The study was sparked, Hill said, by the fact that the re-emergence of bedbugs in recent decades doesn’t fall squarely to any particular governmental agency.

“I’m a public health researcher,” she said. “I study infectious diseases like HIV and how we can control them, so to me bedbugs seem like an issue for public health agencies. But at the same time, it’s a problem that’s related to housing … so maybe people who deal with mice, rats, and cockroaches should be the ones dealing with them.

“But the reality is that in many cities there is not really any agency responsible for bedbugs,” she continued. “So it’s basically a private thing that people have to deal with.”

While that uncertainty has created problems for cities struggling to deal with bedbug outbreaks, it has also created a vacuum for research.

“There’s no government funding agency that’s tasked with funding research on bedbugs,” Hill said. “Which just means there are a lot of unknowns about dealing with bedbugs.”

In an effort to fill that vacuum, the National Science Foundation funded a working group made up of experts from a host of disciplines, including epidemiology, urban planning, economics, and entomology. The group was co-chaired by Michael Levy, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania, who initiated the study and is its senior author.

Based on her experience modeling infectious-disease transmission, Hill was invited to join the panel with an eye toward developing models that could make predictions about how best to control the spread of the insects. Another recruit to the team was Chris Rehmann, a professor of civil engineering at Iowa State University, who co-authored the study with Hill, Xie, and Levy.

Going forward, Hill said, researchers are planning to expand the study to incorporate greater variety in the housing market and understand how various policies can drive rents up or down, while other studies are in the works that would examine how bedbugs spread from location to location using data on the bug’s genetics or the relocation patterns of a city’s residents.

Other studies are planned that would focus on the mental health and economic effects of bedbug infestations on residents, she said.

In the meantime, Hill’s co-authors are planning to present their findings to city officials in Philadelphia, where notification requirements are under consideration.

“Our hope is to spread the word that disclosure policies can be a cost-effective way of slowing bedbug spread,” she said, “because while there are a handful of cities that have implemented these policies, many others haven’t. We hope our study provides some extra evidence to help make that decision.”

This research was supported with funding from the National Science Foundation (via the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health.