It’s enough to make your skin crawl. Lice, fleas and bedbugs in their thousands are crawling all over our nice clean homes, their numbers swelling by the moment as they gorge on our blood. Does this largely unnoticed nightmare herald the return of killer diseases? Are our lifestyles to blame? Do our doctors know what to do? Ask John Maunder, head of Britain’s Medical Entomology Centre near Cambridge. He’s spent 35 years studying what most of us regard as deeply unwelcome visitors at the country’s only unit specialising in the medically-important insects found in temperate zones. But with most major pest-borne diseases still afflicting poor…
Bugs bite back
17 February 2001
