LOS ANGELES, Aug. 13 (Xinhua) -- A ban on the DDT pesticide and an increase in international travel have been blamed for the soaring cases of bedbug in Southern California families these days, the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

    Los Angeles and its surrounding areas are experiencing a population explosion that's making many people itchy -- bedbugs are everywhere. And the situation seems no better in other regions across the United States.

    "Bedbugs are just going ballistic," Michael Potter, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky, was quoted as saying. "It is going to really rock this country. I'm not trying to sound sensationalist."

    Bedbugs aren't believed by the experts to transmit disease, but they do have a way of cranking up stress levels.

    The blood-sucking, heat-seeking parasites used to be associated with cramped and dirty living quarters, grimy motels and high-rise living in places like New York. For much of the second part of the last century, the liberal use of DDT seemed to all but do away with them.

    Now bedbugs have moved into single-family homes with a vengeance and taken up lodging in schools, hospitals and college dormitories too, the newspaper said.

    According to the National Pest Management Association based in Fairfax, Virginia, seven years ago, a pest control company may have received one or two bedbug calls a year, but now there may be50 or more calls a week.

    Western Exterminator Co., which serves California, reported a 240 percent increase in bedbug work from 2000 to 2006, and Isotech Pest Management Inc. in Pomona, a suburban city near Los Angeles, is conducting about 1,000 inspections a month -- 700 percent more than last year.

    Among a number of reasons cited for the infestations of the bug, whose formal name is Cimex lectularius, are the ban on the insecticide DDT years ago and an increase in international travel, the report said.

    "It's not a case of being a lower socioeconomic thing," said William Brogdon, a research entomologist for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "These things can happen to anybody."