Bedbugs are about one-eighth- to one-quarter-inch long, reddish brown in color, with oval, flattened bodies. They can't fly, but they can scurry quite quickly over floors, walls and ceilings. They hitch rides in suitcases and clothing, and they have increasingly been showing up all over New York City, including in expensive hotels and tony co-op, condominium and rental buildings.
Complaints about them have skyrocketed.
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 “bug of the bed.” Only a handful of entomologists specialize in it, and until recently it has been low on the government’s research agenda because it does not transmit disease. 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.”
In August 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency and theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention issued a joint statement on bedbug control. It was not, however, a declaration of war nor a plan of action against bedbugs. It was an acknowledgment that the problem is big, a reminder that federal agencies mostly give 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.”
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