Photo of a bed bug from WikipediaEmployees of the D.C. Department of Health recently made an ungainly discovery at their North Capitol Street office. They found a bed bug, WTOP reports. A single, bed bug, that is. But that’s OK, because bedbugs are ill-suited toward office environments with plenty of light and business.
Unfortunately for the District, office buildings aren’t the only place where bed bug sightings are on the rise. WTOP reports that the bedbug population is spreading again, now into single-family homes, according to Gerard Brown, who runs the the Health Department’s Vector and Rodent Control program. “Now bed bugs are starting to spread in single family homes. First it was hotels, then it started spreading to apartment buildings and then homeless shelters and now we get calls from private homes,” he told the radio station.
In recent years, we’ve reported on bed bug sightings at hospitals, university dormitories and even the hotel housing the Conservative Political Action Conference.
But now those nighttime creepy-crawlies are being spotted inside single-unit dwellings, and the cost of extermination could run as high as $2,000. Bed bugs don’t carry disease, but they are nasty parasites that feed on human blood and can cause large rashes. And, Brown says, they aren’t a low-rent problem. The bugs have been spotted in well-off homes, too. “A bed bug can pop up anywhere,” Brown told WTOP.
