A woman has opened up about her expensive and stressful ordeal after her house became infested with bed bugs.
As you may have seen, bedbugs are currently sweeping through Paris, and one expert has claimed that they’ve already made their way to the UK.
Speaking to Sky News, microbiologist and founder of Bed Bugs Ltd David Cain said: "I think there's probably a similar level of issue in London as there is in Paris at present.
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"They're already on buses, trains, tubes, cinemas, doctor's surgeries, public spaces, hospitals."
The pesky bugs are oval, flat, brownish-red in colour and around the size of an apple pip and feed on blood to survive.
The small bugs are hard to spot and are usually only noticed once it's too late and an infestation has taken hold.
Bedbugs are notoriously difficult to shift and often need a professional to come in and get rid, as Rumi Begun from north London found out.
Speaking to the Sun, she explained that bedbugs hadn't been on her ‘radar’ as she has a daughter with auto-immunue disease so keeps her house ‘spotless’.
But in July this year, she noticed a couple of small bites on her six-year-old daughter and took her to the GP who confirmed they were from bedbugs.
She said: “It was horrifying. The doctor explained that one female bedbug can lay 400 eggs a day.
“After the GP’s advice I spent £200 at the launderette, boil- washing everything fabric, and I threw out and replaced all the mattresses.
“I was determined to exterminate them, so I called in a bedbug expert and spent £260 fumigating the entire house.
“We were told to stay away for a couple of weeks while they died, so we stayed with friends.”
But upon returning home, the mum said she could still see the bugs so had to call in a specialist who did a heat treatment costing £1,200.
However, even that didn’t work and the family could see the bugs leaving her non-verbal child ‘distressed’.
The same company that did the heat treatment then gave the family a free chemical treatment, due to them having a disabled child.
Begun continued: "At this point I had spent £2,000, which I could not afford, as I am on a career break caring for my daughter, but one day later we still had the bugs.
“I then booked a pest controller through Newham Council, and paid a £270 one-off fee that covered the expert treating the home until the bugs were entirely gone.
“He did another search in September and discovered the bugs were coming from next door, through a crack in the skirting board on a shared wall.
“He advised us to strip that wall of wallpaper, remove all the furniture again and, for now, tape up the hole. Although it is a temporary solution, it has worked.
“We haven’t seen bedbugs for almost four weeks now — and soon we’re having the hole filled with a special foam.”
Claire Reid