Why Bed Bug Cases Are Rising

First, the myth

It Is Not About Cleanliness

Worth getting out of the way immediately, because it is the reason people delay ringing for weeks: bed bugs have nothing to do with how clean a home is. They feed on people. A spotless house with a person asleep in it is exactly as attractive as any other.

What a cluttered room does is give them more places to hide, which makes treatment harder. That is a practical point about the job, not a judgement about the household, and the embarrassment is the single biggest reason a small problem becomes a three-room one.

Photographs on this page are for illustration purposes only.

The four causes

Travel, Furniture, Resistance, Buildings

Travel. Bed bugs move in luggage. As travel volumes recovered and kept climbing, so did the number of bugs arriving in suitcases. Milton Keynes has a lot of people who commute, travel for work and stay in hotels, and a case brought back from a trip is the commonest single origin we see.

Second-hand furniture. Marketplace selling, upcycling and the reuse of beds, sofas and headboards have all grown. A second-hand mattress or upholstered headboard is the highest-risk item there is, and a bed frame with joints and screw holes is not far behind.

Insecticide resistance. This is the real technical driver. Bed bug populations worldwide have developed substantial resistance to pyrethroid insecticides, which are the active ingredients in most products sold to the public. A shop spray that would have worked twenty years ago often now irritates and disperses rather than kills — which moves the problem into the next room instead of solving it.

Shared buildings. More people live in flats, HMOs and converted houses than a generation ago. Bed bugs move along service voids, under skirtings and through shared walls, so a problem in one unit is a problem the building has.

What it means for treatment

Resistance Is Why the Method Changed

The resistance point is the one that changes what you should actually do.

It is why professional treatment does not simply mean a stronger version of what you can buy. It means a combination — appropriate products used where the bugs actually harbour, and heat, which nothing can be resistant to because it is physics rather than chemistry. Heat treatment raises the whole room to a temperature that kills every life stage including eggs, held long enough to reach into furniture and voids.

It is also why one visit is rarely the whole job. Eggs are the difficulty: they are laid in seams and cracks, they are well protected, and a second visit timed to catch what hatches is part of doing it properly rather than an upsell.

What to do

Before You Move Anything

The instinct is to strip the room and start carrying things out. Resist it — moving an infested mattress through a house is how a one-room problem becomes a three-room problem.

• Photograph what you have found, in place. The mattress seam and the bed frame joints are the first two places to look.
• Leave the bedding, but stop sleeping elsewhere in the house. Moving to the sofa moves them to the sofa.
• Do not spray. A shop product most likely disperses them.
• Bag anything you do take out of the room, in the room.
• If you are in a flat or an HMO, tell the landlord or managing agent straight away, because the treatment may need to cover more than your unit.

Short answers

Questions, Briefly

Where to go next

The Pages That Answer This