Jeremy Sparig spent months fighting bedbugs. Now, to some people, he is something best avoided. “They don’t want to hug you anymore; they don’t want you coming over,” said Mr. Sparig, of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a borough of New York City.

“You’re like a leper.” Beyond the bites and the itching, the bother and the expense, victims of New York’s most recent plague are finding that an invisible scourge awaits them in the form of bedbug stigma. Friends begin to keep their distance. Invitations are rescinded. For months, one woman said, her mother was afraid to tell her that she had an infestation.

Fear and suspicion are creeping in wherever bedbugs are turning up, which is almost everywhere: “Public health agencies across the country have been overwhelmed by complaints about bedbugs,” said a joint statement in August from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency. The bugs, while they are not known to transmit disease, can travel on clothing, jump into pocketbooks and lurk in furniture. And they do, of course, bite.

Even in New York, where the roach and the rat are considered members of the melting pot, no one wants to be associated with the minuscule pests that treat sleeping bodies as smorgasbords. Whole livelihoods are considered in jeopardy.

Tutors and music teachers, who go from apartment to apartment, fear losing their clients. A caterer canceled work and dressed in long sleeves and pants during July’s hottest days so no one would see her bites. “Who is going to want me in their private home?” said the woman .

In recent weeks, bedbugs snuggled into the seats at a movie theater in Times Square, crept around a Victoria’s Secret store on Lexington Avenue and the offices of Elle Magazine, and hitchhiked into the Brooklyn district attorney’s office. “There were attorneys that didn’t want to come to our building,” said an assistant district attorney .

“I don’t blame them; I wouldn’t want to go somewhere where there is known to be bedbugs.” Bedbugs, once nearly eradicated, have spread across New York City, in part because of the decline in the use of the pesticide DDT. According to the city’s Department of Housing and Preservation, the number of bedbug violations has gone up 67 percent in the last two years.

In the most recent fiscal year, which ended on June 30, the city’s telephone help line recorded 12,768 bedbug complaints, 16 percent more than the previous year and 39 percent above the year before. A New York City community health survey showed that in 2009, one in 15 New Yorkers had bedbugs in their homes, a number that is probably higher now. Anecdotal evidence suggests that bedbugs’ social cost is rising as well.

The caterer’s best friend was too scared to invite her to come out to her summer house this summer. When Hilary Davis, a waitress from Brooklyn, had her apartment treated two years ago because of bedbugs, her friends and even her boyfriend refused to take her in.

“So I was left in a bug-ridden apartment alone,” she said. Everyday behaviors are changing, too. “I don’t go to the movies anymore, I’m not sitting in those seats, and don’t sit on wooden benches,” said Gale A. Brewer, a member of the City Council. But the panic is not widespread. “It’s all part of life,” said Janice Page of the Bronx, another New York borough, who recently thought she had received two bites while traveling in California. (They turned out to be mosquito bites.)

“What am I going to do? Walk around with a fumigation can?” “It’s like terrorism,” said a woman as she ran into the recently sprayed movie theater. “Just cross your fingers and keep going.” A bill that would require landlords to disclose to potential tenants whether any apartment in the building has had bedbugs within the previous year has passed the city Legislature despite opposition from landlords .

Perhaps no one is more attuned to bedbug paranoia than Steven Brodsky, a Midtown Manhattan psychotherapist. He treats people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and has attracted a number of bedbug victims.

Patients tell him they feel like they are “sacrificing themselves because they’re literally being eaten as they sleep,” he said. “It really is like H1N1,’’ Dr. Brodsky said, using the clinical term for last year’s threat, swine flu. “Everybody is concerned about it, wondering if they’ll be next.” And, once the last patient of the day has left, Mr Brodsky confesses, “I do check the chair to see if there’s any-thing