Ep 117 Bedbugs: Bug-bitten and bedeviled

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 Britons think is the best part of a bullock to make a steak 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.

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 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.

podcast before in our shagust disease episode. So bedbugs are in the same order, but are very different bugs than kissing bugs, which are what's spread shagus disease. However, like kissing bugs, sumisids or bed bugs are also hematophagous 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 ninety ish maybe more species of sumisids, 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 cimex like gularius and the topical bedbug Cimex hymipteris.

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 Shawgus 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 nymphle in stars, 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 a 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 feeding and they can just hang out and survive. Yep,

you have that right. So those two species, Cimex lectularius and Cimex hymipdris, 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, bed bugs 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.

A bed bugs are you would think, like the least impressive movement wise, Like they can't fly, they can't jump, they just walk.

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 upholstery, 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 one am and five am, which also happens to be when we tend to sleep the most deeply.

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 eighteen weeks. That's like surprisingly low, right and per air and math, that's only like ninety to one hundred and

forty four eggs, which is not that much. But then other papers suggested it's more like two hundred to five hundred 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.

they biting me? For an adult tends to take about ten to twenty minutes to become fully engorged. So they're biting you every couple of days, ten to twenty minutes at a time, et cetera. Hundreds of bugs laying hundreds

of eggs. Goldkah, yeah, love that. There was also, I will say, in the bed bug 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 bedbug 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 females 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.

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.

about us when we get bitten by these bugs? No doubt, the most common thing that anyone is going 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 mouthparts that are

made specifically for piercing and sucking. Other Hymiptera use this type of mouthpart for piercing plants and sucking out their sap, or for piercing the exoskeleton of other bugs and sucking out their guts. Bedbugs 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 pre details. Some of them actually inhibit factor ten, which is fascinating, which is another part of our clotting cascade, in order to just further delay blood clot formation. I

just it's really impressive stuff. It's unclear if anything that they inject serves to unesthetize our skin, but these are 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 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 bedbug 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 since specific reaction might be. And in some people it's very possible to have a reaction within twenty four to forty eight 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?

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.

widespread rash. And the more that you scratch at it, the more that it can exacerbate this trauma and not only spread the 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.

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 study suggests 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 fifty percent of people will have any kind of a reaction at all. Okay, And like I mentioned, even the timeframe 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 twenty four to forty eight 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 exposures 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.

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. But it's often also that there is no pattern whatsoever to these bites. There's just a bunch of bites everywhere.

In truth, bedbug 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 bedbug bites and not other bug bites or scabies, which is very commonly confused with bed bugs 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 staph infection, although

bites like this could get superimposed with things like a staph infection, so it is difficult to diagnose bed bug bites.

So then if those bed bugs are there, are you feeling the bed bugs or do you just know that you have had bed bugs? 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 is it not? I don't think that it's impossible to feel these bugs. They are again like one to three millimeters, so they're definitely visible and you could

potentially feel that. 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 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.

a long time. So in cooler conditions than 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 like a pre on. It's like impossible to denature, right.

it's not. But yeah, it's not simple at all, And as I'll mention later on, it's also incredibly costly, especially when we look at how 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 it's a major major issue trying to kind of actually get rid of all of these. Yeah, but that's primarily bed bugs and the issues that they cause for us as humans. Aaron, Yes, Aaron, 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?

other species of bedbugs do well? They all feed on blood, but generally speaking, that blood either belongs to waterbirds, other birds, or bats. But if you look at the evolutionary relationships among all of these other species in the Simysidae 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 begin moving into caves for shelter,

bedbugs were already there feeding on bats. And then these bed bugs 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.

unless we're totally wrong about bat evolution. Since the earliest known bats didn't emerge until I read around thirty million years after bedbugs did. That's a long time.

before they started feeding on humans. In fact, these species emerged around five to ten million years before any member of the Homo genus existed.

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 bedbug feed on one species and then feed on a different species, or why does a bedbug start to feed on multiple species? And then these trade offs 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 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 group of organisms to study that like host switching and specialists and generalist trade offs, 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 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 bed bugs. 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, bed bugs 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.

described a spell to keep them away. And the bedbugs also spread, popping up in what is now Iraq by at least the ninth century. They appear in ancient religious texts such as A is a 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 texts 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 steake bites, or get leeches off of you.

bed bugs 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. Speaking of traveling, of course,

the bedbug was a very frequent and successful hitchhiker. So it arrived in Greece at least by four hundred and twenty BCE, Italy by seventy seven c China by six hundred CE, Japan around the same time, Germany by the eleventh century, France by the thirteenth, England by the sixteenth, and onto the Americas, with some of the earliest trips of boats going over there. As the bedbug spread across the world, you know, it's not like it was a

few bugs that popped up here and there. The bedbug 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 place of residence that they earned their fair share of names 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 corus CoRIS, 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 bed bugs.

i mean sapped. In ancient China, the bugs were generally called stinky bug, which is also similar to what people in France called them when the bud bugs arrived there in the thirteenth century, and in Japan floor bug or floor lause. In Spain, Chinche. In Germany, the newly arrived bedbugs as of the eleventh 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.

As the bedbug 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 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 include it in novels, poems, paintings, songs. You can find references to bedbugs in works by Upton, Sinclair Sinclair, Lewis Langston, Hughes, John Steinbeck, so many others.

And bedbugs featured prominently in many early blues songs like Black Snake Moan by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mean Old Bedbug Blues, as well as country songs and calypso songs. And bedbug didn't always mean bedbug, of course, but sometimes it was a little bit of a innuendo term, like you know.

I guess bed bugs 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.

That's incredibly gross. 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, because there are so many just like Yeah.

not pestered with bugs, okay. 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 someone walking in the rickety heartments above.

They were everywhere. It had become a matter of war between humans and bed bugs, 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 sixteen seventy three 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 smoosh 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 rivetting 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 began popping up in the late seventeenth century, the most famous of which was Tiffin and Son of London, who exclusively served the nobility, and who advertise themselves as quote, may the destroyers of peace be destroyed by us Tiffin and Son bug destroyers to her majesty end quote. They were so like snobby and classiest. It's they said, listen literally a quote I work for the upper classes only wow. And then and then this quote.

My work is more method and I may call it scientific treating of bugs rather than wholesale murder just like uh okay. And the main strategy that Tiffin and Son used for bedbug 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 linen's 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 played a major role. Okay, so when you picture like a bed from I don't know, the rent, like a fancy bed and nobility from the Renaissance, what do you picture I.

was so interesting. Sort of 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's 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.

options at your disposal. But 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 eighteen hundreds and into the early nineteen hundreds, 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.

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 bed bugs, and that of course discriminated against those earning low incomes who tended to be at higher risk of exposure to bed bugs. But no one was truly exempt from the threat of

bed bugs. 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 One and World War Two were engaged in another war alongside the political one, as bedbugs prospered and 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 Two 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 aka di chlorodphenol trichloroethane. I think I got that right.

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 oncovering it later this season.

especially as it pertains to bedbugs. So DDT was first synthesized in eighteen seventy four, but mostly forgotten about for like sixty five years or so, and then in nineteen thirty nine when it was rediscovered by a Swiss chemist named Paul Muller, who would later go on to get a Nobel Prize for this. DDT 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.

fell by the wayside. And I would bet that if you plotted like the number of research articles about bedbugs from the early nineteen hundreds to today, you'd see a big boom up to the nineteen forties, and then a crash in the nineteen fifties, nineteen sixties, 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 nineteen seventies maybe reporting on like oh resistance here, oh a case here, that would turn into this full on wave in the early two thousands, as bedbugs found their way back into our beds, our couches,

our futons, our bean bags, our homes. The first time that bedbugs might be back came in nineteen ninety eight 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. A couple of years later, a report from the US also mentioned that bedbug bites might be on the rise, and in two thousand and one Venezuela reported the first instance of bedbugs in thirty years.

Anecdotes then turned into data which put a number to the bedbug resurgence in the UK between nineteen ninety seven and two thousand, a sixfold increase in bedbug infestations. In Australia between nineteen ninety nine and two thousand and six, a four thousand, five hundred percent rise in bedbug numbers.

how do you measure that big 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 ride in bedbugs? I mean, it seems like there are a lot of different factors at work here, but most people point towards the rise and insecticide resistance, increased global travel, as well as a lack of public awareness, at least in the early days of their re emergence, 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 writing this, I was thinking, I remember when bed bugs 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 bed bugs today? Arin?

with us. The decline that we saw from the use of DDT and other insecticides in the you know, mid nineteen hundreds 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 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, et cetera. And so this has allowed for the spread of the two major species that I mentioned, the common bedbug and the tropical bedbug 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 US and 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 bedbug 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. 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 US, in twenty fifteen, studies I think by Orcan suggested that eighty percent of hotels in the US dealt with at least one infed station in that year eighty percent of hotels in the US. Wow. Yeah, And like you mentioned some of the numbers out of Australia, 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.

What's going on? What's up with that? So I want to talk about it a little bit because 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 on 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 realize, actually demonstrate that the end i'll quote here natural transmission cycle of multiple human pathogenic microbes can 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 bedbug and then actually be passed by the bedbugs be shed by the bedbugs. The list of these pathogens includes, but is not limited to, shawgus disease, Trepannosoma cruise i, Bartonella quintana aka trench fever, laosbourne relapsing fever,

Burellia ricrensis, various other ricketsias, possibly your Sinia 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 can become infected various pathogens, can undergo whatever things they need to in this bedbug in the vector hosts that they would normally do in say a kissing bug, they can do that in the bedbug, 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.

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, it's like one pathogen, one vector, but bedbugs are over here, Like.

that on our website. You can find the sources all of these from this episode and all of our episodes podcastikilly dot com. That's where they'll be.