It's Back To School Time for Bed Bugs

Laptops, textbooks and new jeans are among the must-haves for college students heading back to campus, but the most common back-to-school item may well be the blood-sucking bedbug.

Wednesday September 03 2008 @ 03:30 PM Source:MSNBC

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by Michael Inbar

Laptops, textbooks and new jeans are among the must-haves for college students heading back to campus, but the most common back-to-school item may well be the blood-sucking bedbug. Colleges around the U.S. are reporting a scourge of the little buggers infesting dormitories, and the problem only gets worse when they hitchhike on their coed hosts going from room to room.

“U.S. college campuses are really the perfect setting,” noted entomologist Richard Cooper told Matt Lauer on TODAY Friday. “We have large numbers of students coming from all over the country and, in fact, all over the world every semester, and it’s inevitable that somebody is going to bring bugs with them. And once the bugs are introduced, they can rapidly spread because of all the interactions students have visiting each other’s rooms.”

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