Bed Bug Experts Kramer and Potter Featured on NPR

They suck your blood in the middle of the night and vanish when the sun comes up. No, we are not talking about vampires. We're talking about bedbugs that make people want to itch their arms and legs off.

Entomologist Michael Potter of the University of Kentucky puts it this way in a spooky-sounding Internet video: "I've been on bedbug infestations where people have been to four different dermatologists, and then you get to their home and you flip over the box springs and it's like the Boston Massacre. I mean, there's just thousands of bedbugs, and they never knew they were there."

For a long time, the bedbugs weren't there. In the 1950s, exterminators armed with pesticides like DDT drove the parasites out of most of the houses in the country.

But then, 10 years ago, the bugs started coming back. Exterminator Richard Kramer says he found one of the first new infestations in Washington, D.C., in 1998.

"We discovered bedbugs in a hotel downtown," he says. "And ever since then, it's been exponentially increasing — that's the only way to describe it."

Read and listen to the NPR story here.

You can see Potter and Rick Cooper, Cooper Pest Solutions, Lawrenceville, N.J., at PCT’s Bed Bug Seminar in Las Vegas Sept. 18.

For more information on the seminar, visit www.bedbugseminars.com, or Lola Wenham at 800/456-0707 or lperez@giemedia.com.