 Over the last few years, the bed bug problem in the US and Canada has grown exponentially.
Pest control companies nationwide reported a 71% increase in bed bug infestations between 2000 and 2005. Orkin Pest Control says it went for 50 years with virtually no bed bug activity, and now it is treating them in nearly every state. Articles on infestations are appearing in newspapers across the country. A search on “bed bugs” in Google News will provide you with dozens of articles posted in the last few weeks (click here to see what I mean).
And once you start doing a little reading, you’ll find they are everywhere: At universities across the US, dormitories are becoming infested. Columbia University, Loyola, the University of Maryland, Stanford, and the even University of Oklahoma, have all treated dorms for bedbugs Trenton State Hospital, New Jersey’s largest psychiatric facility, has been treated repeatedly. In London, officials reported a 300% increase in bed bug cases from 2000 to 2005. In Australia, experts say a plague of bedbugs is threatening the country’s hotel industry. In Hawaii, lawmakers ordered the State Health Department to conduct a public education campaign and make recommendations on stopping the problem. In 2006, the NOAA reported that 10 long range commercial fishing vessels in the Pacific were infested with bed bugs. In San Francisco, the Department of Public Health now requires that hotels keep precise records and train staff to identify and respond to bed bugs. Bed bug related lawsuits are rampant, from the Boston couple who sued a furniture retailer for selling an infested bed, to the movie director suing the owner of his Manhattan apartment, to the poor residents of a residential hotel in Oakland taking on their landlord. And New York seems to be the epicenter of the plague in the United States, with one pest control operator estimating that his firm received 17,000 bedbug calls in 2006.
Michael F. Potter, entomologist at the University of Kentucky and one of the nation’s foremost experts on bed bugs, said, “This will be the pest of the 21st century -- no question about it.”
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