Bed Bug Infestation Is Scaring Millions Of Americans

Peter Krask stepped out of his New York City apartment one day last year, shut the door, and walked away forever, leaving behind almost everything he owned.

He carried away only a few items of clothing, personal records, and his computer.

Krask's apartment was infested with bedbugs. Savoring warmth, they swarmed in his DSL port, light fixtures, carpets and furniture. They'd feasted on him nightly for a year — which he spent visiting doctors in an increasing state of panic over the rashes inflaming his buttocks and other body parts before finally ascertaining the cause.

It was Cimex lectularius, the flat, cockroach-colored, lentil-sized pest whose favorite food is not just warm blood but human blood. Bedbugs are back, bigtime. According to a National Pest Management Association study, outbreaks have soared 81 percent nationwide since 2000. Their sudden resurgence in all fifty states of a formerly bedbug-free nation has caught off-guard not just the medical and pest-control industries but millions of ordinary people who now apply costly, time-consuming, potentially toxic and inconclusive strategies for slaughtering insects that inhabit indoor environments both soft and hard and can lie in wait without eating for up to a year. Finding hosts, they feed by night, doubling in size as they suck. 

Lending a whole new meaning to the phrase "home invasion," the very idea stokes our deepest fears of swarming hordes and sleeper cells and sneak attacks.

Bedbug infestations at Abercrombie & Fitch, Victoria's Secret and other trendy Manhattan stores last month — and last week in Manhattan's Time Warner Center, home to CNN — cost hundreds of thousands of dollars each in lost sales, furniture, equipment and merchandise, plus the wages of dozens of workers transporting, fumigating and destroying tainted goods. That's just the tip of the iceberg.

America's bedbug problem, says University of Florida entomology professor Philip Koehler, "has reached epidemic proportions."

It's getting worse, he says. And there's no end in sight.

"Especially in the Northeast, bedbugs are becoming a common part of everyone's lives" — in homes, stores, offices, hotels, hospitals, vehicles, schools, theaters, and restaurants.

"Did you ride home in a car, bus or train? You might have been feeding bedbugs while sitting in your seat."

Koehler has seen bedbugs infesting deluxe retirement condos and VA-hospital waiting rooms, crawling out of purses and backpacks, and "pouring by the thousands" from wheelchairs whose paralyzed riders could not feel the bites. Almost any environment under 120 degrees Fahrenheit can support bedbugs. A single pregnant stowaway on a sleeve, say, or in a thrift-shop cushion could turn you into the next Peter Krask.

He spun those few clothes salvaged from his abandoned apartment in a hot dryer, one of the few tactics known to kill bedbugs and their eggs. Before the self-employed writer and floral designer could use his computer again, "it was placed in a sealed bag with poison-gas pellets for a week."

Other bedbug victims he's known have hired companies that poison-gassed all their possessions in the backs of unmarked trucks.

"I burned through every resource I had to restock my new apartment. In every store where I went to buy new things, salespeople told me that other customers had come in with similar horror stories" about bedbugs.

Physically, psychologically, financially, "it was a total catastrophe."

Virtually eradicated nationwide sixty years ago thanks to superpowered pesticides such as DDT, bedbugs are back — largely because those chemicals are now banned, but also thanks to what experts quoted in news reports call "increased foreign travel." While much of this involves airplanes — and Koehler points out that "there are parts of the world such as India and Pakistan that have had bedbugs forever and where they never went away"  — the bedbug resurgence is spurring not-so-surprising buzz about its origins.