Badgered by bedbugs: It's hard to sleep tight

NEW YORK — When Bonnie Friedman first heard about New York's burgeoning bedbug problem, she felt lucky to live in an upscale neighborhood.

"I remember thinking, 'I'm so glad I live in Brooklyn Heights. I will never get a bedbug,' " Friedman said.

Her first bite came a few weeks later.

And as many others have learned, getting rid of the tiny intruders is often a months-long odyssey that requires equal parts detective work, obsessive-compulsive cleaning strategies and emotional healing.

"People in New York are used to cockroaches, where you have the exterminator come once but it doesn't lay siege to your life," said Friedman, a professor at New York University. "This does. Having them turns your life upside down."

New Yorkers, especially those in the ritziest neighborhoods, are discovering that bedbugs aren't the stuff of childhood fairy tales. They're real, they pay no heed to socioeconomic boundaries, and they're staging a comeback.

New York City apartment dwellers lodged 4,638 bedbug complaints in fiscal 2006, up from none three years earlier. Complaints ballooned 67% in the first half of this year from their pace a year earlier.

"There's a new plague," said Dini Miller, an entomologist at Virginia Tech University.

Bedbugs were virtually eradicated from the U.S. in the 1940s and 1950s, Miller said. The cause of their resurgence is not officially known, though theories include increased international travel in which the bugs hitch a ride on clothing or in luggage and decreased use of pesticides such as DDT.

Bedbugs are reddish-brown blood-sucking insects about a quarter of an inch long with a flat, oval shape. Drawn by body heat, they attack at night and inject an anesthetic that makes them virtually undetectable during their mealtime.

They feast for as much as 10 minutes at a time -- a galling fact to those hosting the extended feedings on their backs, necks and faces.

Bedbugs are as likely to infect a Park Avenue penthouse as a Lower East Side flophouse.

"I say 'bedbugs' and then I hear dead silence on the other end" of the phone, said Arnold Fishon, owner of AAA Abco Termite & Pest Control in Queens. "You could have told them they have cancer -- that's the reaction they have. They say, 'But I'm clean. I have a maid. I'm an attorney. I'm a doctor.' "

And bedbugs aren't confined to New York.