These tiny parasites, better known as bedbugs, have spread through Los Angeles, New York and London over the past 60 years, Americans and Britishers thought they had vanquished bed bugs forever. They were wrong.
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Bed bugs have been an insanity-inducing staple of American life ever since the Mayflower. In 1926, infestations in hotels and apartments were so common that experts couldn't recall a time when they weren't a problem. People absolutely hated being bitten in the night by these tenacious bloodsuckers, but the bugs were seemingly impossible to eradicate.
Then, in 1939, a Swiss chemist named Paul Hermann Muller discovered the pesticide DDT, which proved staggeringly effective at killing insects. And, for decades thereafter, DDT and other chemical pesticides helped keep America's homes and hotels bed bug free.
But it didn't last. Since 2000, a new strain of pesticide-resistant bed bugs has been popping up all around the nation in 2009, there were 10,000 reported complaints in New York City alone. Apartment dwellers were waking up with mysterious bites and rashes on their skin and finding peppery flakes around their mattresses (bed bug poop). People couldn’t rid themselves of bed bugs no matter how often they did laundry or threw out their mattresses. Once the bugs invaded, it seemed, almost nothing can stop them.
The bed bug invasion is a skin-crawling story recounted in Brooke Borel’s riveting new book, Infested: How the Bed Bug Infiltrated Our Bedroom and Took Over the World (the book was partially funded by the Alfred Sloan Foundation). I called Borel, a science journalist, to hear more about how bed bugs made a comeback, why they’re so tenacious, and whether we might ever get rid of them again.
Brad Plumer: I’d half assumed bed bugs were a very recent phenomenon, so it was fascinating to see that even the ancient Egyptians were trying to cast spells to ward them off.
Brooke Borel: Yeah, one thing that really struck me was the similarities throughout history. When the bed bug resurgence happened in the last 15 years, we had all these newspaper articles saying, oh my god, they’re in the movie theaters, there in this place, in that place. But when I went back and read some of the historical material, that’s always been the case.
You can go back and read descriptions of these old beds with jars around the legs that contained paraffin to ward off bed bugs. And that’s just an old school version of these little traps you can buy today to put under your bed and capture the bugs. It’s just an old story that’s been repeating itself forever.
BP: Now, there was this 60-year period after World War II where we’d vanquished bed bugs. How did that happen?
BB: A big part of that story happened in 1939, when a Swiss chemist [Paul Hermann Muller] discovered the insecticidal properties of DDT. These were the first synthetic insecticides, and they were way more effective than the natural botanicals or elemental poisons we had been using previously... Read full story: msn.com/en-ca/news/us/why-bed-bugs-are-making-a-comeback
List of bedbugs awareness:
Bed Bug From Wikipedia
Top Bed Bug Infested Cities in 2015
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