Bedbugs: A bloody American infestation

“Your abusive boss isn’t the only vermin in the office,” said Laura Petrecca in USA Today. Expanding on their preference for beds and sofas, “blood-sucking bedbugs are creeping into a growing number of cubicles, break rooms, and filing cabinets” in offices nationwide. The “apple-seed-size insects” are on a 50-state march, infesting IRS offices in Philadelphia and Kentucky, and apartment houses, movie theaters, and retail stores in New York, where they’ve even upstaged King Kong by sowing panic at the Empire State Building. Theories for the infestation include “increased travel, more immigration, and the bug’s resiliency to pesticides.” But theories are of no help to people who get bitten by the critters, which “dine on human blood” and leave bites that “itch like crazy.”

Decades ago, you could “bomb” any infested home or office with DDT, said Nina Burleigh in Time.com. But DDT use is now illegal. Another pesticide that kills bedbugs, propoxur, is considered toxic for home use, but desperate officials in Cincinnati—where some residents have fled infested apartments to sleep in the streets—have asked the EPA to allow in-home use of propoxur, toxic or not. I fully understand the desperation, said Michael Wolff in Newser.com. My adult daughters were driven screaming from their New York City apartment by nightly attacks, which left them covered with little red welts. Once your belongings are infested, your friends, your co-workers, even your parents shun you. “You can only flee, finally.”

We just may have to get used to them, said Bruce Watson in DailyFinance.com. Except for a stretch in the mid-20th century, when the now-banned DDT gave us an edge, bedbugs have been an “irritating part of daily life for most of human history.” The bugs had all but vanished from urban America, said entomologist May Berenbaum in The New York Times. But global travelers aided their resurgence through infested luggage. Now, we’re defenseless, since bedbugs “not only attack while we sleep, but they also inject anesthetics, so as not to awaken us, and anticoagulants, so that in every 10-minute feeding they can suck in two to three times their weight in clot-free blood.” Their only saving grace is that they are “repulsive to humans” of every “race, religion, culture, nationality, tax bracket, and party.” Americans once again are one people, united by our fear and loathing of tiny creatures that bite in the night.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up