Published: 17:09 BST, 27 August 2026 | Updated: 22:51 BST, 27 August 2026
Rhona Hutchinson went to northern France with her husband earlier this year with the hope of making memories. Instead, the 59-year-old businesswoman from Derbyshire returned with bed-bugs that still infest her house and have covered her body in itchy welts.
It was a few days after returning from her French trip in April with husband Sean, 62, who works in home renovations, that Rhona started to itch and noticed clusters of bites on her arms and neck.
‘I react badly to mosquito bites and as these were so red and puffy I thought it was down to them,’ she says.
‘I started applying mosquito repellent to prevent further bites and also steroid cream for the itch.’
But the bites kept coming. ‘Soon I was covered – my back, neck and upper arms. I thought this can’t be mosquitoes as we never heard them buzzing around.’
Rhona looked up her symptoms online and one word came up: bedbugs. A pest control exterminator who came to the house found a host of bedbugs – and they thought the infestation came in her luggage from France, as Rhona had never had a problem with the bugs before.
‘I was horrified,’ she says. ‘I associated them with dirty places and I am a clean freak.’
There will be plenty of others now in the same situation.
Roughly the size, shape and colour of an apple seed, bedbugs feed exclusively on blood, says Richard Naylor
Bedbug activity peaks between the spring and early autumn and ‘longer warms spells mean their numbers are increasing,’ says Dr Richard Naylor, an entomologist (scientist who studies insects) and founder of the Bedbug Foundation CIC, a not-for-profit organisation dedicated to raising standards in the detection and management of bedbugs.
Roughly the size, shape and colour of an apple seed, bedbugs feed exclusively on blood, he adds.
‘Bedbugs live around beds because they live off the blood of their victims, attracted by the carbon dioxide humans emit when we breathe,’ says Richard Naylor.
‘They emerge from their hiding place at night, feed for a few minutes, and then return to the safety of their crevice.’
Bedbug bites normally appear in telltale lines, says Dr Sidra Khan, a consultant dermatologist at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust.
