Don’t be too quick to dismiss the common bedbug as merely a pestiferous six-legged blood-sucker.
Think of it, rather, as Cimex lectularius, international arthropod of mystery.
In comparison to other insects that bite man, or even only walk across man’s food, nibble man’s crops or bite man’s farm animals, very little is known about the creature whose Latin name means — go figure — “bug of the bed.” Only a handful of entomologists specialize in it and until recently it has been low on the US government’s research agenda because it does not transmit disease. Most study grants come from the pesticide industry and ask only one question: What kills it?
But now that it’s The Bug That Ate New York, Not to Mention Other Shocked American Cities, that may change.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement on bedbug control. However, it was not a declaration of war nor a plan of action. It was an acknowledgment that the problem is big, a reminder that federal agencies mostly give advice, plus some advice: Try a mix of vacuuming, crevice-sealing, heat and chemicals to kill the things.
It also noted, twice, that bedbug research “has been very limited over the past several decades.”
Ask any expert why the bugs disappeared for 40 years, why they came roaring back in the late 1990s, even why they don’t spread disease, and you hear one answer: “Good question.”
“The first time I saw one that wasn’t dated 1957 and mounted on a microscope slide was in 2001,” said Dini Miller, a Virginia Tech cockroach expert who has added bedbugs to her repertoire.
The bugs have probably been biting our ancestors since they moved from trees to caves. The bugs are “nest parasites” that fed on bats and cave birds like swallows before man moved in.
That makes their disease-free status even more baffling.
(The bites itch, and can cause anaphylactic shock in rare cases, and dust containing feces and molted shells has triggered asthma attacks, but these are all allergic reactions, not disease.)
Bats are sources of rabies, Ebola, SARS and Nipah virus. And other biting bugs are disease carriers — mosquitoes for malaria and West Nile, ticks for Lyme and babesiosis, lice for typhus, fleas for plague, tsetse flies for sleeping sickness, kissing bugs for Chagas. Even non-biting bugs like houseflies and cockroaches transmit disease by carrying bacteria on their feet or in their feces or vomit.
But bedbugs, despite the ick factor, are clean.
Actually it is safer to say that no one has proved they aren’t, said Jerome Goddard, a Mississippi State entomologist.
But not for lack of trying. South African researchers have fed them blood with the AIDS virus, but the virus died. They have shown that bugs can retain hepatitis B virus for weeks, but when they bite chimpanzees, the infection does not take. Brazilian researchers have come closest, getting bedbugs to transfer the Chagas parasite from a wild mouse to lab mice.
“Someday, somebody may come along with a better experiment,” Goddard said.
That lingering uncertainty has led to one change in lab practice. The classic bedbug strain that all newly caught bugs are compared against is a colony originally from Fort Dix, New Jersey, that a researcher kept alive for 30 years by letting it feed on him.
RSS