Bedbugs suck — blood mostly, but they are also a costly problem, says Rajeev Vaidyanathan of SRI International in Menlo Park, California, who led a series of talks on the creepy parasites at the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Philadelphia today.

New York City has reported a cost of US$10 million-40 million to control them, says Vaidyanathan, and in 2010 some 95% of pest-control agencies reported bedbugs as a number-one concern. They’ve been a huge worry for the hotel and hospitality industry in the United States, and after a few speakers presented their data (with stomach-wrenching pictures), several members of the audience were asking for ways to keep the parasites from hitchhiking home on their luggage.

A driving question for the past few years has been why, in just the past decade or so, have bedbugs come to thrive in the United States? Colby Schal of North Carolina State University in Raleigh has been looking to answer this question through bedbug genetics, as we reported earlier this year.

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The malarial parasite, Plasmodium vivax, is something of a forgotten step sister to the more prevalent, more deadly Plasmodium falciparum. Global and local programmes looking to eradicate malaria may need to pay it more attention say several health experts presenting at this year’s annual meeting for the American Society for Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in Philadelphia taking place this week.

Today, in poster sessions, Peter Gething from Oxford University presented a newly updated map created by the Malaria Atlas Project and showing P. vivax’s impact around the world. “If you asked people before this map was available about vivax’s prevalence, you get 100 different answers,” says Gething.

So, the team assembled data from roughly 8,000 site-based surveys of infection rates and from this drew up maps modelling prevalence and risk. Because many of the survey results could only be found in unpublished ‘grey literature’ they had to work closely with global and local health ministries to get access to the numbers.

The risk of contracting this disease is extremely low throughout most of Africa, where P. falciparum is rampant and a form of genetic resistance to vivax known as Duffy negativity is widespread. But P. vivax is extremely widespread, putting nearly 130 million people at risk in Indonesia alone – more than half the population according to a map of that country presented by Iqbal Elyazar of the Eijkman-Oxford Clinical Research Unit in Jakarta, Indonesia.

“The headline for us,” says Gething, “is in terms of the elimination agenda.” The idea has been that P. vivax is a benign, less common form of malaria than its more dangerous sibling P. falciparum, which attracts upwards of 97% of the funding in terms of research and control* a far greater share of research-and-development investment. But differences in P. vivax’s life cycle and the mosquito based vectors that transmit it could make forgetting about it a serious problem.

Image: Malaria Atlas Project

* Update 12/03/2012: The 97% figure previously listed was inaccurate. According to a PATH report from last year, P. vivax was the specified target for roughly 3% of R&D funding between 2007 and 2009. Roughly 45% went to P. falciparum and more than 50% did not report the species of malaria. I regret the error and thank Austin Walker of Northwestern University for questioning my source and pointing out the error.

The story keeps getting stranger. In two sworn affidavits dated 16 and 21 November, researcher Max Pfost admitted to stealing laboratory notebooks from his employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in Reno, Nevada, and giving them to Judy Mikovits, the institute’s former research director.

He states that he retrieved “between 12-20 notebooks” from a locked desk in Mikovits’s former office on the morning of 30 September. This was one day after Mikovits was fired from her post for insubordination. He stored them in his mother’s garage in a “multicoloured Happy Birthday” bag, and reports that he gave them to Mikovits in Reno on 16 October, when she came to retrieve some personal items. Mikovits has maintained that she had not returned to Nevada since being fired.

Mikovits was arrested in Ventura, California, on felony charges this past Friday, as a fugitive from the law. She awaits a hearing for extradition to Nevada, where she faces a civil suit filed by WPI over the alleged stolen notebooks and data.

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The travails of Judy Mikovits and the Whittemores have all the makings of a soap opera serial. On Friday 18 November, Mikovits, a chronic fatigue syndrome researcher, was arrested and jailed by Ventura County police in relation to a lawsuit brought by her former employer, the Whittemore Peterson Institute (WPI) in Reno, Nevada claiming that she had absconded with lab notebooks and proprietary information. She is being held without bail and may face extradition to Nevada.

As lawyers and patient advocates line up to debate who is right and who is wrong in this bitter dispute, there is still the question of what will become of a US$1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) that is held by WPI with Mikovits as the principal investigator.

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