LET BED BUGS BITE
Residents resigned to living with insects
RESIDENTS of a Scottish community are resigned to living side by side with bed bugs, according to an academic.
Dr Heather Lynch, a lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, says some people in Govanhill on the south side of Glasgow have decided they’ll just have to accept the insects.
Writing in The Conversation, which uses research backed by academics, Dr Lynch said some residents had taken the view that the best response is to learn to live with the bugs and adapt.
She said: “The experience in Govanhill is that once they become endemic they are effectively impossible to remove.” The article says that in the early 1900s, the world took its lead from the “Glasgow system,” which educated tenants about cleanliness and bed bug behaviour. This included regular visits from the public health department.
But now the area has seen “a significant rise” in bed bugs.
Govanhill, it says, has attracted funding worth millions, including a dedicated pest control unit to deal with “hundreds of cases” every year. Glasgow City Council said they have taken a “dual approach” to the issue in Govanhill. “We are responding to individual calls about infestations in the area and that has led to 300 treatments being undertaken in the past six months,” a spokesman said. “But we have also been proactively working on whole block treatments. “Our objective is to see all such pests eradicated from Govanhill in the longer term.” The academic, however, warned that there are few signs of this tackling the problem, because bed bugs can lie dormant for long periods.
Dr Lynch described how one resident felt ashamed of the bugs, but eventually accepted that they may be the norm.
She concluded that the residents who have learned to live with the bed bugs may be ahead of the curve as they are adapting to their environments, rather than using environmentally harmful products.
She said: “Many people who have come to terms with the fact you can’t beat bugs resign themselves to living with them instead.”