When I was renting a flat with a couple of other guys, one of them called me one day on the way home from work and said they had discovered bedbugs (this is in the UK).

I'd never really heard of them aside from the old "night night, don't let the bedbugs bite" saying.

It turns out they are a psychological terror! Every night you know that you're going to fall asleep and have your blood sucked out by loads of little bugs. The council pest control guy who came out made us empty all the rooms, heat treat all of our clothes and then keep them double bagged in sealed plastic bags and once a week he would come round and spray the flat in chemicals and then we would need to put the beds back together and go to sleep as the only way to get the bedbugs to come out and encounter the poison was to lure them out to feed on us.

It affected me mentally for months and months and I'm always paranoid now whenever I go anywhere new like a bus, train, cinema, someone elses house, etc that I'm going to bring them back home with me.

They are no joke.

The horror stories I've heard have been people finding bugs at home after a hotel stay.

You can't always know if the hotel you're staying at has bed bugs. But you could reduce the risk of taking them home with you by always keeping your bags a distance away from the hotel bed, so the bugs won't be likely to hide there. I've never encountered signs of bed bugs when travelling but it is a simple rule I follow, just in case.

I got bed bugs last year in Germany. I was soo wtf that I originally thought they were fleas from my dog so just got him treated for fleas. A month or so later I found one and identified it as a bed bug. I tried for a month to get rid of them, that didn't work at all. It took about 4 months once I got pest control out. It seemed like a standard job for him.

I travel quite a lot and I've occasionally seen bed bugs in hotels in France, Indonesia, Thailand. But it's true that I never heard of bed bugs infestation until I lived in NYC in 2009 (and my whole building had issues with them), there was a peak of infestations at that time.

Visible on Google Trends https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=bed%20bu...

I read somewhere that some bedbugs may be more resilient than others so that may explain.

A Google search of 'bedbug' and any major city in Europe will return plenty of hits.

You should check that famous youtuber’s video on the bug. It looks like they’re hard to notice as they only come out for 10min every night and you can’t feel them.

Your lucky (at least from my journeys in the UK/EU)

You don't tend to see them unless you're looking for them, they live in the crevices in your bed and mattress

I always wondered whether bedbug == flea (which jumps). You squash flea and they are no more... I suspect its a different thing, as it appears bedbug swarms.

I first encountered them in Poland