Bed bugs invade through chinks in our armour

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/10/2010 (5558 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

They were the talk of the town at the Toronto International Film Festival. They’ve made appearances at trendy New York stores like Abercrombie & Fitch and Hollister, been namedropped on the HBO series Bored to Death, and highlighted on the cover of The New Yorker.

As Mugatu — Zoolander‘s grotesquely inappropriate fashion designer — would say: Bed bugs are so hot right now.

The fact that bed bugs have been roaring back into North America in the last decade is, unfortunately, a real news story. These ancient arthropods are small but intractable, and eradicating them can be a nightmare of anxiety, labour and economic hardship.

Still, even with the spread of this tenacious insect, most of us are more likely to be kept up at night by bed bug media stories than by the critters themselves. If we’re all becoming increasingly worried and sleepless, it might be because the bed bug has become the creep-crawly ruler of all media.

 

Mainstream outlets are all over the bed bug trend with TV bits and newspaper stories — inevitably headlined “Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite.” Shy, socially awkward entomologists are being dragged out of sunless basement offices and onto talk shows, and bed bug-sniffing beagles are the newest Animal Planet celebrities.

The Internet is crowded with bed bug blogs like waronbedbugs.blogspot.com and dead bedbugs.com.blog. “It has been a crazy few weeks for a lot of us in bed bug land,” complains one worn-out insect activist over at bedbugger.com.

YouTube is crawling with icky bed bug footage. One video shows a gonzo entomologist using his arm to feed a thousand hungry bed bugs, which are released through a bunny-shaped opening in a jar lid. Three days later, he proudly shows off his red, rabbit-shaped welt. (It’s cute, in a horrible kind of way. )

And, like almost everything else, bed bugs are spreading through social media. Areyouinterested.com, a dating app on Facebook, recently organized a questionnaire about dating and bedbugs. The survey found that 47 per cent of respondents would ask a date about bed bug status before going back to his or her place.

So why does the bed bug story have legs?

It’s a sad comment that the bed bug invasion moved from sidelined news item to massive media trend when bed bugs started to hit the middle and upper classes. There was a kind of indignant shock, for example, when it was revealed that expensive hotel rooms were actually part of the problem, glamorous global travel being a major factor in bed bug resurgence.

But the bed bug infodemic really comes down to a very primal instinct. Our homes are the physical embodiment of our sense of security and safety. We want to shore them up against danger, disease and unhappiness, but at some level we realize we can never completely succeed. So we look for a place to concentrate our fears.

Strangely, it’s not big catastrophic events like floods and fires that captivate us, but threats that are creeping, insidious, invisible. Radon gas, lead paint and toxic mould have all cycled through the media over the last decades. These problems haven’t gone away — radon keeps leaching, mould keeps sending out spores — but they’ve largely disappeared from the mass media and from the public imagination.

It seems that when it comes to home hazards, we can only concentrate on one thing at a time. And right now our attention is being overrun by bed bugs.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca