The one bright side of having bed bugs — if you wanted to be really optimistic about it — has always been that at least the tormenting critters didn’t transmit disease. But now researchers in Vancouver report that they’ve found bed bugs with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
The scientists studied five bed bugs, taken from three patients treated at St. Paul’s Hospital. All three patients were residents of Vancouver’s poor Downtown Eastside, where both bed bugs and MRSA have been on the rise in recent years. The researchers wanted to see if there was a connection.
So they crushed and analyzed the bugs and found three samples with MRSA, the superbug that is resistant to most commonly used antibiotics. The two other samples had vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium, or VRE, a less dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
Full story: Thought bed bugs were bad? Try bed bugs with MRSA