This Podcast Will Kill You - Ep 117 Bedbugs: Bug-bitten and bedeviled

Episode Date: May 2, 2023

This just might be our itchiest episode yet, and for that we sincerely apologize. But it might also be one of our most fascinating and fun episodes yet, and for that we are proud. Whether or not you have personal experience with bedbugs, the mere mention of these vampiric critters is often enough to inspire skin-crawling horror in us all. But in this episode, we also make a case for their appreciation. How can you not admire (from a distance, of course), their incredible ability to go for months or even a year without feeding? Or that their saliva contains all kinds of proteins that slow blood clotting or dilate our blood vessels? Or that the ubiquity of these bugs during the Industrial Revolution drove massive changes in furniture design? From the biology of a bedbug bite to the impressively long history of these blood-feeding arthropods, we present the story of bedbugs in more detail than you ever knew you wanted (and trust us, you do). See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Santana won this tour 2026, the power, the energy. Come celebrate your favorite hits from Woodstock to supernatural and beyond with very special guest, the Doobie Brothers. Get tickets now at LiveNation.com. Santana and Doobie Brothers won this tour, 2026. What a night have I passed, not being able to get to sleep from animals crawling continually all over my poor dear person. If once I had got to sleep, I would then have defied them, but it was not practicable. But what were these animals? Why, to know that, I looked this morning at the bed's head, and behold, I saw some hundred

of bugs on their march home, full of prey, I dare say. Though bugs do not like me in general, I suppose an overabundance of population had created a famine, for I was bit in three different places, all three on a very tender part which I shall forbear mentioning in which we Britain's think is the best part of a bullock to make a stake of. At five this morning, I left Capua, glad to get out of such a dirty hole. However, I deserved it for going to bed last night without looking. Whereas had I proceeded in my customary manner, laying myself down on a board, bench, or table, I should have slept like a hero, but Naples had made me luxurious, and this night was I repaid for it. I slept mercifully, not well, but some. On looking, however, at my fair

hand in the morning as it lay outside the bedclothes, I perceived it to be all, what shall I say, elevated into inequalities, significant of much. My pretty neck, too, especially the part of it Babby used to like to kiss, was all bitten infamously. I went this morning, while a man was taking down my bedstead to look for the bugs, which were worse last night, of course, having found what a rare creature they had got to eat, and investigated another lodging. In a beautiful little garden, villa-wise, rejoicing in the characteristic name of Flora Cottage. God knows whether there'll be bugs in it.

And now, dear, if you think my letter hardly worth the reading, remember that I am all bug-bitten and bedeviled. These old-timey, like, letters about their woes, you know? I mean, it's funny because I think the language style that it's written in is so, like, it seems so quaint from now that it kind of glosses over the horror. that they're experiencing. Yeah, it makes it sound like, what? But then you're like, oh, you're being destroyed by bugs?

Great, while you sleep? While you sleep. Yeah. But bug bitten and bedeviled is genuinely, I think, my favorite phrase that I came across. And there are so many contenders. But it's just so good. It's just so good. Well, I found both of those quotes from a paper that is just chockful of old, quote,

about bedbugs called The Bedbug and the Age of Elegance. Ooh. The first one was by Lord Herbert from September 1779. And the second was by Jane Welsh Carlyle, no relation as far as I'm aware, from 1843. And she had so many letters about bedbugs. An incredible number. Wow. Poor lady.

I know. Right. Hi, I'm Erin Welch. And I'm Erin Almond Updike. And this is, this podcast will kill you. Today we're talking about bedbugs. We are. I'm so excited.

Me too. It's going to be fun. They're horrible little creatures in the way that they invade your life and make you miserable, make you have to throw out things and whatever. But also, they're so fascinating. Like, they're really cool. They're cool little bugs. And I can't wait to talk about them more and learn about them more.

But first... It's quarantini time. It is. What are we drinking this week? We're drinking. Sleep tight. Yeah. I mean, for those of you that may not know that that's a phrase, I feel like it's a pretty common saying.

Yeah. Sleep tight and don't let the bed bugs bite. What is in sleep tight, Erin? It's a delicious little... concoction with gin and blackberries, lime juice, pomegranate juice, top it with a little tonic water. Mm, fantastic. It really is.

We'll post the full recipe for the quarantini as well as the non-alcoholic placebo rita on our website, this podcast will kill you.com and our social media channels. We certainly will. On our website, you can find the usual things that you can find on our website, transcripts, links to Goodreads list and our bookshop.org affiliate account, links to music by Bloodmobile, links to the sources for all of our episodes. You know, there's more there, merch, Patreon, transcripts. Did I already say transcripts? I think I did. I think that means it's time for us to move on to the content now, unless we have any other business. No other business, Erin. Let's get into

it, shall we? Let's do it right after this break. Dinner shows up every night. whether you're prepared for it or not. And with Blue Apron, you won't need to panic order takeout again. Blue Apron meals are designed by chefs and arrive with pre-portioned ingredients so there's no meal planning and no extra grocery trip. There, assemble and bake meals take about five minutes of hands-on prep. Just spread the pre-chopped ingredients on a sheet pan, put it in the oven, and that's it. And if there's truly no time to cook, dish by Blue Apron meals are fully prepared. Just heat them in the oven or microwave and dinner is ready. And here's the exciting news. Blue Apron no longer requires a subscription. You can order meals when you want them and skip when you don't without adding another recurring

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refresh your wardrobe with Quince. Go to quince.com slash this podcast to get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E dot com slash this podcast to get free shipping and 365-day returns. Quince.com slash this podcast. So this is technically like jumping ahead all the way to the current status, just a little bit, but I really like this quote. And I just feel like it gives so much context for like why this bedbug story is just so good.

So I'm going to start with it. Okay, ready? Okay. So this is from a 2012 paper titled Bedbugs, Clinical Relevance and Control Options. Not only was the reappearance of this pest unexpected, but the degree of the resurgence has almost been met with awe by many in the pest management industry. awe. But it's the unexpected part that gets me because I know. Was it really unexpected? Was it? We'll get there eventually.

Okay. Okay. But first, let's talk about bedbugs, shall we? Yeah. I think that's why we're here. That's why we're here. We're going to talk about what these bugs even are, what they do to us. And that's it. That's all I'm going to talk about. And then we'll hear from you. Okay. It's a good start. Thanks. So bedbugs are, obviously, bugs.

They're insects. They're in the family, simicidae, in the order hemiptera, which are, in fact, true bugs. So you're allowed to call them bugs. True bugs. We have talked about true bugs on this podcast before in our Shagas disease episode. So bedbugs are in the same order, but are very different bugs than kissing bugs, which are what spread Shagas disease. However, like kissing bugs, semisids or bedbugs are also hematophagus or blood-feeding insects. Bedbugs are flightless.

They're kind of little like oval shaped, very small, like one to three millimeters. And they are incredibly flat, like amazingly flat-bodied. Both the males and the females have to blood feed on vertebrates in order to survive. And there are at least 90-ish, maybe more species of submissids, but only a handful tend to feed on humans. And the two that most commonly and most preferentially feed on humans and therefore are the most important for us as humans are the common bedbug, cymex lectularius, and the tropical terrestrial. bed bug, Symex hemipterus. So those are the two that I'm going to focus on entirely. So whenever I talk about bedbugs, I'm talking about those two species, the common and the tropical bedbug.

But there are so many more. So many. And like our friends, the kissing bugs that we talked about in Shagas disease episode, these insects feed on blood throughout all of their life stages. They don't metamorphosize, like a lot of insects we know and love and talk about on this podcast more often like flies or mosquitoes or even ants and beetles and things. But instead, what bedbugs and all true bugs do is they go through nymphal instars. And bedbugs have to blood feed at each one of these stages in order to grow into the next instar. How many stages are there? In general, five nymphal instars.

And then so they have to feed at each one of those. And then the females have to feed. every time in order to make eggs as well. So they have to continually feed to be able to continue making eggs. And how often do they need to feed? Great question. In general, they feed every few days or so, maybe every three to seven days. However, they can survive for very long periods of time and exactly how long depends on what

paper you read and, of course, the environmental conditions and everything. But we're talking potentially months without blood. blood feeding and they can just hang out and survive. Yep. Yeah. Love that, right? So those two species, Symex Lechelarious and Symex hemipterus, the common and the tropical bedbug, prefer human hosts, but they're not terribly picky. So they'll also feed on our pets and other domestic animals, even birds.

They can cause a lot of damage to poultry flocks, et cetera. But in general, bedbugs tend to be attracted to their hosts, both by the carbon dioxide that we breathe out, as well as our body heat, and then a whole bunch of other potential chemicals and caramones that we give off that they can detect. And I don't know what these are. And I knew you might want to ask. But they can detect, like, a really wide variety of chemicals. so we're potentially emitting a bunch of different little things while we sleep that they're attracted to. Bedbugs are, you would think, like, the least impressive movement-wise. Like, they can't fly, they can't jump.

They just walk. They can scuttle. They can scuttle. Very fast. They are. They are very fast, and they can walk a surprisingly long distance for how incredibly tiny. they are. And so the way that they generally live their life is that, like I mentioned, they feed just every few days. And then once they have a nice big blood meal, they scuttle off and they go

and rest and they lie dormant while they digest that blood meal. And because they do not live on us like fleas or lice, they generally are found on our bedding or chairs or chairs or a pole. where they can hide during the day and come out only at night to feed. These bugs are photophobic, which is part of why they like a nighttime snack. And their peak feeding tends to be between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., which also happens to be when we tend to sleep the most deeply. I just love it. I know. I mean, you have to admire it. You have to. How can you not?

Oh, my goodness. Once they've had their fill, they crawl or scuttle on back to their nests, which are called refugia. I mean, that's kind of cute. Isn't it? I love it. And they do aggregate there because they release a whole bunch of pheromones for each other to help them find these little nests, these little refugia. Which also, I read helps them with, like, water conservation. Love that for them.

Oh, that is amazing. Having a whole bunch of them all together, you know, rather than like a little. living all alone. Yeah. And in addition to having these aggregation pheromones, bedbugs also have alarm pheromones. So if you find their little abodes and then you start killing them and it smells really bad or weird or some descriptions say sickly sweet, that is the alarm pheromones that these bedbugs are releasing to warn any other little nests or a fugitive us. Scuttle away, scuttle away, they found us. That is so interesting because I came across several quotes describing how horrible they smelled or how distinctive they smelled. And it never occurred to me

to wonder why they smelled. Yeah. And in general, at least from what it seems, is a lot of that smell, it's possible that maybe some of it is those aggregation pheromones that we're smelling, you know, if it's just like there all the time. But I think a lot of it, most of the time, is in the context of them releasing alarm pheromones. So we found their nest, and now they're releasing all these pheromones, and now you smell it for the first time. That is incredible. I know. The other way that you can find their little nests is poop.

They're poop. Fecal spotting. So little black little dots in the corners and crevices of mattresses or bed frames or walls. Those are usually one of the first signs or indications of a bedrocky of the best. of a bedbug infestation. Rather than finding the bugs themselves, it's usually fecal spotting first, and then you have to look really hard to find the bugs.

Hmm. Female bedbugs, I tried to get a handle on just how many eggs they lay, because it seems very important when we're looking at bedbug infestations, because they are impressively good. at spreading. And yet, I was not all that impressed with how many eggs an individual female can lay. One of the papers that I read said that they lay five to eight eggs a week, adult females, for 18 weeks. That's like surprisingly low. Right. And per Aaron math, that's only like 90 to 144 eggs, which is not that much. But then other papers suggested it's more like

200 to 500 eggs in a lifetime, which is more. Okay. But still not as much as I expect for an insect that can spread as rapidly as we know that it can. I wonder, because when we think of insects, we think of them laying or arthropods laying tons and tons of eggs, sort of like in a bet hedging strategy, right? 10% of them survived to be larva, 10% of them survived to be nymphs, etc. Right. So what is the in-star survival rate or mortality rate for bedbugs? Do they survive better because there are fewer? What is maternal care like? I have so many questions now. I have those same questions. I don't have answers for them. But yeah, it's a really good question. You would think maybe it is quite a lot higher because they live in these little refugia, right? So maybe because they're living in such close association with hosts, maybe they have a better chance at survival. maybe, et cetera, et cetera.

I don't know. Yeah. But it's, it was an, it was an interesting number. So a few hundred eggs. Ah. And yet. And yet. Just wait.

And for those of you who wonder, how long are they biting me for? An adult tends to take about 10 to 20 minutes to become fully engorged. So they're biting you every couple of days, 10 to 20. 20 minutes at a time, et cetera. Hundreds of bugs laying hundreds of eggs. Goal. Yeah. Love that.

There was also, I will say, in the bedbug literature, aside from the human clinical side of things, which is what I'm about to get into a little bit more, there is a lot of very interesting stuff in the literature about what I guess is one of the other very interesting parts of bed bug biology. And that is that the way that they mate, which is very different than most bugs. And this is that the males pierce the female's abdominal wall in order to inseminate them, not the genital tract directly. This process is called traumatic insemination because it's literally causing direct trauma to the abdominal wall of the female. Two questions. Okay. Is traumatic insemination common across all bedbug species?

And the second question is, what consequences does this have besides insemination? Great questions. So whether all species of bedbugs do this, I don't actually know because I really only read about these two species, but I'm pretty sure that this is common across semisids in general. Yeah. Now, what consequences does this have kind of a lot? And in fact, it has been shown that this process can actually reduce survival in the females, which is fascinating. It has also led to the evolution of an entirely new, like, paragenital tract, which is still, though, not actually used for insemination.

It's generally still the abdominal wall. But it has led to really strong sexual selection in various ways. Like what? I didn't dive deep into. Anything beyond that because there's simply too much other ground to cover. How on earth did this evolve? Oh, Aaron, I don't know the answer to that. Well, and also, so the genital tract is used for depositing eggs?

Right. Yeah. So that's still how eggs are going to be laid is through the genital tract. Right. But it's not how insemination occurs. Wow. Okay. Yeah.

I mean, I knew that, but it's just still, it's mind blowing. I know. And it's really, it's really weird. Yeah. Especially that it can reduce survival. Anyways, that's all I've got. I got papers you can read more. People can get really into this and maybe we'll get some cool, fun answers out of it.

Let's move on to what we tend to focus on on this podcast, which is like, what happens to us, humans? Yeah, but what about humans? What about us? When we get bitten by these bugs. No doubt, the most common thing that anyone is going to be. to get from a bedbug bite is localized skin reactions, meaning we're itchy. So sorry in advance, everyone's going to be itching for the rest of the time that I'm talking if you're not already. So how does this process of feeding actually work and why do we get so itchy from it? Like pretty much

all hemiptera, bedbugs have these mouth parts that are made specifically for piercing and sucking. Other hemiptera use this type of mouth part for piercing plants and sucking out their sap, or for piercing the exoskeleton of other bugs and sucking out their guts. Bed bugs use them for piercing our skin and sucking out our blood. So they have these very fine little needle mouths. They stick them into us. They inject into us their own saliva, which contains a whole bunch of proteins, many of which contain anticoagulant properties, which makes sense.

Some of these proteins help with vasodilation so that they get more localized blood flow to the area. Some of them inhibit platelet aggregation and activation, which is the first step of our clotting cascade. See our hemophilia episode for details. Some of them actually inhibit Factor 10, which is fascinating, which is another part of our clotting cascade. in order to just further delay blood clot formation. It's really impressive stuff. It's unclear if anything that they inject serves to anesthetize our skin, but these are teeny, teeny, teeny tiny little needle mouths.

So even if it doesn't, it's unlikely in general that we probably feel this because of just how small those needles are. Then they suck up blood, withdraw their legs. little needle and crawl back to their refuge. What you may see after the fact right away are maybe little pinpoint flex of blood on our sheets. But very often you won't see any evidence that you got bitten by bedbugs overnight until your skin reacts to it at a future point. Now, one big question is, How long does it take to have a reaction to bed bug bites? And that is not as easy of a question to answer as you might think.

A lot of the literature says that it might take many days, like several days. But it really depends person to person as I'll get into, like what each person's specific reaction might be. And in some people, it's very possible to have a reaction within 24 to 48 hours. Okay. So it's not very clear cut if bites, for example, appear on your body when exactly the bites actually occurred. Does that make sense? Yeah. So like if you just came back from a trip and a week later, you're like, I have bites.

Are they from the last hotel I stayed in? Right. Or are they from whatever? Yeah. Last night. Or did I bring them back from the hotel that I stayed in and now they're with me? Exactly. Are there certain parts of you that bedbugs, like that bedbugs, like, or did they?

like to bite. Let's get into it, shall we? Yeah. Yes. So let's talk about what it looks like, where you find them, etc. If someone is going to have a reaction to these bed bug bites, which not everyone does, what you usually see initially are little, and by little, I mean like two to five millimeter, so pretty small, flat red spots. And yes, it is slightly more common, Aaron, that you might see these spots on your arms or your legs or your neck or your face. This is not for any other real reason other than clothing can really help protect against bites. So arms, legs, neck, face, these are the places that are most likely uncovered in bed. Anywhere that's uncovered can potentially get bitten.

These little flat red spots can then progress over time to these round or kind of oval-shaped wheels, kind of like hive-y-looking, like slightly raised bumps, though they're not true hives, but they kind of can look a lot like hives. They can actually enlarge quite a bit. So now instead of looking at little two to five-millimeter dots, you might have two to six centimeters. wheels and they can be really, really itchy. And if you have a whole bunch of these bites, then these individual wheels can kind of coalesce into what looks like a more widespread rash. And the more that you scratch at it, the more that it can exacerbate this trauma and not only spread what looks like the rash and the itching,

but also can make it harder to see what's really like going on underneath on the skin itself because of all this scratching. And with repeated exposures, do you get more sensitive to bedbug bites? Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I'll get into it a little bit more later. But the truth is that we don't understand the pathophysiology of this response. Like, why do some people have really severe reactions to bed bug bites? And other people might be living with bedbugs for months and never even really know, right?

It's very, very rare. but sometimes people can have even more severe reactions where they end up with systemic symptoms, like fevers and feeling really cruddy from how many bug bites they've gotten. And we don't really understand this reaction itself. But there is some evidence, at least, that it's maybe in part like an allergic response, where we have an elevation in IGE, which mediates a lot of our allergic responses and our hypersensitivity. reactions. So yes, there is data, though the studies are not great, that suggests that with recurrent exposure, you're more and more likely to have a reaction of some kind. So studies suggest

that like, if you give someone enough bites, eventually almost everyone will develop some kind of a reaction to bed bug bites. But with a single exposure, maybe less than 50% of people will have any kind of a reaction at all. Okay. And. And, And like I mentioned, even the time frame of how soon after a bite you might develop that reaction is a little bit unclear. So if it's a very severe reaction, then maybe within 24 to 48 hours, you might see the initial little red dots that then progress over a number of hours or a couple of days. But if someone has only been bitten a couple of times in their life, then maybe it is a few days before you notice anything. But it all kind of depends on not only how many

exposure someone has had, but how sensitive they are, maybe how much of a hypersensitivity reaction they have at baseline, et cetera, et cetera. Often in the literature, bedbug bites are described as being linear, so like all in a little line along your arm or along your leg. So they feed and then they move and they feed and then they move and they feed. I love this question. Almost certainly no. Okay. And I'll link to a paper that proposed several different possible hypotheses as to why we sometimes see these linear bites like all in a little line. Or a lot of times they're described as in groups of three, which is called breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Oh, my God, that's really cute. Isn't it? It's horrific, but cute. It's horrible. But, yeah, one of the proposed hypothesis is. was, oh, are they biting and then maybe getting disturbed? So then they have to move a little ways and then biting again. But no.

The best hypothesis that I saw for this is that it's most likely groups or bunches of bedbugs that are all kind of lining up and biting you all at once. Oh, my gosh, buffet style. Buffet style, especially because when bedbugs feed, they remember that they're hiding, say, in the corner of your mattress all day, right? Then you lay down for bed in your tank top with your shoulder exposed. You're sleeping on your back. So your shoulder is like, you know, pushed up against your mattress.

And these bedbugs crawl out from underneath the underside of your mattress in the corner. And they crawl up. And your shoulder is in contact with the bedding. These bugs like to maintain contact with the bedding during feeding. So they're going to all kind of line up in a place that's easy for them to reach. and just bite, bite, bite you all the way along. And so that's one of, I think, the kind of best hypotheses is that you have groups of bed bugs. Remember, they're secreting aggregation pheromones.

They're telling their friends, hey, I found a great spot. So everyone's coming up. They're having a buffet where they can have close contact to the bedding so they can hop off when they need to. Not literally hop, but just, you know, release and then crawl away. And that's most likely why we see sometimes these linear patterns. it's often also that there is no pattern whatsoever to these bites. There's just a bunch of bites everywhere. It's so interesting because I feel like competition within a species is often such a strong

driver of behavior of certain adaptations of everything. But with bedbugs, it seems like teamwork has been decided upon us. like the answer, the solution. The dream work. Yeah. I mean, that's just a hypothesis. I don't know that we have a lot of data to say that that's definitely what's happening here.

But the last kind of reaction that some people can also have is, again, in more severe cases, you can end up with kind of a blistery rash, more like bloody blisters or just like fluid-filled blisters, again, if you're having a really, really severe reaction. In truth, bed bug bites are very difficult to distinguish from really any other bug bite. And you really have to find the bugs themselves to be sure that what you're dealing with is actually bed bug bites and not other bug bites or scabies, which is very commonly confused with bedbugs. Or allergies. Or allergies, to something else, like the new laundry detergent that you switched to, because this could look a lot like an allergic reaction or a staff infection, although bites like this could get superimposed with things like a staff infection. So it is difficult to diagnose bed bug bites.

Is it not common then to ever feel the bedbugs bite? Because I feel like our firsthand accounts were very much like, I am feeling them, they're crawling all over me. that's certainly what I read in doing research. It's a good question. In general, these bugs are tending to bite when we are asleep. And generally not coming out until people are probably quite asleep. Now, insomnia or sleep disturbance is very common in bedbug infestations. This can sometimes be caused by the actual like itch scratch cycle where you've had

so many bites that you're itchy, so you get awoken by this itching, then you wake up, you scratch it, that exacerbates the reaction so you can't get back to sleep. So then if those bedbugs are there, are you feeling the bedbugs or do you just know that you have had bedbugs or you think that you have bedbugs so you're feeling things that are itching? But it's hard to know, is that really the bugs or is it not? I don't think that it's impossible to feel these. these bugs, they are, again, like one to three millimeters. So they're definitely visible. And you could potentially feel them. But in general, they're biting when we are asleep, asleep. So you're probably not really feeling them. Mm-hmm. Okay. Which is, again, why it can be so hard. And then,

and then who knows how long after you've been bitten, you have a reaction to it. You have a visible, you know, mark from it. So that's like most of bedbugs. I'm going to take us back to the beginning. Okay. Where you said that bedbugs can crawl, scuttle a surprisingly long distance. What is that distance? One paper that I read said up to 100 feet.

I don't know how common that is, but definitely like numbers of feet. Like they can go from say like the corner of your room up onto your bed and then onto you. Yeah, your face says it all. I mean, yeah. In general, though, they're not probably crawling all around your house unless they have to, if you're not like sleeping in the same spot every night. The way that they tend to be distributed longer distance-wise is they will take up residence in your luggage, in your sheets, and be moved from room to room, say in a,

a hotel, for example. They will be, you know, on furniture or pillows, things that get moved around, room to room, apartment to apartment, ship to ship on a cruise ship. Okay, so let's talk about some of the things that affect their longevity in these environments. I know that adult bugs can live for a very long time without having a blood meal. But I'm assuming that, like many other arthropods that feed on blood, affected by humidity and temperature primarily? Definitely.

So humidity, temperature, environmental conditions will affect not only how long they live in general, but also how long it takes for them to hatch and then develop into adults. But the other thing to know is that these are bugs that are very well adapted to human dwellings, which we often keep at relatively constant temperatures. and honestly just make it really, really easy for them to live for a long time. So in cooler conditions, then they can live for potentially up to a year or more. If we keep our houses warmer, then maybe they're living for just a handful of months, like four, four and a half months or so, and taking only a few weeks or a couple of months

to actually develop fully into adults. But certainly they are susceptible to environmental conditions. They also can't survive good vacuuming. Okay. Putting them in a vacuum bag and then freezers will kill them. Hot, hot water, like washing all of your things with super hot water and then putting them in the dryer. Those things will kill them. So they're not like a preon that's like impossible to de nature.

Right. So I guess this is kind of, because this isn't our usual fare, at this point you would normally talk about treats. treatment. Yeah. But are you going to talk about like pesticides or like what what are you going to talk about? No, I don't I don't really have anything honestly like you can treat the itching, right? Like topical steroids, systemic anhystamines, itch relief. That's that's all I have in terms of treatment. I'll talk more. Well, maybe I won't really actually. So let's talk about it now. I was going to say I'll talk more about how you get rid of bedbugs later on, but I won't really. What I will talk about is how, like, insecticides aren't going to do you pretty much any good because bedbugs have

incredible resistance to pretty much all of the insecticides that we use. That ship has sailed. Yeah. So it really is, like, identifying that these bugs exist, finding their refuges, and then cleaning the heck out of them in order to get rid of them, which is really the only thing that you can do to actually treat the issue of bedbugs. Simple enough. Simple enough. It's not, but yeah. It's not simple at all.

Sounds like it is. And as I'll mention later on, it's also incredibly costly, especially when we look at how quickly quickly these can spread and therefore how intensive the efforts have to be in order to eliminate them, especially when we're looking at things like apartment buildings where you have a lot of housing units in one building, hospitals, hotels, cruise ships, like any place where you have a lot of people sharing space, especially sharing bedding. It's a major, major issue trying to kind of actually get rid of all of these. Yeah. But that's primarily bedbugs and the issues that they cause for us as humans. Aaron? Yes, Erin. Tell me.

Have they always been with us? I'm guessing. I have some guesses here. How did we get here to where we are today? Tell me about these little bugs. Yeah. There's a lot to tell. So I better get started right after this break. Anyone who works long hours knows the routine. Wash, sanitize, repeat. By the end of the day, your hands feel like they've been through something. That's why O'Keefe's working hands. hands hand cream is such a relief. It's a concentrated hand cream that is specifically designed to relieve extremely dry, cracked hands caused by constant hand washing and harsh conditions. Working hands creates a protective layer on the skin that locks in moisture. It's non-greasy, unscented, and absorbs quickly. A little goes a long way. Moisturization that lasts up to 48 hours. It's made for people whose hands take a beating at work, from health care and food service to salon, lab, and caregiving

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So I do care about the food I feed Biggie and Smalls. So go to Just Foodfor Dogs.com for 50% off your first box. No code, no gimmicks, just real fresh food. I'm gonna'nest tour 2026 the power the energy come celebrate your favorite hits from Woodstock to supernatural and beyond with very special guest the Doobie brothers I got a black man to boomer get tickets now at live nation dot com Santana and Doobie Brothers won this tour 2026. I think that the best way to talk about the evolutionary history of bedbugs is to first talk about what we used to think we knew so that we can then appreciate how that history has almost been completely rewritten in the past few years. Oh, love.

Mm-hmm. So like you mentioned, Aaron, when we talk about bedbugs in the context of human infestations, we are generally talking about these three species. You talked about the two, the common bedbug and a tropical bed bug, cymex laticularis and cymex hemipterus. And then there's also mentioned commonly as like a human biting bedbug is leptosymex bouty. And these are three species, like you said, out of a family of, um, of over 100 species, I think, at this point. What do these other species of bedbugs do? Well, they all feed on blood. But generally speaking, that blood either belongs to water birds, other birds, or bats. But if you look at the evolutionary relationships among all of these other species in the Cymicidae family, stuff like which species are oldest, which are more. closely related than others, which evolved most recently. What researchers found by looking at these

things is that the oldest of these species, the one that is closest to the forms that are now extinct, they feed on bats, which would reasonably point towards bats acting as the earliest hosts of all bedbugs. So the story would go that ancient bedbugs encountered bats and fed on their blood occasionally until occasionally became obligately as the bedbugs began to rely on these mammals for their food. Got it. And so, the story continues, that when early humans began moving into caves for shelter, bedbugs were already there, feeding on bats.

And then these bedbugs were like, oh, hey, it's free real estate. Here's a brand new host that we can take. advantage of. And then as ancient humans evolved into different species and then spread across the globe, they took bedbugs with them, which subsequently evolved into different species. That is how the story went for a very long time. But that story is now a, or so we thought, type of story. Ooh, bum bum bum. So there's a paper from 2019 and current biology by Roth at all. that puts it pretty plainly in the title, quote,

bedbugs evolved before their bat hosts and did not co-speciate with ancient humans. The end. Do I need to say anything more? No. Except maybe like, what? Why? I may not need to, but I will. So it turns out that the earliest fossil of a close relative of bedbugs would put the origin of bedbugs back to about 100.

million years ago. So like dinosaurs. Yeah, exactly. I love when we talk about bugs feeding on dinosaurs. I know. I know. We should somehow try to find a way to do a whole episode about it. I don't know how. Especially a bed bug because there's so little, Aaron. How do they pierce dino skin? That's a great question. I love this. I don't know. But the other really cool thing is that they probably did because when these bedbugs evolved, a hundred million years ago, they were already pros at blood feeding. What?

They were already obligate blood feeders, it appears, rather than, you know, as we had thought, sort of slowly incorporating it into their lifestyles. What? And so that means that their ancestor also already specialized on blood. But whose blood? Whose blood? We don't know. We'll never know.

Probably not bats, unless we're totally wrong about bat evolution, since the earliest known bats didn't emerge until I read around 30 million years after bedbugs did. That's a long time. That's a pretty long time. Yeah. So which animal or animals served as the earliest host of bedbugs? Total mystery at this point. But from those mystery hosts, bedbugs found their way onto bats. And then onto birds and then back to bats or from where.

one species of bats to another species of bats and so on, diversifying along the way. Okay. And so the three bedbug species that feed on humans arose as part of this diversification process, and the species themselves were already established before they started feeding on humans. In fact, these species emerged around 5 to 10 million years before any member of the homogenus existed. Wow. Yeah. Old.

Very old. Unlike this previous story that we used to tell about bedbugs and humans and bats and so on, the evolution of these generalist bedbug species didn't happen alongside ancient human evolution into new species, but rather that these bedbug species were introduced to humans in three independent events. When those events occurred and which early human species were from, first parasitized, we still don't know that or don't know that yet maybe. But what does this mean for us today? In terms of how we deal with bedbugs, probably not much. That's more about insecticides and

creative treatment strategies and so on. But it does bring up many interesting questions about the human history of these bedbugs, how co-evolution of humans and bedbugs didn't seem to happen in the ways that we thought it did, as well as something I find super interesting, which is what drives host switching? Like, why does a bed bug feed on one species and then feed on a different species? Right. Or why does a bed bug start to feed on multiple species? Yeah. And then these tradeoffs between being a parasite that specializes on just one species or a parasite that's a generalist. That's like, I want to feed on everything. And then like, can it happen where a specialist becomes a generalist and then goes back to a specialist? Like, there's so much there. That's

absolutely fascinating. And that is honestly, like bedbugs are such a great group of organisms to study that, like host switching and specialist and generalist tradeoffs. And I love it. I love it. But that, I mean, I could spend the whole episode talking about that aspect of it. But I I think I probably should talk a little bit about the human history of these little bugs. The beginnings of the long and fruitful and frustrating relationship between humans and bedbugs, that might be a bit murky still. But we can speculate at least that as humans settled in larger groups and built permanent or semi-permanent shelters, bedbugs were there to keep them company.

or at least they arrived shortly after, adapting to the diurnal sleeping patterns of humans, which is... So cool. So amazing. Yeah. As well as are less hairy bodies compared to bats. Oh, wow. So, like, they had to crawl, scuttle differently. Huh.

I mean, everything about it is... I never thought about that, but yeah. It's so cool. In terms of archaeological evidence, the oldest evidence of bedbugs cohabitating with humans dates back to around 3,500 years ago in ancient Egypt. So there were preserved bedbugs that were identified as Symex Laticularius, found in a city called Akhetaten, in the times before King Tut, in the place where tomb builders and guards likely slept. So like in a sleeping chamber. Okay.

And they hung around, as evidenced by a papyrus from about a thousand years later, that described a spell to keep them away. Ooh. And the bedbugs also spread, popping up in what is now Iraq by at least the 9th century. They appear in ancient religious texts, such as the Talmud. If we take the archaeological samples from ancient Egypt as sort of the origin point and then also use that in combination with, like these references in ancient text to bedbugs, we can assume, we can guess that the bedbug spread from ancient Egypt to the Middle East and then to Europe and Asia. And many of these ancient texts talked about bedbugs the way you might expect them to, the way that we talk about

bedbugs today as bothersome pests, how to look for signs of bedbugs, how to keep them away, and so on. But at least a few of these ancient scholars, had a kind of when life gives you lemons, make lemonade outlook. Stop it. Like instead of lemons, it was like, when life gives you bedbugs, make a potion with meat and beans or wine to treat fevers, cure snake bites, or get leeches off of you. Like from the bugs? Like you take the bugs and you make them into a little potion?

Yeah, ground bed bugs. Ground up bed bugs. Uh-huh. Love it. The beans kind of, it cracked me up. And I think that Pliny the Elder also was skeptical of the beans, but he did support the use of bedbugs to treat earaches by burning the bugs, combining their ashes with rose oil, and injecting it. Into what? Yourself, I guess, your ear canal? I don't know.

Not your ear. I have a real thing about bugs and ears. I know this about you. So I, ooh. That gets me. Mm-hmm. You know, we love these ancient cures, but in the case of bedbugs, they weren't just ancient cures. Okay.

The 1896 edition of the American homeopathic pharmacopoeia includes a recipe for a tincture, 1896, of bedbugs to treat malaria. Other uses of bedbugs included to treat constipation, coughs, hemorrhoids, liver complaints what is a liver complaint i've always wanted to know skin ailments frequent yawning among other like many other things i don't i don't i i literally don't know what to say you know i'm guessing it's because they were there and they were abundant and it was like surely there must be a reason why these things exist anyway okay the ways that you can't could ward off bedbugs in the ancient world were just as inventive as the uses for the critters. So, according to the Greek philosopher, Democritus, around 400 BCE, you should hang the feet of a

hair or a stag at the foot of your bed to keep the bedbugs away. Okay. An alternative solution would be to hang a bear skin or put a bowl of water under your bed while you're traveling. Hmm, okay. Speaking of traveling, of course, the bedbug was a very frequent and successful hitchhiker. So it arrived in Greece at least by 420 BCE, Italy by 77 CE, China by 600 CE, Japan around the same time, Germany by the 11th century, France by the 13th, England by the 16th, and on to the Americas with some of the earliest trips of boats going over there. As the bed bug spread across the world, you know, it's not like it was a few bugs that popped up here and there.

The bed bug is an incredibly successful establisher, right? Like once it got brought to a new place, it survived, it thrived, really to the point where it became so prevalent in their new places of residence that they earned their fair share of name. like these different local names that were used to describe these bugs. So let's get into a couple of these names. Okay. In ancient Greece, the word they used was chorus, C-O-R-I-S, which means to bite. And allegedly gave rise to the name for coriander, because when you crush the fresh leaves and seeds, it's supposed to give off a smell like that of crushed bedbugs.

Fascinating. Yeah. The name Symex was given to the bugs by scholars and ancient. ancient Rome, Symex meaning bug. And later, of course, that would become its genus name, along with the species named Litticularius, which was supplied by Linnaeus in the 1700s. And Litticularius translates to, quote, of the bed or of the couch. Bug of the bed. Bug of the bed, I mean, it's apt. In ancient China, the bugs were generally called stinky bug, which is also similar to what people in France called them

when the bedbugs arrived there in the 13th century and in Japan floorbug or floorlaus. In Spain, Chinche. In Germany, the newly arrived bedbugs as of the 11th century would be called various names that translated to the following. Nightcrawler, paper flounder, and little venereal. But the English word was short and sweet and so perfect that it literally has stood more than the test of time. Bug.

Not bed bug, just bug. Just bug. So, like, that's where the word bug came from was bedbugs. That's what it was referring to. Are you serious? That's what I took from this research. Fascinating. Yeah.

Yeah. As the bedbug found its way into city after city, home. after home, it acquired more names along the way, like Redcoat and Mahogany Flat in what would become the U.S., and it also lent its name to towns like Bedbug Hill, New Jersey, which I think only exists as Bedbug Hill Road these days, and the California Mining Town that was named, it kind of like switched between names, either Bedbug or Freeze Out. Oh. Okay. I guess bedbug in the warmer months and then freeze out in the colder months. As the bed bug found its way into our homes, our suitcases, and our beds, it also began to occupy a bigger and bigger portion of our hearts and minds.

This is at least how I am going to think of it. Basically, what I mean by that is that people began to write about the bedbug and and include it in novels, poems, paintings, songs. You can find references to bedbugs in works by Upton Sinclair, Sinclair-Lews, Lankston Hughes, John Steinbeck, so many others. And bedbugs featured prominently in many early blues songs, like Black Snake Mone by Blind Lemon Jefferson, and mean old bedbug blues, as well as country songs and calypso songs. And bedbug didn't always mean bed bug, of course, but sometimes it was a little bit of a innuendo term, like, you know, eyebrow.

Venereal. Mm-hmm. Little venereal. Yeah, it would be like the bedbug wants to sneak under the covers and bite this lady's butt or something like that. Oh, okay. Yeah, you should look up some of these lyrics. But just because the bed bug started to be included in me, music and art and literature, it didn't mean that people were like, oh, you know what, okay,

I guess bedbugs are here to stay. Let's just welcome them with open arms and lift the covers to hop on in. The battle to get rid of these bugs and stop them from spreading was constant, like absolutely constant and frustratingly, largely unsuccessful, or at least we can assume so given the frequent turnover and wide variety of treatment options. You could use the smoke of ox dung, horsehair, arsenic, these are all smokes, Lupins, and Cyprus. You could combine saltpeter, soft water, shaving soap, and aqua ammonia. You could put on a night light and drizzle turpentine over your sheets and pillows. Don't, please don't. Yeah, yep, right. I feel like this,

especially that last one, turpentine in your sheets, kind of shows that if you're willing to inhale arsenic smoke all night or sleep in turpentine-soaked sheets, the bedbugs must have been horrible. Right, a real, real issue. Real issue. And there is one account, who knows if it's an exaggeration, probably, but it described how in the 19th century U.S.

bedbugs could be scooped from the walls of sod houses. and measured with a spoon. That's incredibly gross. Uh-huh. Uh-uh. And our first-hand accounts were just a couple from so many describing the horrors of having to spend a night in an incredibly infested room or bed. And I couldn't resist including a few more in here. Please.

Because there are so many just like, yeah. I was so itchy. From the Reverend James Woodford describing his 1786 stay in London. Quote, I was bit so terribly with bugs again this night that I got up at 4 o'clock this morning and took a long walk by myself about the city until breakfast time.

The next night, quote, I did not pull off my clothes last night, but sat up in a great chair all night with my feet on the bed and slept very well considering. and not pestered with bugs. Okay. End quote. Yeah.

Or a description given to Henry Mayhew of a lodging house in London. Quote, in the morning, he drew, for purposes of ablution, a basin full of water from a pailful kept in the room. In the water were floating dead, or apparently alive, bugs and lice, which my informant was convinced had fallen from the ceiling, shaken off by the tread of something. someone walking in the rickety apartments above. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Apparently, the bedbugs were so bad in some of these lodging houses that people were told

you should get half drunk to get a decent night's sleep because the bedbugs will keep you up. Wow. They could be seen, quote, crawling from house to house, escaping through exterior windows and doors and traveling along walls, pipes, and gutters. end quote. I mean, that has to be an exaggeration, but I don't know. I don't know. Yeah. I will say when you asked, can you feel the bugs, I feel like you would feel those. Yeah, I mean. That you would feel. Yeah. Yeah. These are not, these are, these are massive. Not subtle. Massive numbers. Yeah. And this is my favorite quote. I've read so many, but this is my favorite quote. Here, nearly every house.

is a haunted house. After dark, there is no place more eerie, no torture more prolonged and blood-curdling than that enacted here year after year, no atrocity more revolting than the nightly human sacrifice. For there are vampires, I have seen them, I have smelt them. Uh-uh. Ay, aye, aye, aye. Yeah. The bedbug situation was truly a nightmare, as John, John Southall pointed out in his 1730 a treatise on bugs, he called them a nauseous venomous insect. Clearly this was not going to be a live and let live situation. No.

And that's mostly what I'm going to focus on for the rest of the history section. By the 1600s, 1700s, there was no more land left undiscovered. by bedbugs, they were everywhere. It had become a matter of war between humans and bedbugs. And the first weapon to be employed in this war was hand-to-hand combat, which was, as you can imagine, highly unpleasant. From a 1673 description, quote, this insect, if it be crushed or bruised, emits a most horrid and loathsome stench so that those that are bitten by them are often in doubt whether it be better to endure the trouble of their bitings or kill them and suffer their most odious and abominable stink. Yeah, end quote. And while manually smushing bugs always remained a viable and sometimes necessary option, there are only so many bugs that you can smush in a night.

and other strategies evolved to deal with the growing infestations, namely prevention and then chemical and non-chemical control techniques, but most importantly, vigilance. There is so much more literature on the history of bedbug management than I ever expected, and it is absolutely riveting and hilarious. And so you should definitely check out some of these papers that I'll mention at the end,

because I'm only going to cover so much here. So let's get to it. England's first bedbug exterminators begin popping up in the late 17th century, the most famous of which was Tiffin and Son of London, who exclusively served the nobility and who advertised themselves as, quote,

may the destroyers of peace be destroyed by us, Tiffin and Son, bug destroyers to her majesty. End quote. I love it. They were so, like, snobby in classist. It's, it's, they said, this is literally a quote, I work for the upper classes only. Wow.

And then this quote, my work is more method and I may call it scientific treating of bugs rather than wholesale murder. Which is like, okay. And the main strategy that Tiffin and Son used for bed bug control was prevention by constantly monitoring and checking for bugs. And among other things, they recommended inspecting everything as much as possible, especially secondhand furniture or linens moving into an old house, stuff like that. And one of my favorite things that I learned about bedbugs is how they drove bed design. What? They changed the way beds were designed or at least had to play a major role. Okay, so when you picture like a bed from, I don't know, like a fancy bed and nobility from the Renaissance, what do you, what do you picture?

I don't know. Like the posts and like drapes and things. Yeah. Like you can turn it into like a little cave. Uh-huh. Yeah. There are tons of like curtains around it and everything. Yeah.

Really ornately carved designs maybe. Lots of, lots of crevices. Yeah. Yeah. No more crevices was the advice. So John Southall, who's who called bedbugs that nauseous venomous insect, he recommended that people should make beds as wood-free as possible, easy to disassemble. and have fewer nooks and crannies for the bugs to hide in.

So like get rid of those velvet curtains, get rid of those tassels, get rid of the ornately carved wood, that's all prime bedbug real estate. I mean, yeah. Yeah. And I just, I thought that was so interesting, sort of this, this need to constantly disassemble and reassemble beds was because of bedbugs, right, to treat and watch for bedbugs. sometimes it would be like, oh, you should make it with this type of wood, not that type of wood, because this type of wood is repellent, whatever. But bed design in hospitals especially made a big impact because hospitals were often hugely infested.

There's a quote to support this, quote, bugs are frequently a greater evil to the patient than the malady for which he seeks a hospital, end quote. Oh, man. The number of times I feel like we've talked about things that kill you in hospitals that are not the thing that you went there for on this podcast. Mm-hmm. And so many hospitals started to use iron beds. Yeah. Beds entirely made out of iron to combat the bugs. I feel like that's so interesting because that's what I picture like old timey hospital beds, right? Or like the metal, just like those metal frame beds. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And so to have. this metal frame bed was really a big benefit when you were pouring boiling water or arsenic or applying sulfur in the crevices when you needed to pull the beds away from the walls,

stand them in pails of oil, you wanted to douse the slats or springs or crevices and bacon grease. I mean, okay, these things were not always like great choices or effective choices. I could just imagine the smell of like rotting bacon grease on your bed. Please stop. But having iron beds really helped with that constant treatment that they needed. If you weren't using bacon grease, you could also use these highly guarded patent formulas like PDQ, pesky devil's quietus. Or pyrethrum powder, which is an insecticide derived from plants, chrysanthemums. The point is there were many different options at your disposal.

But despite if you used every single one of these options, despite if you hired the most reputable exterminator, despite keeping a constant watch for the bugs, you couldn't be sure that you would defeat them. And the problem would only get worse during the Industrial Revolution as people flocked to the city in droves. Throughout the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, bedbugs were for sure winning the war. There was really no contest. Infestations went from seasonal to year round as population density went up, apartment density went up, and central heating began to be incorporated into buildings, which allowed bedbugs to just keep living their best life year round. Year, year round, baby. I read one paper that estimated about a third of dwellings in major European cities in the 1930s and 1940s were infested.

And half of London had bedbugs. The Western Hemisphere was no different. In 1895, a lawsuit in Chicago concluded with the jury ruling that no one should pay rent in a house that was infested with bedbugs. And newspapers were like, no one in Chicago is going to be paying rent. then. Many landlords began to require, and some still do, a prospective tenant to disclose any history with bedbugs, and that, of course, discriminated against those earning low incomes who tended to be at higher risk of exposure to bedbugs.

But no one was truly exempt from the threat of bedbugs. They were found on buses, taxis, trains, planes, and automobiles inside televisions and radios at repair shops, at the theater, library, hospitals, schools, daycare, prisons, hotels, office buildings, restaurants, fire and police stations, stores, funeral homes, everywhere. Still true. Yeah, still true. Soldiers during World War I and World War II were engaged in another war alongside the political one as bedbugs prospered.

They invaded the cork lining of helmets and they bit soldiers' heads. Oh, no! They occupied every possible bunk in living quarters, causing such a morale issue during World War II that there were congressional hearings to figure out how to get rid of these bugs. Wow. Which ultimately led to the most effective, economical, and apparently safer to humans anyway, solution that the world had ever seen in the fight against bedbugs. DDT. DDT, aka dichloridifinal trichloroethane. I think I got that right.

I think you nailed it. By the 1940s, the world had come a long way from the bacon grease ointment days of the 17 or 1800s. But while some of these insecticides may have worked against the bugs, they were also often deadly to humans because they included things like cyanide gas, mercury chloride, phenol, carous. seen, and so on. DDT, on the other hand, was also toxic, but less so. It also didn't have to come into contact directly with the bugs to work. Like, you could kind of just set it and forget it, and it would last for much, much longer than many of the other compounds which would lose efficacy after like a few hours. I'm not going to tell the epic story of the rise and fall of DDT, because I think we're planning on covering it later this season. I thought also you've

touched a lot on it in like our dengue episode and maybe a couple of others. I have no memory of that. You've definitely at least mentioned like all of that story. Okay. Yeah. Well, I'm going to just real quick go through a couple of things, especially as it pertains to bedbugs. So DDT was first synthesized in 1874, but mostly forgotten about for like 65 years or so. And then in 1939, when it was rediscovered by a Swiss chemist named Paul Mueller, who would later go on to get a Nobel Prize for this, DD2 was found to be incredibly effective, like I said. And so it was shortly deployed all around the world to kill everything, including bedbugs. And you could find it and buy it anywhere. It seemed like the miracle.

In the short term, in terms of bedbug control was within five to seven years of when DDT was available, researchers had a really hard time finding any bed bug populations that they could research. What? And by the 1960s, infestations in most industrialized countries were rare. Bed bug awareness campaigns fell by the wayside. And I would bet that if you plotted the number of research articles about bedbugs, from the early 1900s to today, you'd see a big boom up to the 1940s,

and then a crash in the 1950s, 1960s, and then. And then. Yeah. And then it comes back up. First, resistance to DDT, which happened pretty soon after its introduction, of course. And then the prohibition of DDT,

for very good reasons, meant that bedbugs slowly rebounded. and that slow trickle of papers in the 1970s may be reporting on like, oh, resistance here, oh, a case here, that would turn into this like full-on wave in the early 2000s, as bedbugs found their way back into our beds, our couches, our futons, our beanbags, our homes. The first sign that bedbugs might be back came in 1998 in the form of an article describing an apparent increase in bedbug bites in Cambridge, England.

And notably, this article mentioned how no insecticide seemed effective. Mm. Ooh. A couple of years later, a report from the U.S. also mentioned that bedbug bites might be on the rise, and in 2001, Venezuela reported the first instance of bedbugs in 30 years. Anecdotes then turned into data, which put a number to the bedbug resurgence. In the UK between 1997 and 2000, a six-fold increase in bedbug infestations. In Australia between 1999 and 2006, a 4,500% rise in bedbug numbers.

Australia's numbers are bananas and they were like the easiest to find. So it's fascinating to me. Like Australia, doing a great job counting, but like, woof. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. A lot of the papers that I read were from our first. Australia. Yeah. Huh. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. These, these numbers are like hard to, because they're also different, but like they're percent, they're whatever. And so for instance, like that, those numbers in

Australia were over a seven-year period, whereas in the U.S. in one year, 2002 to 2003, it was a 500% increase in calls about bedbugs. Right. Like how do you measure that mean prevalence? Yeah. But, I mean, regardless of like how to relate these numbers, to each other, what they really means. It's pretty obvious that this is a global trend. What drove this rise in bedbugs? I mean, it seems like there are a lot of different factors at work here, but most people point towards the rise in insecticide resistance, increase global travel, as well as a lack of

public awareness, at least in the early days of their reemergence. Like people thought that bedbugs were a problem of the past. right. Bedbugs certainly occupied the headlines for a long time with horror stories and warnings of, you know, if you step one foot into this infested place, you're doomed forever and you'll have to throw away your entire apartment and everything. And that all led to an incredible amount of shame and stigma and misinformation and disinformation surrounding something that it's really hard to have control over in your own life. And I feel like that's something that, you know, throughout this episode we're talking about like, oh, it's so horrible to think about these bugs crawling on you in your bed or whatever. And it is. But I feel like that sort of reaction is part of this whole aspect of shame and stigma and like blaming. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't really have a good wrap up point here. But I guess that like as I was really. writing this, I was thinking, I remember when bedbugs were dominating headlines, but I don't feel like I've read that much about them lately. And so is there still a rampant bedbug problem? Have we just gotten accustomed to it? What's going on with bedbugs today, Aaron? Oh, oh, okay. Let me try and answer that question right after this break. To answer your question briefly, yeah, yeah. Okay. I figured. I figured. There's still a thing. They're still increasing. They're still spreading. They show no signs of stopping in homes, in hotels, trains, cruise ships, buses, public transportation, office buildings, health care facilities, poultry farms. I don't know why those always come up.

Across the globe, every single continent except Antarctica, they're endemic. They're here with us. the decline that we saw from the use of DDT and other insecticides in the, you know, mid-1900s wasn't equal across the globe, unsurprisingly. But the resurgence has been global without a doubt. And the spread of insecticide resistance, like you mentioned, Aaron, has been thought to be one. one of the real driving forces behind this resurgence. And insecticide and pesticide-resistant bugs, bedbugs, are found across the globe. But this is also in combination with increased global travel that facilitates the spread of these bugs in our luggage and on our clothes and in our towels, etc. And so this has allowed for the spread of the two major species that I mentioned, the common bedbug and the tropical bed bug across the globe.

So we really don't see like a true dichotomy in these populations like we may be used to in the past with the tropical one mostly being in the tropics and the common one mostly being in temperate areas. They're both really widespread today. The other thing that compounds this that I find really interesting is that for the most part, across the globe in the U.S., in Europe, everywhere, there aren't centralized monitoring systems for bedbugs. And so the data that we have comes primarily from pest control companies themselves, which is very interesting. And this lack of centralized reporting and relying on private companies means that we're going to have huge differences in how this data is collected as well as how infestations are actually dealt with. And so there is a lot of data that suggests that the way that bed bug infestations are dealt with can vary widely, which can contribute to continued spread or worsened spread because they're not actually being dealt with properly. Mm-hmm. And some of the data, I will say that a lot of companies are collecting a lot of this data, which is shocking. Like in the U.S., in 2015, studies, I think, by Orkin suggested that 80% of hotels in the U.S. dealt with at least one infestation in that year. 80% of hotels in the U.S. Wow.

like thousands of percent increase in reporting in numbers, et cetera, et cetera, they're everywhere. They're everywhere. And they're not going to go anywhere. That's, I think, the biggest, the reality of it. Yeah. One thing that I want to talk about because it's this podcast and because it's just fascinating is that every other time that we have talked about an insect on this podcast,

podcast. We have talked about the pathogens that that insect is spreading to humans. We have talked about those insects as vectors, fleas, lice, mosquitoes, ticks, all of them as vectors of disease, infectious disease. Listeners, you may have noticed in the biology section, I didn't mention that at all. What's going on? What's up with that? So I want to talk about it a little bit because I I think it's one of the most interesting areas of future research for bedbugs. The idea of bedbugs as a vector of infectious diseases, like every other bloodsucker that we've ever talked about in this podcast, is not anything new. But the central dogma across all of the literature is that bedbugs are not vectors.

Bedbugs do not transmit disease. It's repeated over and over. That is what the CDC says. That is the official statement. But here's the thing. It's not because they can't. And we know this now today because plenty of studies that go back way longer than I realized actually demonstrate that the, and I'll quote here, natural transmission cycle of multiple human pathogenic microbes can be. be completed in bedbugs, end quote, when they are artificially infected under laboratory conditions. So a lot of different studies have infected bedbugs with various microbes and been able to have those microbes grow in the bed bug and then actually be passed by the bedbugs, be shed by the bedbugs. The list of these pathogens includes but is not limited to Shagas disease. Cipanosoma cruzai, Bartonella Quintana, aka trench fever, louseborne relapsing fever,

Borrelia recurrences, various other rickettsias, possibly Yersina pestis, aka plague. Okay. And there are probably more. So previously, it was really thought that physiologically, biologically, bedbugs just can't transmit disease. But that's not true, because we know that biologically, bedbugs. bedbugs can become infected. Various pathogens can undergo whatever things they need to in this bed bug, in the vector host that they would normally do in, say, a kissing bug.

They can do that in the bed bug. And then the bedbugs can shed these pathogens. And yet, we still don't have any convincing evidence that bedbugs are, in fact, transmitting any of these diseases in real life. I mean, I feel like that makes sense because, first of all, if you think about a mosquito or a kissing bug or a tick or whatever, compared to bed bugs, there's not as much host hopping because a bed bug is living in your bed. And so it's going to feed on the same person night after night after night after night. Potentially, but in a hotel, you've got a different person in that bed every single night. It's true, but it's still very different. I feel like it's still very different.

I feel like it's ecologically limiting in that way. So that's the big question. If it's not because of a biological barrier, then is it an ecological barrier? Well, and then the other thing, too, is thinking about because all of the pathogens that you described have different transmission roots. So like the fact that a bed bug will shed these different pathogens, is that enough for infection? Right. Well, but we can, for example, in the case of T. Cruz-I, go on to infect other animals from bedbugs. Mm-hmm.

Right? Under laboratory conditions. But how often is one bed bug encountering all these different animals? It's 100%. These are all of the questions that I think are so interesting and fascinating. Because, yes, what this tells us is that it's potentially ecological environmental factors that are precluding bedbugs from serving as. vectors in their natural environments. Yeah.

But what are those specific barriers and under what conditions could they potentially be overcome if the conditions of human bedbugs interactions change in the future? Yeah. I think that's interesting to think about in terms of historical infestations of bedbugs when they were like much, much higher. And maybe they did have more opportunities to play a role in human-to-human transatlanticians. mission of something. But it's hard to see nowadays necessarily. But I mean, like you said, like it's possible. Yeah. I think it's fun and interesting, especially just because I think that the

dogma for a long time was that because we've never seen sustained transmission of any human pathogens from these bedbugs, it must be that they're incapable of being vectors. But now we know that that's not true biologically. Right. What is the barrier? Is it a physiological barrier? Probably not. But is it an ecological barrier seems like likely. Yeah, which I think is just so, so interesting to think about it as an ecological and environmental barrier rather than a biological one, especially because so many vectors that we talk about on this podcast are so specific. Right. Right. It's like one pathogen, one vector. But bedbugs are over here like, well, we could be. do it, but we're just not going to. I mean, thank goodness. Yeah. One less thing to stress about

with bedbugs. Yeah. So yeah, that's what I have, Aaron, bedbugs. They're everywhere. They're itchy. But at least they're not giving us diseases. As far as we know. Well, sources. Sources. I have a bunch. I'm going to call out two in particular. One is by Roth at all, the one that I mentioned earlier, bedbugs evolved before their bad host and did not co-speciate with ancient humans. And then also the one I mentioned at the very top by Boynton from 1965 called The Bedbug and the Age of Elegance. I had a number of different papers, a couple of my favorite on just the general biology. One is titled the Biology of the Bedbugs in annual reviews entomology from two. There was a great one from 2012 that was bedbugs, clinical relevance, and control options in clinical microbiology reviews. And then I've got a number of more papers on the bedbugs as vectors in the biology labs. So you guys can read more about that. On our website, you can find the sources, all of these from this episode and all of our episodes.

This podcast,ukili.com. That's where they'll be. Thank you to Bloodmobile for providing the music for this episode and all of our episodes. Thank you to Leanna Squalachi, our amazing sound mixer. Thank you to the exactly right network. And thank you to you listeners for listening. This is a fun kind of different one. Yeah, I hope that you don't regret sticking with it this episode that made you itchy.

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