Can a bed bug infestation spread to Japan and become the cause of a pandemic? No, that's not true: Bed bugs do not carry infectious diseases, which means a bed bug infestation cannot cause an infectious disease pandemic. Pandemics may be declared when a disease spreads widely on an international scale between countries and regions of the world.
The claim appeared on TikTok (archived here) on November 26, 2023. In comments translated into English from Japanese by Lead Stories staff, the narrator claims:
Japan's trying to get another pandemic. This time, we might not be able to ride trains and buses anymore. This is because bed bugs are all over Korea. There are rumors that they've started to appear in Japan, and since we import a lot of stuff from Korea, it's pretty much certain that another pandemic will occur in Japan.
This is what the post looked like on TikTok at the time of writing:
(Source: TikTok screenshot taken on Thu Nov 30 03:54:16 2023 UTC)
A pandemic is commonly defined as the spread of infectious diseases on an international scale, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and the World Health Organization (WHO) is responsible for declaring when a pandemic is occurring. Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health describes it this way:
A pandemic cuts across international boundaries, as opposed to regional epidemics. It's important to note that a once-declared epidemic can progress into pandemic status. While an epidemic is large, it is also generally contained or expected in its spread, while a pandemic is international and out of control.
A bed bug infestation cannot result in a pandemic since bed bugs do not carry or spread infectious diseases, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. One systematic review of evidence on the possible transmission of human pathogens by bed bugs concludes;
To date, no published clinical or epidemiologic data have demonstrated a causal relationship between bed bugs and infectious diseases in humans.
According to the study, this is because bed bugs may contain "neutralizing factors" that decrease their ability to transmit infectious diseases. This means that the bites of the bed bugs also do not contain infectious diseases.
