Bitten by the bug

‘Good night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ my mother used to say when she tucked me in at night, which may be why, like the author of this book, I never thought bedbugs were real. ‘Bedbugs? Are you crazy? That’s not even a real thing,’ Brooke Borel told her father (a pathologist who specialises in skin conditions). But as Mr Borel told his disbelieving daughter, bedbugs are real all right. They even have a fancy Latin name: Cimex lectularius. So, having been bitten to buggery (moral: never share a flat with someone who bought a used futon off the internet) Brooke Borel did what virtually every journalist ends up doing, eventually, and wrote a book about her misfortunes.

The result is a diverting study of a creature that’s been around a lot longer than we have, and will probably still be around long after we’ve all snuffed it. Bedbugs were biting humans long before humans invented beds, but when we invented modern pesticides, it looked like we had the blighters beat. After the second world war, we smothered everything with dichloro-diphenyltrichloroethane (DDT to you and me), naively believing it would finish off bedbugs for good.

However, creepy-crawlies adapt much faster than we do (shorter generations mean speedier mutations) and now bedbugs are back. All our attempts to eradicate them have merely bred better bugs. And by the time we’d worked out that DDT wasn’t terribly good for us either, it was already in the food chain, even in human breast milk. ‘The official stance of the US government and many other nations is that DDT is probably, but not definitely, carcinogenic,’ reports Borel. Whoops.