SCIENCE IN THE NEWS DAILY

The Bedbug Decider

from the New Yorker

"Dear Carolyn, I am super paranoid that I have bedbugs. No bites, just crazy paranoia. This is all the evidence I have. [Sample] C looks like a cockroach, but I don't know about the others. Please give me a careful and thoughtful definitive answer. Thank you! Jody..."

Carolyn Klass, who for the past thirty-eight years has been Cornell University's diagnostician for insect pests, gets this kind of mail every day. A petite woman with mussed graying blond hair and wire-rimmed glasses, Klass is paid to examine other people's bedbugs, or what they think might be bedbugs. Half are. "The other half are odd things with that general shape," Klass said the other day, sitting in her laboratory in Comstock Hall, in Ithaca.

Often, the item in question is not even an insect. Pills of fabric, cereal, and skin particles or scabs frequent her microscope slides. "People send me pillowcases and bedcovers. Sometimes you see other things, too," she said, blushing. "A sock, or even worse." She'll advise on most everything, except skin debris. In such cases, she tells clients to consult a dermatologist.