Itching to travel

(China Daily)
Updated: 2009-05-06 08:59

Chris Dowding picked up a backpack and left the creature comforts of a farming hamlet on Australia's east coast to see the world.

Itching to travel

"For me, the reality of travel came as a bit of a shock," the 36-year-old recounts. "I was bitten by bed bugs in hostels, terrified by 'extreme sports' bus drivers and shoved out of the way by little old ladies in grocery stores."

Bed bugs, a Third World problem just 20 years ago, are now a global scourge - partly because young adventurers like Dowding take advantage of cheap air fares and, as they trek around the world, ferry bed bugs from poor countries to rich ones.

Besides the jumbo jet, the other big factor in the great resurgence is that bed bugs in poor countries have developed insecticide resistance and are now colonizing rich countries.

"From the late 1950s to the late 1990s we hardly saw a bed bug in the developed world," says Stephen Doggett, one of the world's foremost experts on the wingless insects. "Now, we see almost exponential growth, almost doubling each year."

Doggett, a researcher at Sydney's Westmead Hospital, has some good advice for travelers.

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