Numerous bed bug infestation cases are reported in the news every day. Simply Googling “bed bugs” will bring up dozens of recent bed bug infestation reports. Although bed bugs were largely unheard of between the years of 1950 and 2000, bed bug infestations are now commonplace in every corner of the world. Once bed bugs began to reemerge, the public became interested in them, as most people never thought that these odd insects would one day come to infest their own homes. Since the turn of the millennium, the public’s initial fascination with these little known bugs has completely transformed into fear and hatred toward the critters. So many bed bug infestations have occurred during the past twenty years that pinning down the most widespread of all infestations would be hard, if not impossible to do. However, a bed bug infestation that existed within an apartment complex in Augusta, Maine two years ago may be the most widespread bed bug infestation on recent record. In fact, the bed bug infestation at the complex was so widespread, city officials nearly declared a citywide emergency ordinance in an effort to prevent the termite culprits from infesting other nearby buildings.
The bed bug infestation that nearly shut a whole city down in 2016 had taken hold of two large boarding houses that contained a multitude of tenants. Most of the building’s tenants had suffered from bed bug bites while inside of their own apartment units. Nearly all of the mattresses within the complex had become infested with bed bugs, which prompted multiple pest control operators to spray down the entirety of the two complexes. One pest control operator claimed that every single apartment unit within both complexes contained massive amounts of bed bugs.
The bed bugs had no problem traveling from unit to unit within the apartment complex, as a shared bathroom connected the tenant’s rooms. After several days of planning, numerous pest control professionals along with a city task force managed to eradicate the bed bugs from the two complexes.
Do you think large scale bed bug infestations can be a threat to public health?