The Curious World of Bedbug Research

Allen Brisson-Smith for The New York Times THE ICK FACTOR The lab of Stephen A. Kells, a University of Minnesota entomologist. Bedbugs are not known to transmit disease.

Around the country, the bedbugs are biting again, although nobody really seems to know why, reports Donald McNeil in Tuesday’s Science Times. He writes:

In comparison to other insects that bite man, or even only walk across man’s food, nibble man’s crops or bite man’s farm animals, very little is known about the creature whose Latin name means — go figure — “bug of the bed.” Only a handful of entomologists specialize in it, and until recently it has been low on the government’s research agenda because it does not transmit disease. … Ask any expert why the bugs disappeared for 40 years, why they came roaring back in the late 1990s, even why they don’t spread disease, and you hear one answer: “Good question.”

To learn more about bedbugs, read the full story, “They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists,” and then please join the discussion below.