If you think about this problem long enough, you think about how long it will take for bed bugs to decline in our society once more. And would that be with or without the introduction of an effective and widely-deployable control method?
Right. Nonetheless, we rather obsessively collect whatever hard-to-interpret clues we find.
No longer to be found in trains
In a WHO document dated 16 July 1959(1), a report on a visit to Eastern Europe, there is this.
Poland:
Bed-bugs are no longer to be found in trains, but they are still common in old buildings. Although no special control is carried out against them, Bojanowska reports that there is evidence of DDT-resistance in several places.
Hungary:
[Dr Privora] suspects DDT-resistance in some populations of bed-bugs and wishes to test for it; DDT-resistant bed-bugs evidently exist in Hungary.
Romania:
Bed-bugs are now fast disappearing in Romania, and no resistance is suspected.
Happy Romania.
Cities A and C
No one is capable of making me unhappy like the venerable J.R. Busvine.
Here in 1964(2)—in a section on indoor insect pests of public health importance—he begins, as elsewhere, with his depressing point about slums:
Many years ago, J. W. Munro pointed out that Cimex lectularius L. was not only a common feature of slum dwellings but even a cause of slums; for when the insect became firmly established in terraced houses, the better tenants moved away and the character of the neighbourhood declined. In 1934, a Ministry of Health Committee summarized information on eradication of bugs and a committee of the Medical Research Council was formed to promote research on the matter. Particularly relevant was the thorough ecological study of Johnson (1942).
Then he describes the historical progression of the incidence of certain pests in a nice table that omits the names of the cities:
Data on various infestations from British cities 1934-1960
City C is really interesting. From 367 houses treated in 1947 to 142 in 1957. But wait, the number goes back up to 340 in 1960!
City A is, I suspect, what Clive Boase was telling us about: a decline before the war, from a 10.7% infestation rate in 1934 to 5.2% in 1937. (Yes, I suppose we could have asked, but it’s much more interesting to find stuff on our own six months later.) By the way, in the table, if it’s unclear, bugs stands for bed bugs.
This also gives us context for the Finland numbers in 1968. There an eastern province had a 6.3% infestation rate. Those are not, it would appear from this history, trivial numbers.
It is very clear to us that bed bugs have cycled up and down, cropping up in years and places where by all rights they should have been gone. We will probably take a closer look at this history, before our objectives here at New York vs Bed Bugs are finally reached.
- (1) Brown, A.W.A. (1959) Report on a visit to Eastern European countries. World Health Organization. WHO/Insecticides/99. 16 July 1959.
- (2) Busvine, J.R. (1964) Medical Entomology in Britain. Annals of Applied Biology. 53:2. 190-199. doi:10.1111/j.1744-7348.1964.tb03794.x
These pages may be of related interest:
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