But as VPR’s Nina Keck reports the tiny pests are making a big comeback.

(Keck) Who can forget the old nursery rhyme - Good Night, Sleep Tight – don’t let the bed bugs bite? Unfortunately, they are biting – all over Vermont and the rest of the country. Jon Turmel is Vermont’s state entomologist.

(Turmel)  “I’ve been at it 35 years and we would get one or two bed bugs every three or four years – we’d never see them.  As it is now, I’m getting anywhere from 2 to 6 calls a week.”

(Keck) Turmel says cleanliness has no bearing on where bedbugs show up. Five star hotels are just as likely to have them, he says, as a crowded city apartment.

Missy Henriksen, of the National Pest Management Association in Virginia, says in the last three years, reports of infestations are up 71 percent and include all 50 states.

(Henriksen)  “From suburban areas, rural areas large cities – there really is no area that has been spared, unfortunately.”

(Keck) Experts believe the recent increase in bed bugs may be due to the fact that powerful pesticides like DDT are no longer used.

People are also traveling more than ever before and the tiny bugs often hitchhike to new locations hidden in people’s luggage.

(Henriksen) “Bedbugs are very difficult to find and they can hide for up to a year without a meal – their meal is a human blood meal – so they can lay in wait – reproducing during that hidden life cycle and the female can reproduce 400 offspring.”

(Keck) John Turmel says bedbugs don’t spread any dangerous diseases. But he says the psychological trauma of getting bitten repeatedly while you sleep can be terrible.

So he says it’s best to call a qualified exterminator right away. It’s much better advice, he says than the old nursery rhyme.

Do-It-Yourself Bed Bug Detector

From December 18, 2009 Science News, by Susan Milius

After trying some 50 arrangements of household objects, researchers have come up with a new, homemade bed bug detector.

Wan-Tien Tsai of Rutgers University worked with Changlu Wang, also at Rutgers, for six months on designing homemade devices that lured bed bugs out into a trap so residents can tell whether a home is infested.  Like many insects that search for blood, bed bugs are attracted to plumes of concentrated carbon dioxide, good clues that an animal filled with liquid dinner is breathing somewhere nearby.  In lab tests, carbon dioxide beat heat and several chemical attractants in drawing the bugs out of hiding.

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