the u.s. as having a stingy where welfare state some countries have had premature welfare states like argentina and other latin american countries kind of like time off from the world economy as a consequence of that. it's the american experience other countries will emulate but i don't think that for better or ill the social entitlement state is going to be foremost among these. >> thank you all very much and thanks to the panel. [applause]

is next tbf provides a history of the bad blood a species that may be more than 250000-years-old. and all conversations and audible conversations all right.

good evening everyone. thanks for making it. we are very happy to welcome brooke borel tonight. [applause] she's a science writer and journalist and contributing editor to popular science where she authors the blog and tonight she will be reading from and discussing her new book infested hell the bed bug infiltrated our bedrooms and took over the world. it came out from the university of chicago press and received great feedback already. for example marlene of "the new york times" book review wrote a book about bed bugs is necessity about everything. she takes us through this microcosm of the universe as she goes to the through the culture and biology of the research underscores. they gave a favorable review for anyone that wants to replace their fear with knowledge.

we do have c-span for booktv. we are very happy to have them. so during the q-and-a we are going to have a microphone being passed around to whoever has the questions or if you have a question wait for the microphone to give to you. without further ado, please welcome brooke borel. [applause] this is my first reading so i'm both excited and a little terrified. i wanted to do an icebreaker in the beginning. i'm going to show you the trailer which launched this week. it gets a little racy so if you don't want to see anything about bed bug sex you might want to cover your eyes and ears for that first. >> study crazy bedbugs act swiftly. number one come it might be trendy but they are actually so

hundreds of millennia ago so stop acting like your infestation is the next case. number two, henry miller loved dirty words like [inaudible] and bed bugs. they appear in seven of the most famous novels. number three during the vietnam war the army tried to build a detector to use bed bugs to snuff out enemies. it didn't work. number four, two words to her manic insemination it's how bed bugs say i love you. the male climbs on top of the female and stabs her in the belly with his needle like penis and ejaculates in her belly. for bedbugs it is a family affair literally. a single female can have an entire infestation. i will just let that sink in. fact number six, bed bugs are crazy. how crazy we tried killing them off from everything like gunpowder and baseball bats and

blowtorches and they still come back. yes, yours too. i'm talking to you. once more, check out the book how they infiltrated the bedrooms and took over with additional support from the foundation. thank you for staying collective putting that together. there are a lot of stories in this book and generally some of them are funny like an animation and some of them are really weird like an animation. i'm going to do is tell you a little bit about why i wrote this book. then we can open up to q-and-a

and you can ask anything. so i'm going to read a bit from the prologue. i watched my dr. take a pen and trace the permit or spread around the center of my calf. he told me if it extends beyond this line go back to the emergency room. we blame them but there were others. within the lyrics to extinguished the infection from scratch into much which is kind of interesting and describe steroids for the swelling of the other reaction the disease was negative and although the pills made my red streaks disappear, the relief was not to last. they always returned after i've slept in my bed to read whatever was lurking in my room at night was still there. so as you can probably guess what was there was bedbugs.

i was incredibly shocked to find this out but it never occurred to me that was an actual species. i'd never heard of anyone getting them before. they were not in the news very much at this point. has anyone here had bed bugs? is there anyone that has a friend that has had the bed bugs? [laughter] so as you either even know your soul for you for it from your friends, they can be really difficult to deal with emotionally. physically you have to go through bagging backing up of your clothing and laundries and it's emotionally taxing to know that there is something in your bed biting you. it feels invasive so i went through all that but i thought that it was a very strange thing that happened to me until 2009 when i got them twice again in the same summer. one actually was at my now husband's apartment and the other was at my apartment communities to lovingly joke whether i got them from him or

maybe from my roommate who bought a craigslist futon but i had to deal with them twice in one summer area and that was painful. then not long after that, i was seeing them in the news all the time in 60 probably work him into mac. they were in the empire state building, victoria's secret. all these lawsuits were happening. i was working as a journalist and i wanted to write about bed bugs because i had been. so this is what happened when i started doing that. this is also when i started getting the idea to the book. in the interviews i learned that the bedbugs that most people thought we conquered after world war ii at the modern pesticide was an ancient past. they look at our ancestors at least since the ruling of egypt and possibly much longer stretching back before humans even existed when the bugs made a living on the blood of bats and are close relatives who occasionally is optional for in the same case. from there, they were through history solidifying the bond once we move to permanent camps and cities and conquering the

world as tiny bloodsucking colonists. this made it feel increasingly odd that i've grown up with no knowledge. i realized that it was a strange thought of children not knowing the cockroach by the end or the fly and i begin to understand what is the most intriguing aspect of the story is a return to the ecological stasis so that led me to this project and i learned as i eluded to in the animation at the beginning is that they've actually been around for a very long time may be stretching back to 250,000 years ago also there's a lot more research to pinpoint that. regardless, they've been around a long time and they came out with a relative of ours or some other thing that we interacted with and then they radiated throughout the world from that area and you can trace them through the historical documents and religious text and poetry for one of the historical references radiating throughout

the world eventually going across the atlantic and the americas and ending up here. so, sorry i know it's kind of gross. i wanted to show you to show a full body of the bedbugs. this is also bedbugs having sex because everybody wants to know about them having sex so i figured why not get this out of the way. as we showed him the video it was censored out the male bedbug is on top come and it might be harder to see that it looks like a stinger or something comes out and that is the bedbugs penis and he's about to stab her in the gut. i also wanted to show you this so you could see actually what a bedbug looks like on the next slide. so, this is the oldest known physical evidence of a bedbug. this was discovered in the late '90s and it has an archaeological site in egypt. it's really dry and they found a bunch of insect remains that for thousands of but for thousands of-years-old and this is what was probably the sleeping chambers of the team builders that were building these tombs. and you can see just like in the last picture the legs are gone

and the head is gone and you can see the same body shape and the abdomen. so this is just additional evidence that the bedbug has been around for a very, very long time. so, through all this time we were used to dealing with bedbugs and some people would even be engaged in these things when they went to sleep. i don't know why - i don't believe it is a staged photograph or what because i can't imagine this image is from 1907. i don't know why someone would just set this up for a family photo but this is an image that refers to the hunting. people would actually go through their bedding and look for lice and other things to kick them out of bed so they could get a good night's sleep. and also, throughout history just like we try to do now, we try to kill bedbugs because we didn't like them anymore then and we do now. we would go to really incredibly great lengths to do that. as you know this is an image from the 1940s with a gas mask

on. it's a little hard to see that he - their drawers pulled out in the back and what he is doing is opening the canister at the bottom and that's what develop a structure. we are willing to risk health and life to actually get rid of the bedbugs. this is a real ad i'd have to doublecheck. they were so pervasive and so comment up until world war ii were just after world war ii the properties were discovered right around the start of the war and it was used to kill mosquitoes and lice and other disease carrying insects to protect the troops and civilians from getting sick and after the war

it was commercialized in the u.s. and other places and we loved it. ddt is good for me and i don't know, apple's, i don't know that is all about but it wasn't intended to be used necessarily on bedbugs but it was a broad spectrum and part of the reason it was effective is because it left a residue for a long time on the surfaces. they hide either during the day when - usually with your sleeping at night they come out at night. they will shift their schedule for people that are on a different schedule. if you are a nighttime worker they will come out during the day when your sleeping and high tonight but regardless they are hiding in the corner somewhere. so they helped because it would stay on the surface and they would walk through and pick it up and eventually die. that's also why it was a problem for environmental reasons because it is taking a lot longer than we really wanted it to. but as what is happening not the numbers down dead bedbugs reduced significantly and they never encountered anything like

this before. there was evidence building resistance to little pockets all over the world when it comes to evolution but overall the numbers were down and the little pockets started to emerge. so even though they were rare during the decades, they still existed. here's one example and this is one of the first i interviewed for the book and one of the reasons i thought they might have a hunch that there might be other interesting stories to include in the book and to pursue for the buck. for this is harland and in the 1970s he was working as an army and there are jobs to help protect the troops and different insects that might bother them or spread disease and in the 70s and new jersey there were

army recruits getting bitten by something at night and whose job to figure out what it was to get rid of it and as you can provide guest heat had never even though he had studied these kinds of insects generally he'd never seen them in real life before he had amazing images of them in books or under the microscope and this is pretty typical during that entire time but overall people that were studying as well as exterminators and the people that would normally run into these things they didn't even know it existed. he was so interested by these things even though it was his job to get rid of them he decided to take some home as you do. and he collected them into a jar and took them home and wanted to study them and they will need to blog so we have to keep them alive and as you might have guessed from the photo if you are looking closely the way he kept them alive is to feed them on his own arms and legs and he

took the jars of bedbugs and stretched old pairs of pantyhose across the tops of the key could put his arms and legs against them and although i think they did is get a couple of times he has since advanced a little bit better for them but this has been ever since for almost 40 years at this point. for reasons i won't get into at this point they actually ended up being important for the research. it was at the department of defense and the contractor if iran number correctly. i watched him attach a small box to his arm with a rubber band. he modified one of the sides into the box was originally intended as a prized client or middle but as he pointed out he

explained he used it for heating demonstrations. on the table to my right and a seal them in a more typical feeding he said he would fold each jar against his arm or leg to nourish more at once. i can see a handwritten label on one that attracted each mail. he had even more at his house. collectively they held around 6,000 jars and fed around once a month. by my calculations that meant he got at least 72,000 bedbugs writes every year. when i asked him if he ever had an allergic reaction he rolled up a pant leg and revealed a bright pink wild the size of a silver dollar. i leaned in for a closer look watching as they grew and turned red. what does that feel like, kind of a slight son prick. it feels like someone is taking a paintbrush, you know an artist paint brush and moving it

around. as he described it as the mechanics he gestured with his hands and clasped them in front of his hands. he crouched down and held out his arms and as you can see some of them are getting larger. this one over here is getting pretty big. then we go to the next. so, now they are back and before i show you that image, they are back and why is that? there are more reasons than what i'm about to tell you that the main reasons but the main reasons that they've been identified so far come first we have the ddt resistant bedbugs and still happening in the world in a time here come after world war ii. then in the 80s and 90s, it got a lot easier and cheaper to travel so that happened in the u.s. and in the 80s it got it came into effect anyways because of the deregulation of airlines and there were similar treaties that happened in the '90s so

you have a lot more people and travel goes up and there were more people flying so they get an opportunity to spread them wherever they were further around. there are also more people than ever before, 7 million more to spread these things are now. more about the living in cities than ever before and more than half the world's population live in the urban environment. they still can end up in the country and suburbs so don't get too excited if you're in the suburbs they can end up anywhere they do not discriminate but in the cities, they have a much easier time spreading from one family to another for example, you cannot see six you naturally think of an apartment building and imagine someone accidentally bringing bedbugs and it can spread more easily from one family to another. then the other part of that is the only ones that were allowed to use legally in the bedroom at this point we cannot use them anymore obviously you do this is a class that actually works in a very similar way and the nervous

system so all of those and their offspring that have the resistance also had cross resistance to the main chemical that we are able to use now and they also now have developed resistance. there are other ways to kill bedbugs but the chemical pesticides or one way that it's relatively cheap and easy so it is an attractive way for people and that is increasingly harder to do. so now that they are so common we are back in the poetry and art and music and this is actually from was off-broadway and then this is a bedbug and it's great actually the creator is here today which is great. this is one example of the bedbugs backout in a way to express themselves because the bedbugs are actually kind of terrifying to a lot of us.

i do have one other quick - we are on time one of the reading i'm going to do we talked earlier about the bugs originally living with the bats and some of them coming out with another early relative, so after that we eventually started building structures like apartments into churches and some of them started roosting so there's some science looking at the bedbugs and those sort of artificial routes and also looking at them living on people that have been separated and they are trying to figure out how they are related and this is in an attic outside of prologue that i went to. you can't see here but there are 1200 the chimney they would go up to the bats just like they come to us in the bedrooms and then it's too hot for them to stay so they go down and hide in

little holes in the chimney into the cement so this was counting that they back they were with another scientist to collect and they were looking at the dna and comparing it to how long ago they split off and we are announced if the research keeps going in the direction it might be an interesting model to study how the species sports to two different hosts. they will pisss on us, he warned me. the idea of emptying on me while i collect dead bugs seemed funny. within 24 hours later i was not so sure. to the next slide, is made up - yes, i'm not scared of animals and i was a little uneasy when i was there. they are harmless but they were

loud and smelly. so they were lining the apartment complex and there were people living downstairs and they didn't know they were there. they were were protected for reasons i won't get into and that's why there was a guy counting them. they start leaking a stench that made it hard for me to follow the commentary on the assignment. every minute or so they would swoop the length of the attic and i jumped with each pass and i know they wouldn't hurt me. they are interested in beatles, not people and are used to the occasional scientist claiming the stops to count them or to collect the bedbugs. i had plastic containers i was putting them into and does what it was like. it became a game.

whether it was dead or alive we needed more and we didn't have much time. in the beginning i couldn't recognize the signs of life after ten minutes i could see they emanated a vitality that i couldn't pinpoint even when they are frozen in place. they were brighter and more purposeful ready to take off running. once i caught caught it between my teasers the next step in the game was to collect it against my palms. i settled into a rhythm. i shouted when i captured and encouraged for my lost one and consumed the ground into the ground of my hiking boots. as my collection bottles filled up i rendered a passage from the biography were a poet is thrown into the security prison in philadelphia for dodging the world war ii draft and the poet spent his first evening with a rich man to catch the most

bedbugs. allegedly cheated by carrying them in half and stretching them so they count as double. a drop hit my head and then another. we can open up for questions. we will cast alito has a microphone around. what was the biggest myth that you uncovered through your research it seems to be something people commonly think? spinnaker there's a lot of them but won a lot of times people associate bedbugs with poor people and that is totally unfair. they do not discriminate. they will go to anyone. there are populations that are more vulnerable. it's much more expensive and it is physically demanding so you

can imagine certain groups of people might have more difficulty clearing that up and have a situation like it complex or public housing where there's a lot of people living there and maybe they are not as willing to spend the money and put in the effort to help. there are people that are more vulnerable. >> what did you do about how to protect yourself with which those of us that have experienced israeli horrific. what did you do differently and, i don't want an event. >> i don't either. i ended up getting them in a hotel room in chicago after i turned in the first draft of my book. who knows how good i am at searching. it's not a guarantee that you're going to find them that i felt

that she felt him a check around the mattress and check the headboard if i can. at one point i was taking headboards off the wall and i couldn't put one back. so i stopped doing after that. but i usually check around those areas with a flashlight if i have it. i'm usually looking for a bad infestation because that's - you are more likely to take them home. but even after i don't see anything i try to keep my luggage i don't put it on the bed i hang it in the closet and let it in the drawers and when i get home i will do laundry but even in chicago we got bedbugs and that's because they were hiding in the bed skirt and you can search everywhere sitting laundry when you come home on high temperatures in the more aware it is unlikely for example to get them from the movies but maybe don't carry a billion bags to the movies. don't take stuff around so much to places. >> for all the psychological trauma associated do they carry disease or what is the worst

physical reaction? spinnaker they are not known to carry disease. they've been researching this for many decades and they tumble kind of microbes and pathogens living on them that there isn't any evidence so far that they can transfer those to humans. that is something that is interesting and people have to look at. the worst there are physical symptoms and sometimes there are some pieces for older folks that had really bad infestation actually grew anemic. there are some people that had a really bad allergic reaction. it's not usual. they are blood blisters and shock and things like that. the definite thing is that it's really serious and there are - so there is one study that shows

even people that have no pre-existing issues with anxiety and insomnia this seems like one of those science confirms the obvious but people with other symptoms can get the symptoms after having bedbugs. but then for people that already have existing mental illness it can really exacerbate that. there are people committing suicide because specifically bedbugs they have a lot of other problems, but that is what tipped them over. there's even one woman that had a suicide note and mentioned that it will be quite serious for some people. >> [inaudible] >> i know they ate the beatles but there are other species of

bedbugs insects. >> are they the same [inaudible] spinet of the ones that bite you, i'm sorry i'm not sure if they are fruit eating acts or not. they eat lots of things but i'm not sure. i would have to look that up. >> it seems like they've been around for a long time that there's a lot of investment now in different studies of how to eradicate that. there are some that are good at eradicating. they are usually tests and invasive species or something that makes them especially hearty come and insects i think are especially also hard to eradicate. there's a lot of them. there's even one study on mosquitoes they try to eradicate

them from a small island off of italy and it just didn't happen. they evolved too quickly. it doesn't happen. more questions anyone? can you wait for the microphone? >> [inaudible] were during the wintertime during the warm winter? stanek a good question. there is anecdotal stories that they are more common in the summer in exterminators get more calls in the summer. they wouldn't be as active in the winters in places like new york.

there was a bit like $409 million that was just for professional treatment. it's described as the wild west and there's a lot of helpful people and shady people as you can imagine whether it is totally intentionally or not. >> why don't they trap these things and get them to collect and attract them? it is the same issue with moss. you can go back to the patterns

for almost since the beginning and find the bedbugs craps and we try to trap them in all kinds of ways over the centuries. it would take the beam leaves and put them under the bed and they would get stuck on them and sweep them up and burned down or whatever and now the research has gone back to look at that and they look under strong microscopes. they are trying to develop a trap that is the last i was heard it wasn't so easy to make a synthetic version of that. they are the market yet. with the traps even if you have the best it can attract them easily. it doesn't guarantee that they are totally going to get in the

traps that can be a good tool. it has the food in it and bedbugs eat bugs so it's a little tricky to attract an. that's why they have to work with pheromones and stuff like that. >> what is the timeline from one is it a day or a year? >> as you saw and in the animation and infestation can be sparked on genetic research on one e-mail so they are pretty good reading. at a briefing. not all species like to do that. it depends on how they are

comfortable and the temperature. >> how long can they go between the feedings? >> you always hear people say they can live for a year without eating and that probably isn't true in the situations where there is cold involved or metabolism slowed down but maybe it's a little bit longer and depends on the other environment so don't worry about that, that freaks people out. >> how often they do it do they attack domestic animals?

>> i've heard anecdotes but sometimes they will bite animals and there's always research that shows that they prefer human arms that are less degree so i don't know. they can feed on back. i think that probably in a bad infestation they probably would prefer to munch on you if they have a choice. don't get a hairless cat through the >> don't get one of those anyway. i'm sorry some of you probably have them. [laughter] let's say there were eggs how long could they survive? they usually hatch within a week or two i can't commend the exact number of days but i've heard some people try to tony they can last five years and i don't buy that i don't know if anyone has

researched that but it's like a thing that happens. it's not something that you can slow down that much. they can also be hard to kill. so that is a good question in that regard but probably not a really long time. they are reservoirs like i said earlier the multiunit dwellings and that kind of stuff is a hot spot. they are getting spread to places and continue to be a problem in certain spots.

if i or somebody as i know has been to one of those hot spots in the spread somewhere else why is there not a contagion sweeping the nation quickly. you can treat them pretty easily and if you have all this time and stuff you can drop down their numbers and get rid of them. so that has something to do with it. why they are not more widespread, i'm not sure. but the numbers are up as far as exterminator treatments go. they are definitely tons of cases everywhere but that doesn't - that doesn't mean that everyone is - that doesn't mean that every time you leave your house you are prone to get them. usually you are going out and interacting in public spaces and it is a lot less likely to pick them up then go into someone's home that has it. it's also more of those places like the public housing that i

went to in virginia and ohio and a lot of those folks are interacting but not getting out a lot and another thing that happened is once people have them they might isolate themselves or they get isolated from their friends and families. i got an e-mail from a woman the other day telling me that her 73-year-old mother who is living in an elderly home and they had bedbugs didn't take care of it and she had them for two years and when she moved out she brought them with her and hasn't seen her grandchildren and two years in that entire time because they are afraid to visit. so that probably has something to do with it, too or you don't you don't know how much there is to support that but i do guess guess it has something to do with it. >> for those people like yourself and me and other people here that have had a problem, it is so her - horrific before they had chemicals that we use it

sounds but they did have methods but how do they survive? do they possibly have better techniques? can you talk about the history it seems very frightening in that pesticide. >> i think part of the reason we are so frightened is because they as because they seem to be gone for a while and it was that shocking thing and people not knowing that they existed. i don't think people like them. i would be interested to see the history of the mental health like when did we decide these things we are talking about and how there's all kinds of interaction. i tried to talk to my grandparents because they network before world war ii and this is when they were still common and they existed but that isn't something that we would have talked about back then. if someone had cancer we didn't talk about it.

no one talked about stuff like that so it might have just been a different public mentality of dealing with these things. as far as better treatments, probably not. i think people were mostly used to them and there were these practices passed down from the generations and it was a part of the existing. >> what about the suburbs and cities like phoenix are they less prone to have a problem or do they have a problem with? they can edit the problems is that they will land in the cities and they will start spreading. i don't know about phoenix specifically the chester county problems. like i said earlier people in stand-alone homes unless they

have a lot of people coming in and the spreading of other places it is a little bit they aren't going to crawl across the guard through the hall to another apartment. >> do you think that the average person in the population recognizes this? spinnaker there was a study on that in the uk where i think they were graduate students but they show the images and show what is this and older folks do what it was that people were like i don't know what that is. i would guess a religiously similar thing would have been maybe ten years ago people were little bit more aware now because they've been in the news so much and they're been a lot

of images in the media and online and that kind of stuff so it's hard to tell but i think people are recognizing that more than they used to. >> what is the weirdest thing that you've encountered in researching this book? expect some of them you probably can't say. >> you can say it. [laughter] >> some of the sources there are a lot of very colorful folks studying bedbugs. there are so many stories you sold a picture useful the picture earlier he was kind of an interesting guy. there was one point he was showing me and two of them started making and he was like if you ever seen this before and

i said no. [laughter] so there were awkward things like that but i'm going to leave it there. >> i was wondering our bedbugs the same the world over like is there one dominant type of bedbug now or do they live on samoa - is that a reason to development? spec there are 100 species but not all of them just the few that are specific to us and to the rest of them feed on bats and birds. but the two main ones that are in the u.s. and other temporary regions that is a common bedbug.

then there's the tropical bedbug that is very similar in the tropical regions and then there's overlap like there's some parts of the world you might find those. but other than that, those two species are the ones worldwide that are affecting people. >> as someone that has e-mailed you for bedbug advice have you become a guru, like you people spam your inbox asking you - >> it's like i can't tell. [laughter] i don't know what that is. and i know what it looks like all those others that i was talking about are very similar.

you do get a lot of e-mails and sometimes from friends and acquaintances though i have gotten some from strangers and i usually tell that i'm really sorry. i can't help you because i don't know. but it usually ends up being more therapy i think. here are somethings some things i can do. i don't recommend the specific exterminators but if they want to tell me what the exterminator is using i will get the advice. yes. >> how do they look? speak they look similar to the common bedbug. >> they are about the same size. yes.

>> i just thought of one more. if we could eliminate what there be any negative consequences x. you could get rid of mosquitoes but if so, what? >> there are some other insects that meets them. sometimes maybe cockroaches and how centipedes but i don't know. it is a study where they put them at a battle or something. i don't know how often that happens. usually they are not in the bedroom. usually they are in the kitchen or in the bathroom. it could be the worst method of eradication that i've ever heard. >> that's the other thing. who wants to - to how centipedes,