Why Bedbugs Won't Die: Bug-Affairs

[Guest guest]

Bug-Affairs by Hugh Pennington

Bedbugs never went away. DDT gave them a hard time in the 1940s and for years

afterwards, until Carson's campaigns outlawed it, but resistant strains

survived. Other insecticides – synthetic organophosphates and pyrethroids – have

come and gone, but none has been a challenge for the bugs' versatile genomes.

Blood is their only food. The bug explores the skin of its victim with its

antennae. It grips the skin with its legs for leverage, raises its beak, and

plunges it into the tissues. It probes vigorously, tiny teeth at the tip of the

beak tearing the tissues to forge a path until it finds a suitable blood vessel.

A full meal takes 10 to 15 minutes. A hungry bug is squat and flat like a

lentil. When replete, its distension shapes it like a long berry. A bug will

feed weekly from any host that is handy.

Bedbugs do not spread disease. Their presence has been taken as an indicator of

poor home hygiene, and they can be a precipitant of entomophobia, but beyond

that they haven't had much significance for public health. Nobody counts them or

keeps national records of infestation rates. There are hardly any 20th-century

baseline measures that might enable us to assess the accuracy of claims that

there has been an upsurge in the 21st. Anecdote has driven the perception that

the bugs have gone on the rampage, and epidemiologists are reluctant to put much

weight on stories. But the recent ones have been very persuasive. In New York in

2010 bedbugs turned up in the Empire State Building, a theatre in the Lincoln

Center, and at the Metropolitan Opera House. It is said that they were in

attendance at the 2005 Labour Party Conference in Brighton, and in 2006 they

were found in a guest room at the five-star Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park Hotel in

Knightsbridge. Analyses shows that the number of bedbug calls to pest

controllers in London and Australia has increased significantly since 2000.

Why the resurgence? The bugs' resistance to insecticides has been blamed, along

with the increase in international travel and in the sale of second-hand

furniture. Genetic fingerprinting of the bugs might shed light on the

comparative importance of movement from city to city, travel across national

boundaries and purely local spread; but such studies have only just started. In

truth our understanding of how bedbugs get about has changed little since 1730,

when Southall published his Treatise of Buggs:

By Shipping they were doubtless first brought to England, so are they now

daily brought. This to me is apparent, because not one Sea-Port in England is

free; whereas in Inland-Towns, Buggs are hardly known … If you have occasion to

change Servants, let their Boxes, Trunks, & c. be well examin'd before carried

into your Rooms, lest their coming from infected Houses should prove dangerous

to yours … Upholsterers are often blamed in Bugg-Affairs; the only Fault I can

lay to their Charge, is their Folly, or rather Inadvertency, in suffering old

Furniture, when they have taken it down, because it was buggy, to be brought

into their Shops or Houses, among new and free Furniture, to infect them.

Southall's worries about the role of ships in transporting bedbugs persisted.

Usinger, the author of the monumental Monograph of Cimicidae (the family

to which the bedbug belongs), saw a thriving colony of the tropical bedbug,

Cimex hemipterus, on a liner sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco. But local

transport is just as much of a problem. In 1944, Usinger was bitten by the

common bug, Cimex lectularius, on a bus in Atlanta, Georgia. And in the summer

of 1947 a number of ladies in Dundee were referred to the local dermatologist

because they had developed a red band studded with blisters, some described as

being `as big as a pigeon's egg', on the backs of their calves. All of them had

travelled on the lower deck of a tram on the same route. Investigation showed

that only one tram was infested. The bugs had settled in a groove in a wooden

slat that held a seat in place. They sat in a row on the edge of the wood, the

dermatologist said, `extracting nourishment from the legs of unsuspecting lady

passengers. Men were never affected, their stouter nether garments providing

sufficient protection. The tram was disinfected, the grooves were planed out …

the epidemic came to an end.'

In 2008, bugs were found on the New York subway, on wooden benches on station

platforms at Hoyt-Schermerhorn in Brooklyn, Union Square in Manhattan and

Fordham Road in the Bronx, and in 2010 in a booth at Ninth Street Station on the

D Line. `If you put out your Linnen to wash,' Southall said, `let no

Washer-woman's Basket be brought into your houses; for they often prove as

dangerous to those that have no Buggs.' The Australian Quarantine and Inspection

Service has found bedbugs at airports in woven cane baskets and woven straw bags

– as well as on roses from Kenya, in baggage from Europe, and on an airport

inspection bench.

So it is clear that bedbugs can hitch-hike long distances and ride about town.

But how good they are at very local travel remains undetermined. Urban myths

have been around for a long time. `Bedbugs are popularly credited with an

amazing amount of intelligence,' observed the British Ministry of Health's

`Report on the Bedbug' in 1934. `It is stated that they will travel long

distances, 50 yards or more, in search of food, will unerringly choose the

direction in which their food is to be found, will go by way of windows, eaves

and gutters if unable to get through the party wall, and will drop from the

ceiling onto their victims. We are not prepared to say how much of this may be

due to popular superstition.' The report was produced because `the infestation

of new council houses has become a matter of concern to Local Authorities who

are responsible for their maintenance and management.' Whether bugs became

common in these council houses is not clear; it is certain, however, that the

current upsurge in bedbug numbers cannot be blamed on an increase in social

housing stock.

Hundreds of scientific papers have been published on bugs, though funding for

bug research has never been easy to get because of their medical unimportance.

Surveys of prevalence are expensive and are hardly ever done. But bugs are easy

to keep in the laboratory. Some investigators have allowed bugs to feed on them

for convenience, and to save money. Much attention has been paid to their method

of reproduction. Males mate preferentially with recently fed females. The male

sexual organ, called the paramere, has a sharp point, which the male bug uses to

penetrate the abdominal wall of the female. Sperm are injected into the

abdominal cavity. This process is sometimes lethal; repeated matings reduce the

female lifespan. This sexual conflict of interests has been of great interest to

evolutionary biologists.

Males attempt to mate with any moving object the size of a fed female, including

juvenile bugs and males who have sucked blood. But in these cases they dismount

quickly – good news both for the male, who doesn't waste his sperm, and for the

mountee, since penetration would quite likely have perforated his guts to mortal

effect. The males back off because inappropriate partners produce chemical

deterrents – alarm pheromones. Their smell is easily detected by humans. It has

been described as an `obnoxious sweetness', and is characteristic of a bedroom

with a heavy infestation. It is highly likely that these pheromones are what the

bedbug-sniffer dog detects. Two firms in Florida train them, usually using

animals rescued from shelters. One firm prefers beagle mixes, the other labrador

retriever mixes. Bold claims are made for their success. New York City is hiring

two, and Lola, a Jack bitch, has been imported into the UK.

Bedbugs avoid the light and are thigmotactic: they love contact with rough

surfaces. They seek cracks and crevices, preferably in wood or paper, in which

they establish refugia to digest their meals and breed, among an accumulation of

faeces, egg shells and cast-off skins. Bugs in refugia are hard to reach with

pesticides. Drastic measures have been used. A note in the Journal of the Royal

Army Medical Corps in 1926 entitled `Disinfestation of Barracks' records that

the British Army of the Rhine had been contacted by the representative of a firm

in furt am Main who wanted to explain the use of a substance with the trade

name Zyklon `B'. He described it as `siliceous earth impregnated with hydrogen

cyanide, to which is added a tear gas', and noted that it was extensively used

by the German government. A large advertisement inside the front cover of the

standard German work on bedbugs published in 1936 says: `Zyklon and T-Gas

exterminates bugs … without damaging the furnishings.'

The current upsurge has been good news for pest controllers. Booksellers have

benefited too: a copy of Southall's 44-page treatise was auctioned by Bonhams at

Oxford in October 2010, and despite being disbound, lacking a frontispiece and

having numerous ink annotations, went for £132 inclusive of the buyer's premium.

And bugs have brought business to lawyers. The landmark case this century has

been Mathias v. Accor Economy Lodging Inc. The plaintiffs, Burl and

Mathias, were bitten by bugs while staying at a Motel 6 in downtown Chicago.

They claimed that in allowing guests to be attacked by bedbugs in rooms costing

upwards of $100 a day, the defendant was guilty of wilful and wanton conduct.

The jury awarded each plaintiff $5000 in compensatory damages and $186,000 in

punitive damages. The defendant appealed, complaining primarily about the level

of the punitive damages, but the appeal court judge, Posner, dismissed

the appeal. His decision was bold: a Supreme Court statement had been made not

long before that `few awards exceeding a single-digit ratio between punitive and

compensatory damages, to a significant degree, will satisfy due process.' Posner

noted that bedbugs had been discovered at the motel in 1998 by EcoLab, an

extermination service. They recommended that every room be sprayed, at a cost of

$500. The motel refused. Bugs were found again in 1999. The motel tried without

success to get an exterminator to sweep the building free of charge. In the

spring of 2000 the motel manager told her superior that guests were being bitten

and were demanding, and receiving, refunds, and recommended that the motel be

closed while every room was sprayed. Her boss refused. On one occasion a guest

was moved from a room after being bitten, only to discover insects in the second

room; then, within 18 minutes of being moved to a third, he found them there as

well. `Odd that at that point he didn't flee the motel,' Posner comments. He was

unimpressed by the instruction given to desk clerks by the motel management that

bed bugs should be called ticks, `apparently on the theory that customers would

be less alarmed, though in fact ticks are more dangerous than bedbugs because

they spread Lyme Disease and Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever'. This is the bedbug

paradox. For most individuals their bites have only nuisance value. Yet they

arouse much more disgust than many other insects whose bites transmit

potentially lethal infections.

The bugs in the Empire State Building, Lincoln Center Theater and the Met were

found in the basement employee changing room, a dressing-room, and back of

house. The likelihood of being bitten in a public place without beds is remote.

And if the New York subway had the London Tube's metal seats rather than wooden

ones there would be no bug refugia. Alleviation here would be easy. But it is

unlikely that the public will come to terms with bugs. They will continue to

turn to lawyers. Posner's judgment and its financial consequences are on record.

The bedbugs' lifestyle makes it unlikely that they will go away soon. The

contrast with the body louse is instructive. Their refugia and breeding places

are the seams of human clothing. Body heat is necessary for egg hatching, so

those who take their underclothes off at night and change their garments more

than once a month will never be very lousy even if they consort with those who

are. The natural habitat of the bedbug is the home. In Europe and North America

the only one left for the body louse is the homeless.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n01/hugh-pennington/bug-affairs