mail or the mail bags. There have been occasions where you can actually see quite clearly what appears to be a sting in the area thought to be a bite and on analysis these were found to be papaer fibres. The cure is to increase relative humidity thereby reducing the build up of static. Sometimes the act of spraying carpets with waterbased insecticide will solve the problem short term not because fleas are killed but because the relative humidity is increased by spraying water around.
Hope this is useful to someone. Please pass it on it may help reduce the number of complaints I have to deal with and people are usually very impressed too.

Posted By Simon Ayee
I have come across this before where employees handling old documents in an office with low humidity were suffering from skin, nose & eye irritation etc.

The occ hygienist that was consulted suggested this as one of the possibilities and referred to the small paper fibres as "paper shard". The suggestion was that the shard is picked up on the hands as documents are handled and transferred to the face, nose & eyes through normal hand to face contact. The shard causes mechanical irritation to the skin, nose & eyes causing redness, soreness, itching etc.

Document cleaning, use of disposable handwipes were suggested solutions along with plants or small water features to increase the humidity.

Posted By peter gotch
When we had a similar problem, we called in Rentokil for a second opinion. Within 10 minutes he had diagnosed "carpet bug".

The flying particles aim for non-conductive materials e.g. ladies' tights.

To put this into perspective the problem had by this time resulted in us reporting one major and one 3 day accident.

Peter