For those of you who commute to work, it may be best to use your own car. This is because public transportation vehicles are often infested with insects. Of course, there may be some unusually immaculate buses and trains in the world, but it is fair to say that different modes of public transportation are havens for pests like bed bugs. Here in America, we will see an occasional news story telling about bed bugs on a bus or a subway, but in England, commuter trains host several different types of insect pest.
A recent study has shown that fleas, bed bugs and cockroaches are plentiful on British commuter trains. Researchers were able to determine the amount of bugs on a particular train by counting the insect corpses littering the ground after an insecticide device was activated in an empty train. The amount of bug corpses found would amaze and probably disgust you. Researchers determined that the average commuter train in England carried one thousand individual cockroaches. These roaches hide behind ceiling and lighting panels. In addition to the roaches, two hundred bed bugs and fleas are present in the seats of British commuter trains.
In response to this unsettling finding, public transportation officials dismissed these results as inaccurate, and they flat out denied the possibility of commuter trains carrying an abundance of insects. The officials claimed that the trains were cleaned after each workday and each train undergoes a deep cleaning every two weeks.
This is not the sort of news that British citizens want to hear these days given the country’s problems with bed bug infestations. Late last spring, a study was published in England concerning the growth in bed bug populations. The amount of insecticide-resistant bed bugs in England tripled in population size. This amount of bed bugs closely approached “epidemic levels” in the country.
If you lived in England would you avoid taking any forms of public transportation to work or anywhere else?
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