Govanhill residents are resigned to life with bed bugs

● Academic says some ‘reluctantly’ accept insects being in the home

Residents of a Glasgow community are resigned to living side by side with bed bugs, an academic has claimed.

Dr Heather Lynch, a lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian University, said some people in Govanhill, on the city’s south side, feel they simply have to accept the insects being in their homes.

Writing for academic website The Conversation, Dr Lynch said some residents had decided the best response was to learn to live “side-by-side” with the insects and adapt.

She said: “The experience of people in Govanhill, a locality just south of Glasgow city centre, is that once these insects become endemic they are effectively impossible to remove.”

Dr Lynch said the area reflected the challenges and opportunities of 21st century Europe.

“Govanhill has become renowned in recent years for poor housing, poverty and crime, as well as for artists and vibrant community activists,” she said. “And it faces major environmental issues, with constant rubbish dumping and infestations of bed bugs.”

The article said 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.

0 Bed bugs can be very difficult to eradicate, in part because they can lie dormant for long periods of time

But now researchers are claiming the area has experienced “a significant rise” in bedbugs similar to parts of New York, Australia, China and France.

Govanhill has attracted funding worth millions of pounds, including a dedicated pest control unit to deal with “hundreds of cases” of bed bugs every year.

But Dr Lynch warned there were few signs of this tackling the problem because bed bugs could lie dormant for extenthe sive periods. She described how one resident felt ashamed and horrified by the bugs, but eventually accepted “reluctantly” they may be the norm.

Dr Lynch found the residents who had learned to live with the bed bugs may be ahead of curve as they were adapting to their environments rather than using environmentally harmful products.

The academic said the problem may be too big to solve despite efforts from Glasgow City Council.