As a child I was often sent to bed with the chilling last words, “Sleep tight don’t let the bed bugs bite.” These words terrified me because of their mythological ring. Being bitten by something living in my bed sounded like the boogey man in my closet or the monster under my bed. However, bed bugs are not a fiction of the imagination! Bed Bugs are a very real threat and today they are finding their way into our homes at a startling rate. In California, bed bugs are making headlines as they have shut down a handful of public facilities in the Bay area. Nationally, a major pest control company has rated New York as the bed buggiest city. The runner-ups include Philadelphia, Detroit, Cincinnati and Chicago. Despite the recent buzz, bed bugs are not a new phenomena. Below is a brief history of bed bugs.
Bed bugs are referred to in the writing of the ancient Greeks all the way back in 400 BC. The ancient Greek play write Aristophanes wrote about bed bugs in several of his plays. Pliny the ancient Roman philosopher believed bed bug bites could heal snakebites and ear infections. Bed bugs continued to make literary appearances in the middle-age writings and history of the Germans, (11th cen.) the French (13th cen.), and English (16th cen.). It is believed that bed bugs then migrated to the “New World” on the ships of the early colonist. However, bed bug infestation did not really explode in North America until the Industrial Revolution. Before the car and the airplane, the railroads were almost the only way to effectively travel. Railroad cars and the cheap rail side hotels became bed bug “distribution centers,” spreading bed bugs effectively across the entire country. The railroad cars helped distribute bed bugs so effectively that according to a report by the UK Ministry of Healthy in 1933, all the houses in many areas had some degree of bed bug infestation.
Bed bugs have a long history of human interaction, however, humans also have a long list of irradiation methods. Early methods included cultivating fungi and plants in infected areas along with using other bugs to naturally irradiate bed bugs. More modern twentieth century methods including smoking bed bugs out with peat fires, scattering plant ash and sanitizing furniture with boiling water. The first chemical solution came as a result of WWII. Early solider barracks used hydrogen cyanide fumigation to curb the bed bug epidemic. However, this was a very dangerous proceed that resulted in numbers of deaths. In the 1940’s a product came along, DDT, that was previously used to kill typhus and malaria carriers, and effectively ended bed bugs in the mass population.
So, why then are bed bugs, or the Cimex lectularius, back? Bed bug populations began to grow again in the 1980’s when the Environmental Protection Agency outlawed the use of DDT in mattress. They also outlawed the pesticides chlordane and diazinon, for their adverse effects on human health and the environment. With these chemicals no longer being used in the mattress manufacturing process, mattresses again became suitable homes for bed bugs. Bed bugs, however, did not flood back into to American homes over-night, rather they had to be reintroduced. This is why just today, nearly thirty-years after the EPA’s bans on mattress pesticides are we seeing bed-bugs crop up as a mass problem. The bugs today have spread much like they did in the late 19th and early 20th century- through travel. Places like New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago are international travel hubs and many of the hotels in these cities are again becoming “distribution centers” for bed bugs. Bed bugs hitch a ride on everything from shoe soles to luggage, as they spread across the globe.
Today’s bed bugs also present a new challenge- a resistance to pesticides. Scientist studying the pest today claim that today’s bed bugs have thicker, waxier exoskeletons that help shield them from the pesticides we try to poison them with and faster metabolisms to beef-up their natural chemical defenses. A duo of biologists at Simon Fraser University have slept in bed-bug ridden beds every night for the last five years, subjecting themselves to over 180,000 bed bug bites in an effort to discover new methods for curbing infestations.
The silver lining in this grim child-hood rhyme turned reality, is that bed bugs are a relatively harmless pest. Bed bugs are a supreme nuisance but bed bug bites do not spread disease pathogens like other pests are capable of. Bed bug bites do cause rashes, skin irritations, allergic symptoms, and even physiological effects.