Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite, Part 2: In Which Bed Bug Paranoia Now Encompasses Flesh-Eating Disease

Note: You can read Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite, Part 1 here .

The blog was on a bit of a hiatus last week while I was at a risk management conference in Vancouver, during which I attended, among others, a session on bed bugs. While in Vancouver, my suitcase rode around for a while in a rental car. Today, my bed bug paranoia includes the fear of the MRSA¹ superbug. All of these things are connected. Allow me to explain.

The bed bug session was useful, in an ick-making sort of way. I learned that bed bugs are most prevalent in places like hotels and motels, theaters, and rental cars. Rental cars? This is one vehicle option I do not want! I guess it makes sense, because bed bugs can be carried around in luggage. But I wish I’d known this before casually stowing my suitcase in the trunk of a rental car. I also learned that hotels and motels are usually not the source of bed bug infestations; rather, they tend to be the victims of bed bugs carried around in guests’ luggage. But if you’re the guest next following a stay by a bed bug carrier, you could fall victim, too.

OK. So now we come to the MRSA superbug. In my previous post about bed bugs, I repeated the conventional wisdom that bed bugs can inflict psychic horrors, but are not otherwise hazardous to human health. Now comes a Centers for Disease Control (CDC) paper that indicates otherwise. It seems that scientists have found, on patients suffering from superbug-caused infections, bedbugs carrying MRSA or other antibiotic-resistant bacteria. It was only a total of three patients, and five bedbugs, from an impoverished community in one city. But still, the paper indicates that bed bugs may “act as a hidden environmental reservoir for MRSA and may promote the spread of MRSA in impoverished and overcrowded communities.” Great. As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

The city in which the superbug-carrying bed bugs were found? Vancouver, of course.

Oh, the humanity.

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^{1 MRSA stands for methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus Aureus, a strain of staph that is highly resistant to common antibiotics and can cause a deadly, difficult-to-treat infection.}