It’s a bedbug’s world now. We’re just sleeping in it.
On a brisk morning last month, the deputy mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, stood in front of a French TV camera with a serious look on his face and said: “No one is safe.”
He wasn’t talking about the threat of climate change or some frightening new virus. He was talking about bedbugs.
For the blissfully unaware, bedbugs are small wingless insects that bite humans and feast on our blood, often at night. They find us by sensing the carbon dioxide in our breath and our body heat. While bedbugs can carry a large number of pathogens, they don’t seem to transmit diseases to humans, though they do produce itchy welts.
In recent weeks, viral videos showing insects that look like bedbugs on the Paris metro and trains, and sightings of bedbugs in movie theaters and at the airport, have fueled fears of a widespread outbreak across the city. People have been panicking. “These little insects are spreading despair in our country,” a French politician told Parliament earlier this month, urging the prime minister to act. (She brought a vial of bed bugs with her into the chamber, presumably in an effort to strengthen her point.)
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Remon Haazen/Getty Images
Elevating these concerns is the looming Summer Olympics, which will take place in Paris just 10 months from now. Millions of people will descend on Paris for the Games. And you know what likes millions of people? Bedbugs.
The extent of the current “outbreak” isn’t clear, and most of the sightings have not been confirmed. Videos, news reports, and memes have almost certainly made the problem seem far bigger than it really is (go figure!).
But this isn’t exactly good news. Paris certainly does have bed bugs. So does Chicago, New York, and every other major city in the world. These bloodsuckers are, unfortunately, everywhere.
It gets worse: Over the last two decades, there’s been a “global resurgence” in bedbugs, according to a recent scientific review, following lows in the mid-20th century. “The resurgence has been widespread, affecting virtually every sector of society,” the authors wrote.
Scientists say this surge is unlikely to wane anytime soon. So for now, it’s a bedbug’s world. Welcome.
The rise and fall and rise of bedbugs
No matter how potent the threat of bedbugs may feel today, I promise that it used to be worse. These insects have been gorging on our legs and arms and crotches for thousands of years, dating back to ancient Egypt — long before the invention of chemical pesticides.
In the 1800s, some London hotels were so infested that lodgers “were advised to become half-drunk to obtain some sleep,” according to the recent scientific review. Entire buildings would be burned down in order to stamp out an infestation. It was the golden age of bedbugs (at least from the perspective of a bedbug).
The tables turned in the 1940s, when the chemical DDT was popularized as an insecticide. During World War II, militaries sprayed DDT to control mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria, as well as body lice. It was also shown to be highly effective at killing bedbugs. Along with other newly developed pesticides, DDT helped wipe out bedbug populations. By the 1960s, bedbug infestations were rare, at least among wealthy nations, according to the review.
For the next few decades, citizens in the US and Europe enjoyed evenings largely free of bedbug bites, even after DDT was banned in the US in 1972 (for its harmful impacts on humans and wildlife). But the reprieve obviously didn’t last.
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Around the turn of the century, the parasites began reentering people’s homes and beds in droves, according to reports from the UK, US, Australia, Japan, and a handful of other countries. In Australia, for example, infestations of bed bugs rose by an estimated 4,500 percent between 1999 and 2006. There isn’t clear data on the number of infestations in the US, though in 2010 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency issued a joint statement, warning of an “alarming resurgence” of these pests.
That brings us to today. Bedbugs are back. Why?
Why bed bugs are surging now
There are some obvious reasons. More people live in cities now, and bedbugs love densely packed warm bodies. We’re also traveling more than ever before, giving bedbugs an opportunity to spread (see: horror stories of bedbugs in Airbnbs).
But the main reason why it’s boom time for bedbugs, according to the review, is that they’ve evolved resistance to many pesticides, our main line of defense. Indeed, these critters are now resistant to “most of the major classes of insecticides,” the review states, including pyrethroids, which is still one of the most commonly used insecticides. They’ve also developed resistance to DDT, which attacks insects in a similar way to pyrethroids.
“Insecticides, especially the use of pyrethroids, are useless,” said Chow-Yang Lee, a professor of urban entomology at the University of California Riverside and a co-author of the recent review. “That will never get rid of bedbugs.”
There’s also some evidence that powders like diatomaceous earth — which is designed to kill the bugs by drying them out — no longer work either. At least some of the insects have evolved resistance to desiccation, Lee said.
That doesn’t mean bedbugs are impossible to destroy. High temperatures, around 113 degrees Fahrenheit and above, kill the insects, and research suggests that they aren’t likely to evolve heat tolerance. So do extremely cold temperatures. Fumigation using highly toxic chemicals and insecticide combinations can work too, Lee said, especially when they’re used repeatedly.
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Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images
But these effective options come with a very important caveat: They’re expensive.
Low-income communities often can’t afford these eradication methods, Lee said, which can cost several hundred to thousands of dollars for a single apartment. Large complexes might hire an exterminator, but he or she may only spend a few minutes in each unit spraying chemicals that don’t work, he said.
These communities may also be home to elderly folks who can’t easily vacate their apartments for treatment; the exterminator has to work around them, so they’ll undoubtedly miss some spots. These less-affluent communities are considered reservoirs that can spread bedbugs throughout a city, Lee said.
“The biggest challenge when it comes to treating bedbugs is cost,” Lee said.
How to avoid bedbugs
While it’s hard to eradicate bedbugs, it’s relatively easy to avoid them.
Here’s a tip: When you enter a hotel or Airbnb, immediately check the mattress for reddish-brown blood stains, Lee said. After bed bugs feast, he said, they defecate, and their poop includes some staining hemoglobin (sorry). You can also look for the bugs themselves, which are visible to the naked eye; they’re roughly the size of an apple seed.
Let’s say you do end up staying somewhere with bedbugs. When you get back home, Lee said, don’t bring your luggage inside. Take out your clothes and put them in the dryer for at least 30 minutes (or wash them and then dry them). Then, use a garment steamer to heat-treat your luggage outside. That should kill any eggs.
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Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Now let’s say you’ve found them in your home. Immediately call for professional help, Lee said. “Do not attempt to treat it yourself,” he said. If the infestation is small, an exterminator may treat your bed or furniture with a hand-held steamer, though if they’re everywhere, the exterminator may want to fumigate or place your furniture into a heat chamber — that’s when the costs will go up.
Finally, a word from Lee for all of you thrifters: Be very wary about taking anything off the street, especially in cities like New York and Chicago. If you plan to take in any furniture — especially sofas, chairs, beds, and mattresses — you should have it heated first.
Books, too, should be treated. “Do not bring them directly into the house,” Lee said. If it’s the middle of summer or winter, you can leave the books outside for a day or two — the heat or cold will force the bedbugs out or kill them. Or you can simply put them in a sealed plastic bag and place them in your freezer for a few days.
These solutions will help you avoid bites or a home invasion. Yet until cheaper effective options are available — or the cost of heat treatment is subsidized for low-income communities — it’s unlikely the bedbug problem in the US and elsewhere will be eliminated. According to the EPA, “financial assistance [for bedbug treatment] is not generally available.”
In the meantime, we’ll have to learn to live with the threat of bedbugs.
“We have not seen the light at the end of the tunnel,” Lee said. “Until we come out with some method that is affordable to everyone, we will remain in the tunnel.”
Other people’s money decisions affect your own. Here’s how to talk boundaries.
On the Money is a new monthly advice column. If you want advice on spending, saving, or investing — or any of the complicated emotions that may come up as you prepare to make big financial decisions — you can submit your question on this form. Here, we answer two questions asked by Vox readers, which have been edited and condensed.
My husband and I are on the same page with our money, but not with his parents’ finances. His parents, who are currently selling their home to pay their debts, want to put part of the leftover money toward a new home and spend the rest on travel. They don’t have a retirement plan, and my husband is prepared to support them financially in the future. He says that his parents are free to spend their money however they choose. I feel that it is unfair that my in-laws spend their money on traveling and then depend on our money to live.
How can we manage our finances when they are affected by other people’s decisions and actions?
Our finances are always affected by other people’s decisions and actions. Your in-laws are likely to discover this when they complete the process of selling their home, paying off their debts, and finding a new place to live. While downsizing might sound attractive to a couple looking for a quick way to pay off old debts, we’re in a severely disadvantaged real estate market right now. Mortgage interest rates are at a 21-year high, which means that your in-laws may have difficulty finding someone willing to buy their home — and they may end up spending a lot more than they expected on their next living situation, whether they end up buying or renting.
This means that the scenario you currently feel is unfair — the one in which your in-laws get to spend their money on travel while relying on your money to pay the bills — may not actually happen. They might get one long vacation out of the deal, and the money they spend on that trip will have a negligible effect on their ability to live out the rest of their lives without your financial help.
If the idea that your in-laws might get a vacation while you and your husband might not feels unbearable, the first step is to talk to your husband about taking some time off. Seriously. The money the two of you spend on a trip will have an equally negligible effect on your ability to support your in-laws, so make it a financial goal and get it done by the end of the year.
Now that we’ve gotten the “why do they get to play when I have to work” issue out of the way, it’s time to have a conversation with your husband about the amount of financial support he is prepared to provide. You do not specify how your in-laws incurred their debts; was it simply overspending, or were some of those funds put toward your husband’s education? Did your in-laws help your husband rent his first apartment? Did they support him as he built his career? Did they have an unexpected medical crisis that drained their savings and, perhaps, incentivized them to pursue their current travel goals?
Your husband feels financially responsible for his parents, which is not a terrible thing. You should ask him to tell you more about his family and their financial story, if you do not already understand why he wants to take on this responsibility. You should also talk about the difference between “financial responsibility” and “paying for everything” because there might be ways to provide support that still allow your in-laws to carry the bulk of their own expenses. (You’ll probably want to study up on Medicare and Medicaid, for example.) You might also want to consider your own parents’ financial needs, and ask yourself whether you might be able to help both sides of the family.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly: Start talking to your husband, right now, about what you’re going to say when your in-laws ask to live with you. Given the current housing market, it’s a much more likely scenario than the one in which they travel the world.
My husband has two kids from a previous marriage. I don’t have kids, and I bought the house we live in before we got married. I pay the mortgage and he gives me money for utilities. Is that okay? Should he contribute more than 50 percent for groceries?
The amount of money your husband puts toward groceries — even during a period of inflation, when grocery prices are higher than anticipated — is not half as important as the legal issues surrounding his residence in your home.
A lot of this depends on whether you live in a community property state, and the rest depends on your state’s tenancy laws, and some of it may depend on the mortgage and title documents associated with your home. I suggest talking to a lawyer to ensure that you and your husband are both completely aware of your rights and responsibilities, since the internet is not likely to provide the depth of insight you might need.
Here are the questions you and your husband may need to answer, both in terms of your relationship and in terms of your living situation:
- Is your husband legally building equity in the home? (Does he want to build equity in the home?) (Do you want him to build equity in the home?)
- Are his children legally entitled to inherit the home? (Does he want his children to inherit the home?) (Do you want his children to inherit the home?)
- Is your husband legally considered your tenant? (Does he want to be your tenant?) (Do you want him to be your tenant?)
Get those taken care of and then you can start talking about whether you’re going to keep your finances separate and split household expenses proportionally or whether you’re going to pool your resources and pay all of your expenses together.
Here’s my advice on handling that conversation, when you’re ready.
Israel’s evacuation order is creating chaos in Gaza. A ground invasion will be worse.
An airstrike on Friday hit a convoy of Palestinians, killing at least 12, including women and young children, as they tried to flee northern Gaza at the direction of the Israel Defense Forces, ahead of a presumed ground operation in the region. Hamas has blamed the IDF for the strike, which occurred on an evacuation route the military deemed safe.
The strike came hours after the IDF had given the approximately 1.1 million people of northern Gaza 24 hours to evacuate the region. The United Nations said the operation would have dire humanitarian consequences in a part of the world that had already been facing humanitarian disaster before Israel declared it would retaliate for the Hamas attacks on October 7.
The situation on the ground in Gaza is “fast becoming untenable,” Martin Griffiths, the UN humanitarian aid chief, said in a statement Saturday. On Monday, the Israeli government shut off Gaza’s access to water, electricity, and fuel as part of its declared siege of the region. Gaza has been under blockade by both Israel and Egypt since 2007, and access to basic goods, including food and medicine, is available only via the UN and nongovernmental organizations.
“I fear that the worst is yet to come,” Griffiths added.
Since Hamas, the militant Islamic group that has controlled Gaza since 2007, launched an unprecedented and brutal attack against Israel that killed at least 1,300 people a week ago, the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has run multiple sorties over Gaza, dropping at least 6,000 munitions. Those operations have so far killed more than 1,500 Palestinians, including civilians.
Though US officials have reportedly begun to caution Israel to minimize civilian deaths during upcoming operations, Gazans are already vulnerable; roads damaged from the current and previous airstrikes make evacuation slow and dangerous, and many buildings cannot withstand such bombardment because they’ve been affected by previous airstrikes and there’s no capacity to repair them.
Supplies like food, fuel, medicine, and clean water are already running critically low in the region, and as of yet there is no humanitarian corridor to get supplies into Gaza — or get people out. US officials are working with Egyptian authorities to open up such a route so that the UN can get supplies into Gaza.
A decade and a half of conflict has already brought Gaza to its knees
Egypt and Israel closed their borders with Gaza after Hamas took control of the territory in 2007, following a brief civil war between Hamas forces and factions loyal to Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas, who oversees the West Bank. Both Egypt and Israel imposed the blockade because they feared Hamas would bring further instability to their backyard due to the group’s ties to Iran and to Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.
As of 2017, the poverty rate in Gaza was 53 percent and a third of people lived in extreme poverty, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Central Statistics; 63 percent of people in Gaza are food-insecure, according to current statistics from the World Food Programme. Since 2017, the price of basic necessities has increased precipitously due, in part, to global inflation in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Most of Gaza’s water is undrinkable, and low-level cholera outbreaks are common; a significant portion of the region’s infrastructure has been decimated by previous airstrikes, making crushing injuries and deaths common during conflict, Helen Ottens-Patterson, Médecins Sans Frontieres’ former head of mission in Gaza, told Vox in an interview.
More than 2 million Gazans live in a strip of land the size of Philadelphia, making it one of the most densely populated places on the planet, which increases the possibility of hitting civilians during military operations. And about 42.5 percent of the population is under the age of 14, making childhood casualties common in times of conflict.
“Today, all of the patients we received at our clinic in Gaza City were children between 10 and 14,” Ayman Al-Djaroucha, MSF deputy project coordinator in Gaza, said in a Wednesday email statement. “This is because the majority of the injured in Gaza are women and children, since they are the ones who are most often in the houses that get destroyed in the airstrikes.”
Though Israeli military policy is to use disproportionate force in Gaza as a deterrent strategy, that has so far failed to enact durable security, limit Hamas’s ability to strike Israel, or allow space in Israeli politics for any sort of political negotiation that could lead to a more peaceful future.
It has also resulted in devastating civilian losses on the Palestinian side; in 2014, simmering conflict in Gaza exploded into a major Hamas rocket offensive into Israel, which responded with a 19-day ground invasion. Though there was an Egypt-mediated ceasefire in August of that year, 2,251 Palestinians — including 1,462 civilians — and 73 Israelis, mostly soldiers, were killed in the fighting, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
Gazans are running out of supplies — and time
By Tuesday, an MSF hospital in northern Gaza had used three weeks’ worth of supplies, Ottens-Patterson told Vox. Whatever buffer supply of fuel, food, medication, and medical supplies hospitals had prior to October 7 is quickly dwindling. “You can imagine within a month, they’re going to be running on empty — or within an even shorter space of time,” she said.
Now, with people evacuating to the south, those problems compound. There’s no way to safely evacuate patients from hospitals to the south; roads damaged by this and previous conflicts make that challenging. Multiple ambulances and medics have also been hit by airstrikes in the past week.
Southern Gaza also has only about half the number of hospitals as the north, so even patients who do get evacuated can’t find a bed, Zaher Sahloul, the head of MedGlobal, a medical NGO that operates in crisis zones, told Vox in an interview.
“Southern Gaza doesn’t have the infrastructure, the food, the capacity, to have all of these people,” he said. “So it’s going to create a huge humanitarian crisis in southern Gaza, where you will have people dying of dehydration, [disease] outbreaks — the water is not clean — malnutrition, besides, of course, injuries from bombings. It’s a near-impossible situation.”
But moving people to Egypt for treatment is complicated, too — partly because Egypt isn’t allowing it right now. Furthermore, Sahloul said, “We’re against that as an international organization. We’re against evacuating people from their homeland [so they become] refugees.”
Egypt is unwilling to host Palestinian refugees as of now because of internal pressures and because it doesn’t wish to get sucked into the war. But there’s also the fact that many Palestinians have been expelled from their homes since the Nakba in 1948. Now, as then, leaving could mean never coming back.
As the war progresses, UN experts, as well as other advocates and some politicians, have indicated that Israel’s actions amount to collective punishment of all Gazans for the acts of the militant group that controls it
Gazans “have lived under unlawful blockade for 16 years, and already gone through five major brutal wars, which remain unaccounted for,” UN experts said in a statement Thursday. “This amounts to collective punishment. There is no justification for violence that indiscriminately targets innocent civilians, whether by Hamas or Israeli forces. This is absolutely prohibited under international law and amounts to a war crime.”
Meanwhile, an IDF ground invasion seems imminent; Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu visited IDF troops at the border with Gaza Saturday, Reuters reported, asking if they were “ready for the next stage.” Without elaborating, Netanyahu told the soldiers that “the next stage is coming.”