By Julia Lyon

The Salt Lake Tribune

A closeup of a bed bug at the Salt Lake Valley Health Department's environmental health offices in Murray. ( Steve Griffin / The Salt Lake Tribune)

Bed bugs may not sound as frightening as a global flu pandemic, but the hungry bloodsuckers have already attacked hundreds of thousands of unsuspecting Americans while they slept.

Now they're crawling into the crevices of Utah homes and feasting on the residents of the Beehive state. Salt Lake County has seen its bed bug complaints nearly double between 2007 and 2008, from hotels to homes.

“The only good thing you can say about bed bugs is they do not transmit disease,” said Diane Keay, a Salt Lake Valley Health Department supervisor. “The real problem seems to be horror.”

Humans are a bed bug's main course. The nocturnal creatures often strike while the person is sleeping, leaving

In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, bed bugs were commonly found in U.S. hotels, hospitals, theaters and trains, according to Michael Potter, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. But an alert public and aggressive chemical campaign proved highly successful. Insecticides and pesticides such as DDT, some of which were easily available at the drug store, decimated bed bug numbers.

“Anyone who had a bedbug problem could now have the tools to absolutely go to war,” he said.

In the late 1990s, for reasons that are not entirely clear, bed bug populations exploded in