The Decibel - Bed bugs are everywhere, here’s why

Episode Date: October 26, 2023

Bed bugs are pretty much everywhere. They’re being spotted in major cities like Paris, London and even Toronto now. They’ve been found in 135 countries in the world, according to a recent study, and they can live in mattresses, couches, walls, lightswitches, even books. For a while, we were doing well at keeping the bed bugs in check, but not anymore.Murray Isman, a professor and dean emeritus at UBC’s Faculty of Land and Food Systems, explains how bed bugs became so prevalent, and why they’re so good at sticking around.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

I'm trying to get dressed right now. I can't stop thinking about the bed bugs. Just a few minutes ago, my friend messaged me and she said that this morning she was on the line 13 with her boyfriend and he had one crawling up his leg. When I was woken up by 2am in the midnights killing bed bugs, I killed over a hundred bed bugs. Oh, we have bed bugs now? Oh, as if Rishi Sunak and the Cozy Nibs wasn't bad enough, now you're gonna mess with my sleep. You might have seen these videos floating around social media

about Paris and the UK's problems with bedbugs. And one even surfaced on the subway in Toronto. Oh my God, what is that? Ew. Oh my God. Bedbugs are pretty much everywhere. They're in most major cities and have been found in 135 countries in the world, according

to a recent study. For a while, we were doing well in keeping bedbugs in check, but not anymore. Murray Eisman is going to help us understand why. He's a professor and dean emeritus of entomology at UBC's Faculty of Land and Food Systems. He also helped the federal government with its bed bug problem back in 2019. Today, Murray will tell us why we're losing the battle against bed bugs and how they've become so good at sticking around. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Murray, thank you so much for being here today. My pleasure. I want to get started with some biology here. For anyone who has been lucky enough to never have encountered a bed bug before. What exactly is it? A bed bug is a small, flightless insect that evolved to basically be a bloodsucker, like mosquitoes. They have evolved feeding on other warm-blooded things like birds living in bird nests or maybe in rodent nests. And at some point in past history, decided that humans were a pretty good source of a blood meal. They are primarily nocturnal. This is why most people never see them unless you have a really significant infestation. They do have a bit of a peculiar, some people describe it as a sweet odor when they're at very high populations.

So you might smell them before you actually see one. Basically, they come out at night, take their blood meal when people are sleeping, and then spend the rest of the time basically digesting the meal in some safe place underneath the mattress, in the cracks in furniture. They're very, very thin, so they're really, really good at edging their way into really, really narrow spaces. Things like behind light switches and behind electrical plugs, those sort of places. Sort of under optimal conditions where they have good access to humans or other warm-blooded animals and in a nice steady temperature, they can probably complete their development from egg to an adult in, oh, as fast as 30 to 40 days and then start reproducing not too long after that. If conditions are suboptimal, they don't have consistent access to host humans to feed on, they can delay their development for up to a year. Wow. Okay. So even if there's no humans around, they can just kind of lurk in

the floorboards or something until somebody comes by and then there's their next meal? They can hang out for a long period of time without a meal. Okay. Okay. And so I know when you get bitten by a bed bug, they kind of leave little itchy bumps on you. I guess, is that the extent of it then? Pretty much. I mean, if you can call it an upside to bed bugs, it's the fact that they don't vector any major diseases. So you're not going to get malaria, yellow fever, dengue, Zika, any of the mosquito-borne

viruses. You don't get any of the diseases we associate with tick bites, like obviously terrible stuff like Lyme disease, Rocky Mountain spotted fever. There's a whole range of diseases humans can get that are vectored by ticks, mites, mosquitoes, black flies, lots of other blood-feeding insects. But fortunately, as far as we know, bedbugs are not in that class. Okay. Okay. Yeah. So kind of an upside, as you say there. So obviously they're found in beds, hence the name, and a whole bunch of other places as well, as you say. And I think a lot of us have been seeing these videos of bedbugs recently in other places as well, right? Like on public transit or in a movie theater.

Why are we seeing them in those places? The fact is because they're flightless and they don't walk very fast, they get transported by humans. We carry them around. We carry them around typically not in our clothing. And they're certainly not like lice, where human lice spend their entire life on your head, attached to your hair, or on your body. Bed bugs only are on you to take their quick blood meal, and then they hide somewhere else. But we can transport them, for example, in luggage, tote bags, purses, anything that we carry with us. And the problem is we have a lot of human traffic,

a lot of people coming and going, as you would find in movie theaters, libraries, schools, public transit, airliners, cruise ships. A lot of people coming and going, there's a higher probability that people are going to be carrying them into that space. And then the bugs wander off out of the luggage or the tote bags or whatever. And that's typically how they end up there. And then if it turns out to be a good place, there's lots of juicy humans to feed on, they will stick around and reproduce. Lovely, lovely. Okay, so we've seen all of this coverage of bed bug infestations in Europe recently. But I guess I wonder, are we actually seeing infestations right now? Or are people just, I guess, maybe hyper aware of them because of all the coverage even?

Combination of the two. To go back a little ways before the current millennium, so back in the 1990s, really from about the mid-60s to the late 1990s, bedbugs sort of were really pushed to the wayside. They became not much of a problem at all, to the point that when I was teaching entomology in the 1980s and early 90s, we didn't even have a bedbug to show students. They were so rare. Wow. They were only found in maybe like hostels and places, again, a lot of high human turnover and probably, let's say, suboptimal hygiene, those sort of places. So they were really, really uncommon. And somewhere around the late 90s to early 2000s, things changed that really allowed them to take off. Now, probably the single biggest one was pest control operators no longer had the

arsenal of heavy chemicals like DDT. And the one that they used to use was called Dursban. The ones that were very, very effective at knocking out insects from urban habitats. But they stuck around a little bit in the urban environment. They weren't probably the best for our health. So in the absence of having those strong chemicals to fight and mitigate bedbugs, the bedbugs started to resurge in a big way. And of course, we stopped using things like DDT because we found there was other adverse effects, right, in other parts of the environment. So there's reasons for that. Yeah, absolutely. Then, of course, there was the increase in international travel. It became a lot more relatively inexpensive for more people to travel long

distances internationally. And then quite possibly is global warming just made it more conducive to bedbugs as getting out of their normal habitats, which is people's bedrooms and living rooms. And those things combined probably led to an increase in bedbugs. And I mean, they used to be associated with, you know, sort of, you know, flop houses and run down school dormitories and hostels and whatnot. But, you know, by the 2008, 2010, you know, four and five star hotels were starting to report problems with bedbugs. And all of a sudden, it was, you know, a calamity for even the best hotels. So they really can be everywhere, it sounds like. And from what I understand, too, it can be quite hard to get rid of an infestation of bedbugs

once they're there, right? I guess, why is that, Murray? What is it about, I guess, the way that they move or how they live that makes them hard to get rid of? Yeah, it's because the places they hide in the daytime make them quite inaccessible to spraying or treating with chemicals or whatever types of other pest management tools we have. They're very adept at being behind and between walls, behind baseboards, you know, under box springs and mattresses. And that's a big part of the challenge. Wow. So, yeah, it seems like a lot of crowded places, once they're in there,

it'd be really difficult to get them out of. So places like hotels, even places like hospitals, I've read too, right? You have a lot of people coming in and out. It's really difficult to get bedbugs out once they're in there. And the problem, especially in multiple dwellings, is that even if you try to treat in an apartment or a hospital room where

there seems to be an infestation, if you apply chemicals, you might just be pushing them into your next door neighbor's apartment or somewhere else in the building. And that's the problem is you can have limited infestations in part of a building, and they will move freely between units within a building. So you might have to do a whole floor of a hotel, a whole wing of a hospital. Otherwise, you're just pushing them around. Wow. So, okay, so they could be found anywhere, hotels, motels, hospitals. They can hide out on the floorboards with the light switches.

There seems to be a bit of a stigma around having bedbugs too, right? Can we talk a little bit about this? Absolutely. I mean, number one is they're associated with poor hygiene, which isn't necessarily the case at all. But in people's minds, if you find bedbugs, it's because you have bad housekeeping, poor hygiene. But certainly that's not the case at all. But in people's minds, if you find bedbugs, it's because you have bad housekeeping, poor hygiene. But certainly that's not the case. The other problem is there's this whole stigma around it's fear, fear around something's coming out at night and sucking your blood. I mean, it's sort of the vampire syndrome. That's very disconcerting, at least with mosquitoes. When they land on us, we see them and

we can swat them. But bedbugs are really stealthy. And unless we're getting a lot of bites at night, we're not even going to wake up. So that's pretty disconcerting for a lot of people. Yeah. And when you talked before about the idea of, you know, they're associated with kind of dirty hygiene or unhygienic or dirty areas. I guess, are people less willing to report because of that, report these bed bug infestations because of that stigma? Well, I think certainly if you're running an Airbnb, you wouldn't want to put it in your advertising. This is a real challenge for hotels and cruise ships

and the hospitality industry. And they have invested huge amounts of money, very quietly, I might add. They really had to step up their pest management contracts, the way they clean rooms between guests, that sort of thing, to try and minimize the possibility that their guests are going to find and then report bedbugs. We'll be right back. All right, Murray, I'd like to ask you about the history of bedbugs. When did they originate and how long have they actually been with us, with humans? They have been with us as long as humans have been cohabiting and living together, probably from caves onward.

As I said, they probably originally evolved to feed on birds and rodents and other animals in nests. And basically when humans started creating their own large nests, that's when they probably started feeding on humans or evolved to specialize on humans. So this goes back thousands of years. Certainly, they were well known from the Renaissance period, 1500s, 1600s, 17s, pre-industrial and then industrial Europe and the UK. Huge problem, for example, in trench warfare in the First World War and then in the Second World War, where you've got large populations of transient people and people crowded together in, again, less suboptimal hygienic conditions. We talked a little bit earlier about kind of how there's been a resurgence in the last little while of bedbugs.

I wonder, are bedbugs getting better at avoiding our pesticides? Not better at avoiding them, but as they've come back to the fore, of course, then pest control operators started using the pesticides remaining in their arsenal and using more and more and more of it. And insects are absolute champions of evolving what we call resistance. So if you keep hitting insect populations or pest populations hard enough with a chemical, in pretty short order, they will evolve resistance to it. And in fact, there's a lot of research that shows that for insects, at least based on agricultural insects, they can evolve resistance in typically about 12 generations. So if you have an insect that's going through a generation once a month, within a year, a pesticide that had formerly been relatively effective at controlling them, you know, a year later, it's doing nothing to them at all.

And then you have to move to the next chemical and the next chemical. And you get on what in the industry is called a pesticide treadmill, which is just you have to keep coming up with new chemicals because the bugs keep evolving resistance to the ones that you try to use. So are we seeing, I guess, like super bed bugs who are just going to be resilient to everything we've got so far? There are certainly some populations in the eastern U.S. and undoubtedly places like Western Europe and probably in central Canada as well that are what's called multiply resistant. So they have resistance to two or more different

commercial insecticides. Now that we've talked through all the concerns that a lot of people have with bed bugs, Murray, what are some of the things that people can do to actually prevent getting bedbugs? First and foremost, avoid bringing them into your home or apartment. So if you're traveling, what some people suggest is if you're in a hotel, actually put your suitcase in the bathtub or in the shower or someplace that's not close to the place you're going to be sleeping. Keep it elevated on hard furniture so it's a little harder for the bugs to get into your suitcase. So this is so they don't stow away into your suitcase and then you bring them home, right? Exactly. The idea is to try and not collect

them when you're away and then you're the one that introduces them into your own home. People also say, don't unpack in your bedroom. Don't unpack in your place at all. Unpack in a garage. Unpack your stuff somewhere. Unpack in a laundry room. Shake your clothes out. Shake the suitcase out so that, you know, if they fall out, at least you have a chance to, you know, squash them before they squash them before they quietly migrate under your bed or behind your headboard or wherever. Yeah. I remember we used to do something similar coming back from India. We would leave our suitcases in the garage for a day and then open them there in case any cockroaches found their way. Yeah. Same principle, exactly. And I believe there are some repellents or something like mothballs that are being sold that you can put in suitcases and carry-on bags.

It'll sort of fumigate your suitcase in travel. The problem is almost everyone I've seen smells pretty awful, and you end up with all your clothes smelling awful. But if you're going to launder everything when you come home, maybe that's a precaution some people are willing to take. Yeah. What about something like a bug repellent, like a mosquito repellent, stronger ones even with deet? Would that do anything? So certainly, yes, they will. The problem is people probably don't want to apply that every night before they go to bed. Then it ends up on your bed sheets. And again, most of them aren't very pleasant smelling. If you were going into a hotel or a motel or a hostel

or something like that, that you thought there was a reasonable possibility there was bed bugs, might be a good idea for one night to lather up with DEET or some other good insect repellent. They will deter them from biting. But generally speaking, I think people would not be too keen on doing that. Okay. I'm curious, Murray, how many of these things do you actually do when you're traveling or in your daily life? Are you doing all of these things? The ones I do is I try to keep the luggage elevated and closed as much as possible if I'm in a motel.

Marie, just lastly here, I mean, I think a lot of people, including myself a little bit here, are a little freaked out when we think about bedbugs, even though they don't spread diseases. It's just the idea of them, as you say, right? So now that we're seeing all this coverage about people supposedly finding bedbugs in all these places, I guess, what should we be thinking about? What's your advice to people? Well, the problem is these things have evolved and they've been very, very successful living with us indoors. They're almost impossible to eradicate. They will be around in one form or another. People should be vigilant and keep their eyes open. And if they think they're being bitten by something at night, definitely do a good search. If people are really bothered, they should consult with pest control professionals. I would suggest to listeners that they be vigilant.

Try not to push the panic button if you see one bed bug, but certainly, you know, be a little more sensitive and vigilant to what's going on and maybe do a little more snooping around. You can buy traps. There are these traps that you can put on the feet of your bed that they have trouble walking through and getting onto your bed. And again, they don't fly. They don't jump. They don't run, they walk. So anything that will intercept them walking can hopefully give you some relief. Murray, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. It's been a pleasure.

That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening,

and I'll talk to you tomorrow.