The one bright side of having bed bugs — if you wanted to be really optimistic about it — has always been that at least the tormenting critters didn't transmit disease. But now researchers in Vancouver report that they've found bed bugs with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA.
The scientists studied five bed bugs, taken from three patients treated at St. Paul's Hospital. All three patients were residents of Vancouver's poor Downtown Eastside, where both bed bugs and MRSA have been on the rise in recent years. The researchers wanted to see if there was a connection.
So they crushed and analyzed the bugs and found three samples with MRSA, the superbug that is resistant to most commonly used antibiotics. The two other samples had vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium, or VRE, a less dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
That's pretty much all they know at this point. It's not clear, for example, whether the drug-resistant germs were transmitted from people to bed bugs, or the other way around. The strain of MRSA the scientists found was consistent with community-associated MRSA found in other Downtown Eastside residents.
It's also not clear whether the bacteria existed on the bed bugs or in them. That is, were the bed bugs carrying MRSA on their backs or were the bacteria living and growing inside them? Either way, it's bad news: if bed bugs are capable of carrying and transmitting MRSA the way a mosquito spreads malaria, it could mean a whole new vector of human disease.
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