While bed bugs carry a lot of stigma, they are not disease carriers.

To date, no published study has demonstrated a causal relationship between bed bugs and infectious disease transmission in humans. Also, we present and propose to expand on previous hypotheses as to why bed bugs do not transmit human pathogens. Bed bugs may contain “neutralizing factors” that attenuate pathogen virulence and, thereby, decrease the ability of bed bugs to transmit infectious disease: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5007277/

This is awesome. Now I wonder if I'm similarly wrong about mosquitoes... (edit: those suckers do of course transmit, malaria and so on, but not sure about other diseases like hiv or hepatitis, haven't heard of mosquitoes as vector?)

Unfortunately not, they're considered "the world's deadliest animal"

https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/stories/2019/world-deadlies...

[Edit: posted before your edit. Bonus points for the "suckers" pun :) ]

Yeah I realized after posting that "do mosquitoes transmit?" is a silly question:)

"Decrease the ability to transmit infection diseases"

Why dont they say stop and not decrease ?

So they can transmit pathogens ?

How did this paper get published

Thats science slang . Science is rarely absolute.

* for some values of "probably"

I had bed bugs a 15 year ago while living in Bahrain. I had never heard of them or had any idea about what they were (in Italy, where I am from, they are not common at all) so when i started to notice bites all over my legs i did not know what i was facing. But: my sleep quality deteriorated, and with it my personal well being. So while it might be true that they do not bear diseases, if not taken care of they can severely affect your health anyway