Bed bugs used to be a part of eveyone's daily life before the Second World War - or should that be 'a part of everyone's nocturnal life'? For hundreds of years, people merely grinned and bore it; they had to because there were no effectual methods of getting rid of them.
They lived in the stored clothes, the furniture, the bedding and the houses of the rich and poor alike and because houses were located so close together, families were larger and people were in and out of each others houses, you could not eradicate a bed bug infestation for long.
Then came the bombing of European cities in the Second World War 1939-1945 and numerous inner cities were unsafe, so the authorities decided to take the opportunity to level the inner city slums and start again. An equivalent programme was started in America, but not because of devastation.
The authorities pulled down hundreds of millions of houses and made billions of rats, mice, bed bugs, fleas and other nasties homeless. In fact, rat poison and a new miracle insecticide, DDT, were used widely in the clean up. By the end of the Forties or during the Fifties, bed bugs were just about eliminated from the Western World.
The Baby Boomer generation was the first one never to have been bothered by bed bugs. This happy situation lasted until the mid-Nineties, when increased long haul travel and increased immigration permitted bed bugs to hitch lifts back to the West. These unwelcome hitch hikers mostly returned on garments that had been packed away in suitcases.
And so here we are today, in a state of affairs where the West's major inner cities have a bed bug problem of epidemic proportions. Bed bugs are being passed around from person to person on all forms of public transport but particularly buses, trains and taxis and anywhere where individuals congregate, but particularly hotels, cinemas and waiting rooms.
So, here are a few tips on how to avoid infesting your home with bed bugs. If you stay in hotels a couple of nights or one night at a time, just unpack what you require to at any one time. In other words, live out of your suitcase.
If you are on a longer vacation, by all means, unpack everything, but keep your suitcase closed and have all your clothes boil washed, dry cleaned or tumble-dried on 'HOT' before you repack them to go home.
If this cannot be done because of the sort of cloth, examine all the seams, hems, pockets, cuffs and collars and blow them with the hair-dryer on 'HOT.' The hair-dryer is not anywhere near as effective, but all stages of a bed bug's life cycle are killed by seven minutes exposure to temperatures above 45C or 115F.
If you cannot heat-treat your clothing before you leave the hotel, seal them up in plastic bags and treat them when you arrive home - preferably in a laundrette or dry cleaners.
What do you do about your overcoat, if you mingle with others every day on the bus or at work? This is a tough one. Bed bugs are resilient to all forms of insect killer, which is why we are experiencing this epidemic, so you will literally have to inspect your overcoat each time you come home or buy one that you can put in the tumble-dryer each night.
One bed bug can lay 300 eggs and last for a year without feeding, so you cannot know that you have not got bed bugs, you can just say that you have not seen any - yet.
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Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on a number of topics, but is now concerned with the
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