How to Kill Bed Bugs

Bed bug reports have resurged in most developed countries in the past 10 years, including most major North American cities.

Bed bugs used to be a fact of life before the mid-twentieth century, but the problem subsided because of improved hygiene and increased accessibility and use of insecticides, like dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT).

DDT was outlawed in the United States in the early 1970s because of environmental impacts and health hazards to humans. In its place, less effective pesticides came into use. Pest control experts started using methods, like integrated pest management (IPM), which allowed bedbugs to avoid treatment that they had otherwise been subjected to in other extermination and control methods used in the past.

Researchers believe that the use of less effective pesticides in combination with an increase in international travel and immigration are behind the current rise in bedbug infestations in North America.

An alternate theory that is being investigated involves poultry facilities in Texas and Arkansas. Researchers at Texas A&M University have written, “We believe that populations never truly died out in the United States, but were forced to alternate their hosts.” They found no genetic bottleneck in bed bug populations that would indicate that the insects had died down to a minimum number of locales. They’re looking into whether bed bugs may have started feeding on birds and then jumped again back to humans.