They virtually disappeared until about three years ago, when Baker started getting so many inquiries about the pests that he dusted off his grandfather’s original product labels and EPA registrations for JT Eaton’s Kills Bedbugs spray.
It’s a best-seller again.
“On the retail side, it’s now over 50 percent of our business,” Baker said. “This is the new termite for the industry; everyone is trying to come up with a cure.”
Experts are baffled by the resurgence of the tiny reddish-brown insects that feed off human and animal blood, their bites often leaving red welts. Entomologists say the pests are appearing on a scale not seen since before World War II and cite increases in global travel and the elimination of certain chemicals, like DDT, that were once used to treat bedbugs, as possible factors contributing to the upsurge. The Environmental Protection Agency even hosted its first bedbug summit in April.
“We’re miles away from understanding how these bedbugs function,” said Stephen Kells, a bedbug researcher at the University of Minnesota, who addressed the annual convention of the New Jersey Pest Management Association on Thursday at Rutgers University.
“Every month, I go into the lab and I see something new,” Kells told the gathering of pest control experts. “This is incredible, that we do not know that much.”
Bedbugs were a hot topic at the convention, with exhibitors displaying chemical sprays and green alternatives such as thermal heat, extreme cold, or mattress wraps to control infestations that can easily return, even after treatments.
The resurgence has been both a boon to and a bane of the $5.5 billion pest control industry, with many companies saying they are exasperated by the time and effort – for minimal return – that bedbug eradication requires, the refusal of the EPA to approve chemical cures that may have worked in the past, or the fact that there is no way to guarantee to customers that the pests won’t return.
Bedbug infestations – recently reported in a movie theater in New York City’s Times Square and hotels and apartments across the nation – has coincided with a downturn in termite infestations, once the backbone of the industry.
“It’s just phenomenal, it’s taken over what was the biggest part of the industry,” said Vince LaMantia of Pest-Heat Thermal Management. “But people are frustrated with these chemical companies coming over and over to do the job.”
The EPA has warned consumers not to treat the problem on their own, or to use outdoor pesticides.