Five decades after being declared officially dead, the most toe-curling of all America’s critters has returned, with a spate of bloodsucking attacks on unsuspecting victims as they sleep. The culprit is Cimex lectularius - otherwise known as the common bedbug. Until recently it was known happily to Americans only from nursery rhymes.

Not any more. Up to 5mm in length, wingless, nocturnal and covered in microscopic hairs, the bedbug was supposed to have been eliminated from the US by the pesticide DDT, which was later banned by the US Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 because of the damage it caused to fish, birds and other wildlife.

But now the insect is back, and its sudden return has been proclaimed “one of the great mysteries of entomology”. Over recent months bedbugs have been turning up in hospitals, nursing homes, cinemas, dry cleaners, schools, public housing and even some well-to-do residential homes.

They are attracted to the very thing that has caused the US, and the rest of the world, so much grief lately: carbon dioxide. While historically it is the carbon dioxide in human breath that has brought them out to feed, experts speculate that rising levels in the air could be behind their renaissance. Every day seems to bring a new tale of infestation - and, in the land that spawned the compensation culture, a new lawsuit.

Maya Rudelph, star of Saturday Night Live, is suing her New York landlord for $450,000 (£225,000) over a claim that her $13,500-a-month SoHo loft apartment is infested with the insects. In Ohio a woman is suing the Hilton hotel chain after she allegedly suffered more than 150 bites in a room, leaving her “physically scarred and emotionally damaged”. The bugs have been gone for so long now that few know how to deal with them.

“We have a whole new generation of people in our profession who had never seen a bedbug,” said Leonard Douglen, executive director of the New Jersey Pest Management Association, which organised a trade show at Rutgers University last week devoted to the pest’s resurgence.

Another problem: with DDT banned, the bedbugs laugh in the face of the pyrethroid-based compounds now used against them. “We’ve had cases where we’re spraying 200 to 300 times the label dose of toxins and we can’t kill ’em,” Michael Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky, complained during a seminar in New York last week.

Anyone unsure of what a bedbug calls mealtime is invited by Dr Potter to look at a video posted on YouTube by his university. It shows a bug, in close-up, on the flesh of a victim. The bug appears translucent at first, but after injecting the human with saliva - which contains anticoagulants and anaesthetics - the bug turns crimson as it gorges on blood.

Bedbugs are hard to see, as are their eggs, of which they can lay six a day. Although they like to feed every five to ten days, they can survive without a bloodsucking session for as long as 18 months. The good news is that while they have been known to contain pathogens such as plague and hepatitis B, bedbugs have not been linked with the transmission of any diseases.

A taste for blood

- Bedbugs usually take three to five minutes to engorge themselves on a victim’s blood

- A fluid is injected through the bug’s sharp beak helping it to obtain blood. This causes itchiness and swelling on the skin

- Once it has fed, a bedbug hides for several days to digest its meal

- A fertilised female bedbug lays up to six eggs a day, and an average of between 300 and 500 in a lifetime. Eggs are covered in a sticky substance so they adhere to surfaces

- Once an infested bed has been cleared, applying petroleum jelly to the lower two or three inches of its legs can help to prevent bugs from climbing on to it

Times Recommends

• A track to Shangri-La: Bhutan gets first rail link
• Avatar takings hit $600m in ten days
• Bomb disposal squad is Times’s Team of the Year