Excellent read, and people may want to look at his other interesting and exhaustively researched posts as well. Good stuff.

Yes– we need a study like the one in Toronto, done in NYC. I am a broken record on this, alas. Pest Away tells the Village Voice they have 85 legit calls and 15 false alarms a day (20,100 bed bug cases in 12 months without any increases over time), but the city insists that only 311 calls count as bed bug reports. It IS the ostrich syndrome: if I ignore it it will go away.

Last November, I referred to someone else’s blog which alleged that the VIP couch at Fox was infested with bed bugs. (They were media professionals, and after I mentioned their report, they came on and confirmed it.)

Until the wood benches of city hall, and every posh co-op on the Upper East Side, every coat check at the Met, and every VIP couch in every news studio is infested, we may not see much action.

And forget national attention: people still want to see this as a NYC problem. (Yes, I am in NYC, but plenty of folks here are in other cities.)

People who stumble across this blog who aren’t bedbuggers think we’re crazy. As nutty as the nuttiest tinhat conspiracy theorists.
And I don’t mean crazy-from-itching-crazy, or crazy-my-stuff-is-in-ziplocs-crazy (both valid); I mean crazy-overreacting-crazy.

Bedbug-free visitor, we’re a bunch of canaries and Cassandras, your complimentary early bed bug warning system.

Are you listening???

It’s a fascinating subject.

Someone has to be there collecting data in order to notice spikes and other important trends. We don’t have institutions here even paying the right kind of attention.

No need to apologize! I share your concerns, though it may not have been apparent from the post, which I regret.

Actually, one of the digressions I edited out of the post (would you believe I actually edited something out of it? It was longer before?!?) was about how much the immigrant theory offends me (which I’ve blogged about lots before), and how close the Olympic one is to it. I should have been clearer about that.

I have just corrected the post to say I find the Olympic theory _slightly_ less offensive, and also to say that Australian theory is that bed bugs came via foreign tourists who came from countries where bed bugs _were_ more common _at the time_. I make that correction because you are right, bed bugs are now very common in the US (and Australia), though I don’t know that they’re less common in any particular country. But at the time, they were not common. Even though there were bed bugs in the US in 1999, they were very uncommon.

You’re absolutely right that the convergence of people is nothing new and not a good explanation, except I got the impression that there was a real spike after the Olympics, a spike which begs some kind of explanation (and which I don’t think is mirrored in NYC, which seems to have seen a more gradual rise). More data is needed. (And I’d love to hear about other cities with spikes after recent World Cups, Olympics, and other convergences.)

There have always been some bed bugs in the US, even before 1999, and in other developed countries as well– entomologists have led me to believe this. But not so many. From what I gather, bed bugs are rising all over the world.

We’re told that routine baseboard roach spraying kept them away, here, until the early 1990’s, when PCOs started using gel baits, and baseboard spraying became less common. That gave bed bugs about 10 years to come back, rather than the 30 that elapsed since DDT was outlawed.

On thing, though, if I may. The immigrant origins of bedbugs is the most consistently dispiriting theory around, and because no one is sure, it is regularly included in articles much like the dreaded sleep tight.

The Olympic theory only sounds less offensive; it still locates the original sin with “[f]oreign tourists from countries where bedbugs are more common” as you put it. Well, I come from a Third World country, and I have to say, bedbugs are now more common in the United States. (My family doesn’t understand what happened to me. They can’t fathom why pesticides didn’t work, why I got them, etc. etc. They certainly have nothing but mystified silence in the face of my abandoning all my belongings and moving away like a refugee.)

Great sporting events happen every few years like clockwork. Different cities. World Cup? Travel happens all the time. Backpacking is older than you and me.

I remember someone posting a comment on Caitlin’s blog, I think, where he described fighting bedbugs in NYC SRO housing since 1999.

Something happened in the last two decades. I doubt it was someone’s “developing world” downstairs tenants who started it all.

Sorry if I sound like I’m in a bad mood. :/