Would need to exactly happen for a bedbug to transmit a superbacteria?

January 7, 2018 2:15 AM

This is a really gross hypothetical so I'm just going to put a TW BEDBUGS DISEASE here

This is for fiction. So, a well-educated ten-year-old knows more about science than I do. That being said: certain bacteria like C-diff and MRSA live on surfaces for a long time, right? What's to stop a bedbug or cockroach from skittering over some superbacteria in one apartment and spreading it to another?

Sorry for the gross question.

THANK YOU

posted by angrycat to Writing & Language (8 answers total)

I can't cite sources right now, but there has been research into the antibacterial properties of insect feet. That said, there has also been research showing that houseflies, for example, can be vectors for transferring bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7.
posted by sevenyearlurk at 6:13 AM on January 7, 2018

Digestion tends to kill things. This is especially true in blood eaters, as they are already coping with a lot of hard to digest stuff and potential pathogens. Also, bedbugs tend to feed rarely, and not travel that far, returning each morning to a sort of bedbug dorm.

Sure, you can fly a suitcase of bedbugs from Paris to Beijing, but the critters simply won’t infect the new city at any alarming rate. The spread would be far slower than flu spread, or anything that spreads through air or even direct human contact. Probably slower than these scary pathogens already can spread through hospitals.

In their dorm, bedbugs will share food insofar as if one has a full belly and another doesn’t, they will stab him in the gut and suck his bloodmeal.

This is also how they have sex, via stabbing. A male bedbug can penis stab another male, who is currently stab-mating with a female, and inseminate the female via the intermediate.

My point in all this is there are plenty of weird scary true things about bedbugs, but if you want to plausibly make up more, then you have to have a germ that can survive in a bedbug gut, which is a very inhospitable place. Perhaps a more likely option would be for it to surivice in the mouthparts, but that’s tricky too.

In general, I think viral pathogens are more likely to utilize animal vectors than bacteria, so I might go with a super virus over a super bacteria.

Finally, it’s semi-well known trivia that bedbugs don’t transmit disease between humans, and the only real danger is annoyance and itching. This is the first thing that anyone who’s had bedbugs hears, so this is something you probably have to handle in fiction if you want to pull readers along for the ride.
posted by SaltySalticid at 6:24 AM on January 7, 2018

CDiff and MRSA are everywhere anyway so even if they were transmitted from one apt to another is wouldn't matter too much. The issue is when insect vectors get pathogens past the skin where they can do some harm. (MRSA and CDiff are mostly dangerous to people who are alreaday sick too so this scenario is a solid meh on the plague scale).

Mosquitos are the best known example (malaria, zika) but fleas spread the plague this way which is a bacterial infection. And obviously ticks spread variois pathogens too (lymes, borella).

So for this is be actually scary or dangerous your hypothetical insect vector needs to bite or scratch people, be more mobile than a bed bug and host something that is virulent and infects humans. Lots of real life examples to choose from or of you are inventing one it's easier to invent a new disease for the purposes of fiction than a new mode of transmission.
posted by fshgrl at 11:35 AM on January 7, 2018

Bedbugs would be most adept at spreading blood borne illness since they feed on our blood and can use multiple people in a household as hosts. What may also be compelling from a fictional perspective is that bedbugs can go for a very long time without feeding (up to a year) and so you could have bugs in a basically dormant state holed up in the cracks or crevices of old furniture or in the pages of books (yes, I found bugs in my books during a very bad infestation) who "awake" in the presence of a fresh host and start spreading disease.
posted by brookeb at 1:47 PM on January 7, 2018

This study showed bi-drectional transmisstion between bedbugs and Trypanosoma cruzi, the parasite that causes Chagas disease. The parasite is normally transmitted bloodsucking triatomine bugs via their feces and is prevalent in North and South America.

The parasites are hidden mainly in the heart and digestive muscle and over time can cause cardiac disorders and sometimes digestive or neurological problems. In later years, the infection can lead to sudden death or heart failure caused by progressive destruction of the heart muscle.

This would suck for sure.
posted by waving at 2:02 PM on January 7, 2018

Add lice to the list of potential vectors.
posted by SemiSalt at 2:13 PM on January 7, 2018

thanks everybody! waving, that stuff about Chagas is fascinating! I've never heard about Chagas before--is that because I live in northern U.S. and these cases mostly occur quite a bit further south? Is it somewhat well known in such places, do you know?
posted by angrycat at 1:46 AM on January 8, 2018

Chagas is rather well known where it commonly occurs, yes. The assassin bug that can transmit it occurs in many US states, but Chagas disease itself is not all that common on until you go to central/south America. See map of the actual endemic region for the disease here.
The CDC says "However, the transmission of Chagas disease from a bug to a human is not easy. "
" In the early stage, symptoms are typically either not present or mild, "
and "After 8–12 weeks, individuals enter the chronic phase of disease and in 60–70% it never produces further symptoms."

So on the one hand, it's often not a big deal. On the other hand, it does kill about 8k people per year, world wide. Those are overwhelmingly poor/rural people in poor countries. For context, we kill about 35k/year with cars just in the USA, and the "ordinary" flu kills ~375,000 per year world wide.

All things considered, your fiction may do well to have a super-strong variant of the Chagas-causing protist (Trypanosoma), perhaps one that can re-surge after an inactive period, or one that can be spread by other assassin bugs (which are distributed widely around the whole world, but usually do not bite mammals on purpose).

https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/chagas/gen_info/detailed.html
https://www.cdc.gov/parasites/chagas/gen_info/vectors/index.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chagas_disease
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trypanosoma_cruzi
posted by SaltySalticid at 11:30 AM on January 8, 2018