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By Sara Specht
Don’t let the bedbugs bite.
Think that’s just a myth? You wouldn’t be alone ten years ago. Long-lasting residual insecticides like DDT nearly wiped bedbugs out of society altogether in the 1960s, but then something happened in 1999. They came back.
Possibly aided by the worldwide convergence at the 2000 Australian Summer Olympics, bedbugs began reappearing around the globe. Infestations appeared in hotels, but owners didn’t believe it. Emergency room doctors called the pests a myth and looked for other explanations for reoccurring rashes. Meanwhile the insects continued to travel through societal systems, hitchhiking on bags and clothing to spread to new places and throughout buildings.
When entomology assistant professor Stephen Kells came across his sixth bedbug infestation that year, he captured some of the bugs and dipped them directly into a container of insecticide spray. They not only survived for days, they laid eggs with viable young. That’s when Kells knew the pest control industry was in major trouble, and he started researching bedbugs’ behavior to find a better solution.
“We went through a whole generation of entomologists with no training or experience with bedbugs,” Kells says. “At that point we were having to relearn the insect and its behavior. It’s incredible. The research materials go back to the '50s and '60s, then nothing until 2004.”
Today’s insecticides, while safer, are very limited in their ability to control bedbugs, both because the insects have proven to be extremely resistant and because the insecticide must be sprayed directly into their hard-to-find, mobile gathering places. Instead, Kells is experimenting with non-chemical measures like heat and steam to control infestation.
In cooperation with TempAir, a Burnsville-based company that manufactures mobile heating units, Kells is trying to determine both the most effective methods of heat treatment and the insects’ reaction to the measures. While he’s found that a controlled application of heat can be very effective to clear a room of the bugs, any populations already gathered in walls or behind fixtures will retreat to a safe distance and return. So spray insecticides still seem to play a vital role in containment.
Public health and social service providers no longer need convincing that the bedbug problem is real. Kells regularly talks to safety and service groups both about safely moving into areas with a higher risk of infestation and debunking bedbug myths. While bedbugs don’t spread any disease to humans and don’t remain on or in a person’s skin, their bites can cause rashes or hives, and often victims require treatment for sleep deprivation and anxiety.
“We’re talking about a bug that waits on a bed for a person to go to sleep, creeps out to feed, and then creeps back,” Kells says. “You get sleeplessness and paranoia. People talk about them like they’re superbugs, but they’re not. We just need to understand their behavior before we can clean them out.”
