In today’s The Big Story podcast, just 20 years ago, Canadian cities were seeing a few dozen bed bug infestation reports a year. Now they get thousands — and in Toronto, tens of thousands. In Canada and around the world, the terrifying creatures are back, and they’re becoming more resilient every day.

Lauren McKeon is the deputy editor at Toronto Life, where she wrote at length about her own experience dealing with these seemingly ineradicable pests. “The idea of having your home, which is your sanctuary, no longer be that, is just too much to handle,” says McKeon.

How did bed bugs come back to become such a huge problem? What works against them and what doesn’t? And why are these bugs, of all the things that crawl on this Earth, the ones that make us so nauseatingly uncomfortable and paranoid?

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You can also find it at thebigstorypodcast.ca.