The website This is Hampshire! reports that council (local government) extermination rates are going up, in Southampton at least. Now it costs more to get rid of bed bugs in Southampton.

CHARGES to get rid of bed bugs and vermin are to rocket as part of a hike of council fees and charges in Southampton.
Residents […]

Apparently, many journalists still don’t bother to find out what bed bugs look like!
As of writing (4 pm EST on 3/3/2008), this article from This is Leicestershire, which is obviously about bed bugs, contains a massive photo of a dust mite.
No wonder the article’s commenters think bed bugs are not such a big deal.

BED BUG CLAIM EARNS GUEST £630 (Isle of Wight, UK)
“A DISGRUNTLED guest who claimed his experience at a Sandown hotel ruined his break has won £630 in compensation. Keith Clack, from Brighton, took legal action against The Carlton Hotel, on Sandown Esplanade, claiming his room and bed were infested with
(tags: isleofwight bedbugs UK england nov2007 […]

Some Boston University students claim they were bitten by bed bugs in a London BU dorm, that the infestation was not properly identified or treated, and that they were threatened with losing future study abroad privileges if they told anyone about their experience, according to this article by Matt Kaplan in the BU independent student […]

Monday’s Daily Telegraph featured a long article on bed bugs in the UK. Overall it was a typical story of the spread of bed bugs in Britain, and coming as it does from a well-respected source, it is a good thing. I was, however, disappointed in some of the information provided.
First, the journalist […]

Have you had bed bugs? If so, drop a comment on this New Statesman article (scroll down). They want to know if bed bugs actually exist over there. (Yanks, please do not comment! They know we have bed bugs.)

Advice from private pest control experts, freely offered on the […]

News of the World covered bed bugs this week. The article comes under the banner “New Bedbug Horror Facing England,” and below a photo of a Titanic-like bed bug floating through a sea of white carpeting fibers:

(Photo by News of the World)
It is entitled, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers!”
NOTW journalist Sophy Ridge […]

Last week or so, I was complaining when the Times (UK, not New York) ran a story about how bed bugs are taking over Los Angeles. As if they were not also taking over the UK.
This week, they’ve gone a step further, with Michele Kirsch’s three-page story on how Britain is “Infested” (not just […]

I was perplexed by this article from August 20th in the Times (London, not New York) about the spread of bed bugs, mainly because it was only about the bed bug epidemic in the USA.
Times reporter Chris Ayres writes from Los Angeles,
Five decades after being declared officially dead, the most toe-curling of all America’s […]

In this article from Friday’s Oxford (UK) Mail, journalist Giles Sheldrick tries to drive home the point that unclean homes, or people who don’t clean often, or who have poor hygeine, are “responsible for bed bugs.”

Students are partly to blame for an explosion in bed bugs in Oxford, according to pest control experts […]

Bed bugs spreading fast in the UK, with the sharpest rise recently in Manchester.In today’s Daily Mail.
Travelers warned about bringing them home from warmer countries.
Nothing much unusual here…

In light of the story from Ireland today, I wanted to check in on England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and so I looked through the BBC’s coverage of bed bugs over the past year.
On August 17th, 2006 the BBC reported that a residence for doctors and nurses in a hospital in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland, […]