"We have them here in Athens County," confirmed Chuck Hammer, Athens City-County Health Department administrator. "We've actually seen bedbugs for several years. But they're just now starting to become more of a problem."

Big cities tend to have the most bedbug problems, Hammer said last week, but Athens County is certainly not immune, even though incidents are comparatively few. Cities such as Cincinnati, Dayton, Columbus and Cleveland have been reported by pest-control company Terminix as being among the 15 cities nationwide with the most bedbug reports.

Bedbugs are small brown insects that feed on blood, and prefer human blood to any other. They travel by catching a ride on shoes, clothes, bags, purses and other items that might be brought from home to home. They hide near sleeping quarters in whatever crevices and cracks they can find behind a bed's headboard, folds in the furniture, under the mattress.

When all is still in the night, they come out to feed. The result of their late-night snack is often itchy welts on the unsuspecting slumbering victim. These welts are the typical sign that there might be a problem.

"They'll come out when things are real quiet and still, and they'll take a blood meal," Hammer said. "They do that by inserting their feeding mouth parts into the skin. And simultaneous with that they inject what serves as an anesthetic so that a sleeping person won't even feel the bite."

The welt is caused by an allergic reaction to the bug's saliva, Hammer said. Bedbugs don't carry any diseases transmittable to humans, he added, but secondary infections can be caused by scratching a welt too much.

Hammer said that officials are seeing new strains of bedbugs that have become resistant to traditional pesticides, making an already difficult infestation to get rid of even more so.

"That's the problem nationwide," he said. "They used to respond to some of the pesticides. Now the response is maybe 60 percent kill. So you don't kill them all."

Bedbugs can be found, Hammer said, as they are not microscopic, and they prefer rooms with a lot of clutter because it gives them plenty of opportunities to hide, as well as possibly be transported. Eliminating clutter in sleeping areas can help guard against infestation, he said.

He recommended that if somebody has a bite, it's important to look for evidence of bedbugs around the sleeping quarters, included the bugs' feces, skin the bugs may have shed and the bugs themselves. All of these things are important to check for if one is staying in a hotel or other temporary lodging, Hammer said, to avoid bringing them home.

He said hot water and a hot dryer will kill bedbugs, so laundering bedding and clothing is important. Vacuuming will also pick up any eggs that may have been laid, Hammer said.

It is incumbent on everybody to be aware that this is a pest that's on the increase, he said. Some other places bedbugs might be lurking to hitchhike a ride home include dressing rooms in retail clothing stores, in furniture purchased second-hand, and even, sometimes, at the office. Hammer said they can go up to a year without eating, and still be active.

That is part of the reason why bedbugs can be so especially difficult to get rid of, he said. The best approach to getting rid of bedbugs is an integrated pest management solution, Hammer said, which requires a lot of vigilance.

This includes not only having a pest-control company come in to spray but to be continually on the lookout for more bedbugs and to pay particular attention to sanitation, he said. Residents who have had their residence sprayed due to bedbugs need to make sure they inspect, vacuum, launder, and otherwise keep actively fighting the problem.

THE ESSENTIAL PROBLEM, ACCORDING to information from the Ohio Pest Management Association, is that bedbugs reproduce quickly and situations can spiral out of control fast. Bedbugs can also be expensive to eliminate, with an initial treatment of an average three-bedroom home costing anywhere from $850 to $1,400.

Bedbugs are resistant to many treatments because unlike many other insects all they eat is human blood, Hammer said. Other insects can be baited and then killed, he noted, while bedbugs cannot. Bug bombs also don't work too well, he said.

"It's going to take a very concerted effort on the part of the people affected to implement this integrated pest management approach," he said.

Hammer said that pamphlets of information on bedbugs are available at the Athens City-County Health Department on Union Street in Athens.