And Nobugs, I didn’t even know California had guidelines due to the fact that the long-time reader who lives in a SF SRO said that nothing was being done about his building’s infestation of bbs and he had to take drastic measures to keep them at bay and/or get rid of them.

The bubble grows ever fatter. When is it going to explode?

I forgot the California bed bug guidelines, and so I amended my comment above. The California and San Francisco guidelines are indeed important.

Cincinnati does not yet have guidelines, though they do have a Bed Bug Remediation Commission, and the act of actually designating a hotline and services for collection of bed bug refuse (exclusively) is impressive. On the other hand, they do need to think about guidelines. For example, by providing dedicated pickups and instructions on wrapping items, are they actually encouraging people to discard things? Should people be educated about the need not to toss everything (since most experts do not recommend this course of action), as well as the need to get prompt professional treatment and to prep for it?

There’s much more to be done.

Unfortunately, we hear from San Francisco and California as a whole that the guidelines are still not being implemented fully. For example, one long-time reader who lived in a SF SRO had the health dept. out to inspect, and he showed them bed bugs, but the reaction was clearly not in line with the guidelines. In many places, laws are not being enforced.

So there’s having a plan, and there’s taking action, and they both need to be integrated and working in concert. Frankly, I am not sure that’s happening anywhere yet.

California was the first state to require education for hospitality industry staff. They have a great pdf file of pictures and educational materials that can be downloaded from their website.

Doug Summers MS

You’re right, it’s purely local.

But the only real health department response in the US, in my opinion, has been in Cincinnati. A few other cities have coughed up a fact sheet, but Cincinnati is actually doing more, and showing signs they may escalate efforts further. (Correction: California’s Bed Bug Guidelines are also impressive and much needed.)

For the purposes of considering federal responses, what can we compare this to?

A tornado or flood or fire that wipes out your belongings and makes your home barely liveable and in need of prompt, expensive work? (No, not a total destruction, but expensive enough to treat properly that people often can’t do it, or can’t do it without hardship.)

A virus? Unless you are terribly allergic, it won’t kill you. It can deprive you of sleep, which causes stress and does lead to other medical conditions. It can mess up your skin. But the real reason I compare it to a virus is because if your neighbor does not get good treatment, it can afflict you too.

People who have TB need medication. Unmedicated, they walk around spreading it to everyone. If they do not have the education and information (from doctors) that they need to take pills, then others will suffer. It is not a perfect analogy, but if lots of people were walking around with TB, getting others sick, the government would probably step in somehow.

Now imagine a combination of a tornado and a person with TB, and consider the effects mildly-to-seriously unpleasant, mildly-to-moderately destructive to health and property, and moderately-to-highly contagious.

And consider that all those effects are magnified because of a lack of education and a lack of funds, and that the unpleasantness and expense are much worse if one has no control over one’s exposure (ie in a multi-unit building or workplace or other location where one cannot personally stop one’s exposure to the source).

We definitely need a coordinated response, but I think the cities will have to request that, won’t they? And so the first step is admitting you have a problem…

Another thing management iof senior housing often does not do (I know directly from someone living in senior housing) is tell tenants when a building has bedbugs. A friend of mine asked what the PCOs in her senior housing were treating since none of the instructions handed out mentioned what bug they were trying to eradicate. She was told her building was being treated for “a new kind of roach.”

At a bedbug conference, a panel claimed that buildings do not disclose bedbugs to the tenants because “pandemonium will ensue.” But if tenants are not told adbout the bedbugs and educated, there is no united and effective front against bedbugs.

Disclosure, education, effective pest management, a united effort between all the stake holders–landlords, tenants, PCOs, building managers, politicians–that’s what we need.