When Haley Batis and her roommate moved into their summer housing, they had no idea that someone else was already living there. Their room in the fraternity house just off USC's campus seemed perfectly fine. Maybe a little dirty, but nothing out of the ordinary. It wasn't until Batis went home for the weekend that she noticed a serious problem.
"All of a sudden I had all of these bites on my arms and I didn't know what they were from," Batis said. "So I researched it online and self-diagnosed it as bed bugs."
Since she was at home, Batis thought that her bed in Northern California was infested with bed bugs. To avoid being bitten, she slept on the couch for the rest of the week. But when she returned to her room in the fraternity, one of her many unwanted roommates exposed himself.
"And then I got back and that night I got back I was sitting at my desk," Batis said, "and I saw something out of the corner of my eye crawling on the bed and I like freaked out and I saw what it looked like and I looked it up and found out it was a bed bug."
Recently, bed bugs are making a comeback all across the United States as well as the rest of the world. They have infested high-end hotels, apartment complexes, hospitals and especially college residences. Bed bugs are spread when people unknowingly carry them in their luggage or clothes from an infested location to other spaces. According to Western Exterminator Entomologist Fred Rozo, this normally happens when people are traveling or visiting a home because in normal conditions people don't usually encounter them.
"Once you find that there are bed bugs in your home the best thing to do is call a professional," Rozo said. "Call one of us to come out and take a look at it. Don't do any changing of it yourself in preparation for us to come out and see you."
Rozo said once an exterminator is on the site, the first thing they look for is blood stains on the mattress or sheets, which comes from the bed bugs actually biting their victims. Victims can’t feel the bed bugs bite them because as they bite their food, they anesthetize the area of exposed skin they are going to bite.
“It’s almost like a true surgeon doing surgery,” Rozo said.
The second thing that exterminators look for is actual live or dead bed bugs or even their eggs. According to Rozo, bed bugs are not always just in the bed; they can be anywhere around the bed or even behind frames on walls.
“If there are 20 pair of bed bugs today, in six months you will have 6,000 bed bugs,” Rozo said. “So they reproduce very quickly. The thing is if females are able to eat blood every day, their reproduction is going to increase as well.”
Once it has been established that a space is infested with bed bugs, Rozo said it takes two treatments over the course of one to two weeks to completely get rid of them. These treatments normally include heat or chemical treatments. He also recommended special mattress or box spring covers that do not let bed bugs in or out of the mattress. These sheets kill the any remaining bed bugs that the exterminators may have missed, since an adult bed bugs can live up to a year without feeding.
After the bed bugs are eradicated, the victim may still experience various degrees of anxiety. Susan Jones, an associate professor at Ohio State University said the psychological effects from bed bugs range from fear of sleeping at night to depression.
“Beyond the anxiety, we see physical responses where the scratching can lead to secondary bacterial infections,” Jones said.
Like the case with many bed bug victims, Batis said she experienced some anxiety. She said she felt dirty and ashamed, even though the bugs were there before she arrived.
“It was a little bit of a relief that I knew it wasn’t me who like caused it or anything because I’m not a dirty person,” Batis said. “But I just felt really dirty I guess.”
Even though Batis said she now feels better, Jones said many people stay paranoid even long after having bed bugs. In her experience, victims continue to wake up at night thinking they are being bitten or believe they see bed bugs when it is another insect.
“In some case it gets to be a point of where people are experiencing delusionary parasitosis,” Jones said, “delusions that their body has been infested, that they are being infested.”
The best way to avoid bed bugs is looking for bed bugs when people go to hotels or buy used furniture. Rozo recommends looking around the mattress for any live bugs or looking for small blood stains since these can be signs of bed bugs.
“These things are very adaptable to traveling with us,” Rozo said. “They are very good hitchhikers.”
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