Think you’re sleeping alone at night? You might not be. If you wake up itching or with red welts on your body, you could be sharing your bed with bed bugs.

Bed bugs are everywhere these days. They’re popping up in summer camp sleeping bags, hostel cots, hotel beds and — ICK! — in your home. “History is repeating itself,” said well-known entomologist Michael Potter of the University of Kentucky. A leading bed bug expert, Potter said most American beds were crawling with bed bugs before World War II. After the war, the use of potent chemicals like DDT spelled the death knell for the nasty bugs in America but they continued to flourish in most other countries around the world. With environmental consciousness came less powerful, but safer, chemicals that have allowed bed bugs carried in on the clothing and suitcases of international travelers to dig back into American beds.

“If bed bugs transmitted disease, what’s happening would be considered a huge epidemic,” says bed bug expert Dini Miller, an entomologist at Virginia Tech. “Though bedbugs have been shown to harbor 28 pathogens temporarily — including HIV and hepatitis B — numerous studies have shown the pathogens fail to thrive in the host enough to spread disease to people,” according to an article in the July 16, 2007 issue of U.S. News & World Report. Click here to read the whole story.

Feeding on human blood, the tiny nocturnal pests, while only the size of a lentil or grain of rice, carry a psychological punch out of proportion to their size. “They come in the dark; they feed on you; they scurry away when you turn the light on,” said Lynn Kimsey, director of the Bohart Museum of Entomology at the University of California-Davis. And they’re tough to kill. They have a hard cuticle for protection, can live for more than a year without feeding, and hide in tiny cracks and crevices making it hard for exterminators to reach them. Their eggs are tiny, translucent and pearly white making them hard to see. The darn things just keep bouncing back! And here’s the bad news: Potter and UK researchers are starting to find bed bugs that are resistant to the pesticides commonly used to kill them.

While they don’t pose a health threat, bed bugs routinely throw people into a state of hysteria. There are stories of people dumping gallons of insecticide on their mattresses and dousing themselves with bug spray before they go to sleep — such extreme measures put you at far greater risk than the bugs themselves. “I have people who call me in tears. They’re in hysterics,” says entomologist Richard Pollack of Harvard University. “My response is to put things in perspective. This is not a terminal illness. Being upset is not going to kill any bed bugs.”

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