The bedbugs of New York turn up in BBC studios

Infestations of bedbugs have unfold throughout New York and no-one appreciates wherever they're going to turn up up coming.

In recent days there has been a buzz of exercise while in the UN's corridors of electrical power: intense discussions while in the hallways, reporters conferring in hushed tones, a flurry of e-mails.

Are the Palestinians about to declare statehood? Is the Security Council about to authorise a army strike on Iran? Is civil war breaking out once more in Sudan?

Nope. Some thing of a lot greater import when you are a UN correspondent: a creeping infestation of bedbugs.

It is a scourge presently afflicting New York, with the bugs working rampant by means of accommodations and, if a single believes the somewhat hysterical media coverage, spreading in an uncontrolled contagion to buildings this kind of as theatres, shops, eating places and homes.

Bloodsucking pests

Now, bedbugs will not be unsafe or life-threatening, despite the fact that their bites itch and sting.

The true pain is, the moment a place is infested, a significant and costly fumigation course of action is demanded to obtain rid of them.

A month ago, the UN ultimately admitted it had been battling the blood-sucking pests in different parts of its sprawling office complicated for greater than a 12 months.

So their eventual discovery while in the UN media centre had an air of grim inevitability about it.

There is certainly just one technique to sniff out bedbugs - with dogs. If a dog smells a bedbug, she or he will bark.

So on the need of the UN press corps, Rover (or some model of him) was enlisted, and we waited with bated breath for that success.

The e-mail came at midnight and yes - not like the famous Sherlock Holmes story in which the dog does not bark while in the evening time - this time, it did (in two studios, no less).

And a single of them was ours. Oh the disgrace. Oh the horror.

Stigma

But what to try and do?

In the beginning we had incredibly peaceful conversations about fumigation, seeking to delay the unavoidable publicity. It was hopeless.

We agreed that worse than the BBC possessing bedbugs can be for that BBC to cover up possessing mattress bugs.

In any situation, every person currently knew. Which is a single of the banes of operating in a media centre wherever journalists possess a Rover-like nose for stories.

Some turned it right into a joke.

A single threw caution towards the wind and knocked on our door to express solidarity: "I know what it seems like to become stigmatised," he stated, "I've had bedbugs."

But most gave the BBC office a wide berth.

In panic, I turned to my husband.

He was dismissive. This terror of bedbugs is ludicrous, he stated. It's all component of the tradition of worry in America, the latest model of "reds underneath the bed". Initially it was communists, then Obama the Islamist terrorist, and now bedbugs.