Bed bugs have been ruining the lives of humans for a long time. They have been documented in medieval texts, mentioned in the writings of Aristotle, and discovered in the archeological excavation of a 3,500 year old Egyptian village. In fact, they were actually fairly common in the United States until the early part of the 20th century. It has been estimated that, fifty years ago, 30-50% of the population in some areas suffered from bedbugs.
Then came DDT. Developed as a pesticide in 1939, DDT was considered a miraculous cure against a variety of insect plagues. It was so successful in killing mosquitoes that Paul Hermann Müller, the Swiss chemist who invented it, was awarded the Nobel Prize. Why? Because it saved countless lives that would otherwise have been lost to malaria and other insect-borne diseases. Malaria was wiped out in Europe and the United States, in part because of the use of DDT. Hotels used to spray DDT on a regular basis in rooms to kill cockroaches. DDT lasts a long time, and it kills a lot of different kinds of bugs. It is believed that these cockroach treatments also killed any bedbugs that might be hiding in the rooms. In fact, DDT was so effective that bedbugs were virtually eradicated in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s. Imagine it – the nation was essentially bed bug free! But in other parts of the world, including Asia, Africa, Central America and Europe, bed bugs were still around. Over time, DDT became implicated in various human diseases, including cancer. And it nearly wiped out the bald eagle. So in 1972, the chemical was banned in the United States. That was the beginning of a larger trend in pest control – away from the practice of spraying broad-spectrum pesticides whenever an ant or cockroach turned up – and toward more species-specific treatments. In other words, if you have an ant problem, you put out ant traps and use compounds specifically formulated to treat ants, and only ants. You supplement with non-chemical means, such as taking away their food source and sealing up the route they used to get into the house. It’s an approach called “Integrated Pest Management.” And it means that your house might now be ant-free, but those ant-control measures don’t have any impact on other bugs. They survive. So bed bugs, no longer killed by regular spraying of insecticides, could begin to reestablish themselves. At the same time, international travel was becoming widespread. More and more people were visiting the US and Canada from less developed nations, and more Americans and Canadians were visiting foreign countries. Countries that still had bedbug problems. Today, many experts believe that changes in pest control opened the door to the current bed bug problem, and international travel became the vector that brought bed bugs back into the United States. Sometime in the last decade or so, the tipping point was reached. Bed bugs were back.
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