“The stories have become horribly familiar: houses so overrun by bedbugs that the bloodsucking insects pile an inch deep on the floor. An airport shutting down gates for deep cleaning after the parasites were spotted. Fear and loathing during Fashion Week 2023 in Paris, with bedbug-detection dogs working overtime when the insects turned up in movie theaters and trains,” Ute Eberle writes over at The Atlantic. “For reasons that almost certainly have to do with global travel and poor pest management, bedbugs have resurfaced with a vengeance in 50 countries since the late 1990s. But recently, the resurgence has brought an added twist: When exterminators swarm out to hunt these pests, they might encounter not just one but two different kinds of bugs. Besides the common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, which has always made its home in the Northern Hemisphere, there are now sightings of its relative, the tropical bedbug, Cimex hemipterus, in temperate regions. Historically, this species didn’t venture that far from the equator, write the entomologists Stephen Doggett and Chow-Yang Lee in the 2023 issue of the Annual Review of Entomology. But in recent years, tropical bedbugs have turned up in the United States, Sweden, Italy, Norway, Finland, China, Japan, France, Central Europe, Spain — ‘even in Russia, which would have once been unthinkable,’ says Lee, a professor of urban entomology at UC Riverside. Like the common bedbug, the tropical version has grown resistant to many standard pesticides — to the point where some experts say they wouldn’t bother spraying should their own home become infested. It has been estimated that the fight against bedbugs is costing the world economy billions annually. This all adds up to a sobering new reality: For many people, bedbugs are becoming a fact of life again, much as they used to be throughout humanity’s history. ” Ute Eberle, “The ‘unthinkable’ new reality about bedbugs,” The Atlantic.
