Bed Bugs: A Worldwide Problem, Especially for Travelers

Foresight is always better than hindsight and if you're planning on traveling, the following may be of interest.

On the first night of my Camino trip in Spain, a group of us stayed in one of the worst refugioes of the entire trip. I told my friends if every refugio/alberque/hostel was like the one in Estella, I would find something else to do until my plane flew back to the US a month later.

The next day my friend from London had many welts, possibly hundreds, on his feet, ankles and lower legs. At first he thought it was an allergic reaction of some kind. A day or two later he went to the doctor. The itching was insufferable and things didn't seem to be improving. The doctor told him the welts were bug bites and not an allergic reaction. I didn't see the prescription the doctor gave him, and don't know what it was, but in a few days the itching was gone and the bites were healing without signs of infection.

After arriving home, where I have access to our extensive medical reference library, I looked up bed bugs, fleas and other insects that roam around in the night and feast on humans. The information pointed to bed bugs most likely being the problem in one respect, usually fleas don't care much for humans and bed bugs do, but on the other side of that coin, fleas generally bite humans on the feet, ankles and lower legs and there is a human flea variety. Bed bugs aren't so territorial and will take a human blood meal wherever they can find it.

When our daughter called, she said she'd just read an article in one of the San Diego papers stating that in New York City there was a pandemic going on in the hotels. It seems that travelers from foreign countries, my personal experience would say Spain is one, are bringing the little buggers with them and leaving a few for the next person. Most of us would relate that type of problem to flop houses or skid row hotels (kind of like the refugio in Estella seemed to me). Fleas and bed bugs know no price range: they show no favorites and care not if you have a platinum card or barely enough money to find a place to sleep off the street.