Walmart Goes Buggy, Prompting Pennsylvania State Police Probe

EDINBORO, PA — Hold the Walmart jokes. This is serious. Pennsylvania authorities are on the hunt for whoever unleashed bed bugs in the discount chain’s Supercenter in Edinboro. The crime put store workers on a separate, more-urgent hunt: to track down the elusive little bloodsuckers and kill them.

In the insect hierarchy, bed bugs rank low on the phylum. They’re not pollinators. They’re not a food source for predators. All they seem to do is load up on the blood of people and animals, and have sex — a lot of it.

Nobody needs or wants bed bugs — especially not the Walmart store, where a manager found several crawling around a men’s fitting room on Thursday.

Although a prescription bottle found in a boy’s jacket left in the fitting room was capped, some of the bed bugs had escaped. Dead bed bugs were also found in a prescription bottle left on the floor near the men’s belts display.

Lab tests Friday confirmed it was bed bugs that were crawling around the fitting room, the Erie Times-News reported. Store officials contacted their peers at other Walmarts in the area to see if bed bug liberator was on the loose, but the bed bug release at the Edinboro store appears to be isolated, according to reports.

Authorities are, ahem, itching to round up the culprit.

Walmart loss prevention officers are reviewing store surveillance video, and state police are dusting the pill bottles for fingerprints.

"We take this seriously and are looking into this,” Walmart said in a statement to news station WENY. “We are fully cooperating with law enforcement on their investigation."

The areas where the live and dead bed bugs were found have been blocked off, and a pest control service is working to eradicate them, according to reports.

Bed bugs are small, flat, parasitic insects that feed on the blood of people and animals while they sleep. Reddish-brown in color, these wingless bugs range in size from 1 to 7 millimeters — about the size of Lincoln’s head on a penny.

Bed bugs are good hiders, reproduce quickly and are hardy enough to survive for several months without a blood meal, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Other than annoying people, bed bugs don’t have much purpose. The one good thing that can be said about bed bugs is they don’t carry or spread disease, but their bites can itch so badly that excessive scratching can lead to a secondary skin infection.