I don’t have anything to say about the merits of the case (who knows if there were bed bugs or if they gave her nightmares), though but I did want to comment on how Fox News filed it under their “Strange and Unusual” news category (along with “Uranium Found in Pawn Shop,” and “Tornado Blows Old Check from Georgia to Alabama“).  I don’t think bed bug lawsuits, at this stage, should be in the “circus sideshow” section of the news, even of Fox News, where everything kind of has that quality to it.

I haven’t personally heard from anyone in this woman’s situation (which sounds like PTSD brought on by a night in a motel with bed bugs), but there are plenty of people who experience bed bugs and have bed bug nightmares–especially those for whom bed bugs go on and on and disrupt their lives in numerous ways–financially, socially, emotionally, and at work.  I don’t think that’s a strange and unusual reaction to knowing that a pest is drinking your blood as you sleep. Let alone, to seeing the bugs doing so.

I suppose, in some sense, the entire bed bug epidemic is strange and unusual, as is the reluctance many people have to seeing it as a real problem. When they do acknowledge it is one, it may be because they too are having nightmares.  When newscasters and Senators and Hollywood stars are regularly calling one another up to ask who their friends used as a PCO, then we’ll see some action.

• Bed Bugs in Hampton Roads, Virginia hotels
• Gaston County, N.C. health officials to hotel: bed bugs not a serious violation
• Old mattresses given out as charity: will cause more harm than good
• entomologists podcasting; bed bugs and disease; another bedbugged motel closed; Singapore, Hawai’i

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