I travel frequently for my job, and I don’t always stay in the fanciest or cleanest hotels. I also live in a Baltimore rowhouse, a living arrangement that can be too close for comfort at times. Vermin can pass between houses with ease.
So I get shivers when I read this item from The Wall Street Journal — and so should many facilities managers:
The first comprehensive genetic study of bedbugs, the irritating pests that have enjoyed a world-wide resurgence in recent years, indicates they are quickly evolving to withstand the pesticides used to combat them.
The new findings from entomologists at Ohio State University, reported Wednesday online in PLoS One, show that bedbugs may have boosted their natural defenses by generating higher levels of enzymes that can cleanse them of poisons.
In New York City, bedbugs now are 250 times more resistant to the standard pesticide than bedbugs in Florida, due to changes in a gene controlling the resilience of the nerve cells targeted by the insecticide, researchers at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst recently reported.
It’s like a scene out of the 1954 horror classic Them!
Bedbugs have been a problem for colleges, as The Chronicle has reported in the past. Institutions have hired exterminators with poisons, supercharged room heaters (which fry the bugs), and even bug-sniffing dogs.
There is also no shortage of online anecdotes about problems with bedbugs in dormitories and other student residences, including this one, posted a week ago on a bedbug forum: A young woman found she had scarring bites on her legs and arms after she stayed over at her boyfriend’s dorm a couple of nights; on the second night, they removed the bedsheets and found bugs. (Premarital sex just gets riskier!) In her post, she says she’s considering filing a lawsuit against the university.
When I travel, I tend to follow some precautionary principles: Take the sheets off the bed and look in the seams for bugs or tiny blood stains. I also keep my suitcase off the floor, on one of those suitcase racks. I leave the suitcase outside when I get home and wash everything with hot water or a hot dryer.
Any stories from out there about bed bugs at colleges? Have you had them recently, and how have you dealt with them?
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5 Responses to Friday’s Freaky News: Bedbugs Are Evolving to Resist Poison
diogenesc - January 21, 2011 at 12:58 pm
I hear that another common treatment is to elevate the temperature in an infested room until the bugs die. That would seem to be a harder hurdle to evolve past.
swish - January 21, 2011 at 4:37 pm
How hot does the room have to be? I bet they can evolve past that, too.
jonrpatrick - January 22, 2011 at 2:10 pm
As someone who thought they were myths or an extinct species, I was surprised to get them 2x in 2years. They can hitch a ride from anywhere, and are so small and thin they had hide in cracks in the bed. You can get rid of them yourself – you just have to be ruthless and do it multiple times. I even blogged about it and the solution(s) we used. http://bedbugsbgone.netii.net/
jbfjbf - January 24, 2011 at 11:51 pm
Haul the mattress out and burn it. Have we become such a poor third world country that we can’t afford clean bedding? If the problem is that bad, college students can bring a new mattress at their own expense and burn it at the end of the semester.
sand6432 - April 25, 2011 at 12:56 pm
I had a similar experience at Princeton University Press in publishing The Peruvian Experiment edited by Abraham Lowenthal in 1975 when a military coup occurred when the book was already in page proofs. Lowenthal quickly had to write a new Preface to take account of this major event. One advantage of ebooks is that such updating can become much more manageable and less costly.—Sandy Thatcher