The fear of bed bugs has come to Asia, and the pest controllers are here for it

It’s a good time to be a professional insect killer in Asia.

Fears of major bed bug outbreaks have been palpable for weeks across the Asia-Pacific region, heightened by breathless news media coverage of an outbreak in France earlier this year and a smaller, more recent outbreak in South Korea. These cases, along with an overall increase in travel after the pandemic, have fueled fears — based on reality — that airline passengers will inadvertently spark outbreaks in other places.

In Hong Kong, there have been recent reports of a sighting of bed bugs at an airport train led to several days of feverish reporting. And in Seoul, teams of workers in white hazmat suits have spread through an airport looking for possible pests.

So far this fall, no major bed bug outbreaks have been reported in Asia, but some residents and municipalities are already hiring pest control companies or purchasing pest control supplies with abandon.

The exterminators say they are fine with that.

“Bed bugs have always been around,” but consumer interest in pest control has increased recently due to news media coverage, said Darian Ee, director of Ikari, a pest control company in Singapore that has seen a 10 to 15 percent increase knows. revival in sales since the outbreak in France. “It’s more top-of-mind.”

Bedbug mania is of course not new and unique to Asia. The blood-sucking pests are a common feature of urban life around the world, including in New York City. But if Paris is the unofficial world capital of bedbug fear (perhaps followed by… London), then Asian megacities such as Seoul, Hong Kong and Singapore are quickly rising in the rankings.

In South Korea, where only a handful of cases have been reported in the past decade, recent reports have put the public and news media on high alert. So far, there are at least thirteen confirmed cases and several dozen suspected cases nationwide. That was enough for the government to launch a four-week period prevention and disinfection campaign in dormitories, buses, trains and other public places.

“Public concern is inevitable as more and more reports come in,” said Park Ku-yeon, the campaign manager. told other officials recently.

Another inevitability: profit for exterminators. Bloomberg News reported this month that the stock prices of several South Korean pest control companies had risen by 30 percent or more after news reports about bed bugs. Yonhap, a South Korean news agency, reported that sales of bedbug insecticides at an online shopping center increased by more than 800 percent in the first week of November compared to the same period last year.

As normal travel resumes after the pandemic, it is inevitable that international travelers will contribute to the spread of bed bugs around the world, said Chow-Yang Lee, professor of urban entomology at the University of California, Riverside. He said he had “no doubt” there would be an increase in bedbug plagues in the Asia-Pacific, similar to those sweeping Europe.

“Imagine if someone checked into a bedbug-infested hotel in Bangkok, the bedbugs hitched a ride in the luggage, and then that person checked into another hotel in Singapore,” he said. “The insects are transported to the new location, leave the baggage behind and start the infestation in this new location.”

One of the most fearful places in the region is Hong Kong. The authorities divide bed bug warning leaflets to passengers at the international airport, and the Department of Food and Environmental Hygiene said in a statement this week that it is working to reduce “the potential for transmission of bed bugs from overseas to the local community.”

But a biology professor at a local university, Chiu Siu-wai, felt compelled to do so remind a local broadcaster It recently emerged that bed bugs, which thrive in the warm, dark corners that a subtropical region like Hong Kong has in abundance, are already the city’s “second most popular blood-sucking insect” after mosquitoes.

Someone has to kill them. Francisco Pazos, the director of NoBedBugs HK, said his turnover this month was more than double normal, with more than 400 jobs destroyed. He attributed the increase mainly to an increase in post-pandemic socializing, but also to anxiety.

“More people in Hong Kong are panicking after seeing the news reports,” he said.

A similar dynamic is playing out in Taiwan, where the Ministry of the Environment warned residents this week to look for bedbugs in second-hand furniture and check their suitcases after returning from international travel.

Lin Chien-liang, spokesman for Johnson Group, a pest control company in New Taipei City, said its sales have doubled since the summer. He said this was partly because the island lifted the last of its Covid-era travel restrictions in October 2022.

But not completely: some people are just anxious. Mr Lin said customers sometimes requested repeat eradication even after a first attempt had completely eliminated bedbugs in their home.

“Even though we assure them that everything is being disinfected, some people still get scared,” he said. Each session costs more than $1,000, and sometimes more than $2,000.

Professor Lee said there has been a global resurgence of bedbugs that started in Europe about 25 years ago and gradually spread to the United States and Asia.

One of the two common species of bed bugs tends to be more common in temperate regions, while the other prefers tropical and subtropical species, he said. But as indoor environments become more uniform, thanks in part to climate control systems, there are more locations where both species thrive.

Another trend is that bed bugs are becoming increasingly resistant to certain types of insecticides – a problem that has been documented in Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and other countries.

The best way to kill insecticide-resistant bed bugs is through extreme heat, Professor Lee said. But because heat methods can be ten times or more expensive, many pest control operators continue to use insecticides.

Mr Ee in Singapore said that although he sometimes used heat-based methods, his pesticide mixtures were still effective because they had industrial strength.

“I can’t say the same about the off-the-shelf insecticides and everything people buy on the Internet,” he said.