Bed bugs thrive in colleges, for many reasons.
College students move often, sometimes from semester to semester.
They also tend to travel a lot, going back and forth to one another’s dorm rooms and apartments, visiting parents’ homes, friends’ parents’ homes, and vacationing at frat houses in Madison, Wisconsin, hostels in Amsterdam or cheap resorts in Ft. Lauderdale.
Many students shop in secondhand stores and accept gifts of secondhand furniture from parents, friends, or even off the street.
All in all, they can be helpful in moving bed bugs around.
Now the Contra Costa Times tells us that college officials have been talking about how to deal with bed bugs in college housing at a recent conference.
Universities and colleges nationwide are trying to figure out how to keep the biting insects out of dormitories — no easy task when it comes to creatures that can survive pesticides.
At this weekend’s conference of university and college housing officers in Florida, two sessions deal with the pesky bugs, which also have boomed at hotels and major cities around the world. UC Berkeley residence halls had to be treated for bedbugs at least six times during the recently ended school year — up from no incidents the year before.
I am glad that university housing officers are spending time on learning about how to deal with this problem. I hope that Stanford was there to represent; the reports we’ve seen suggest the Stanford officials have a good protocol and are getting good advice from professionals about how to get rid of bed bugs when they rear their ugly heads.
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I don’t think this problem will ever go away until the government starts funding some much needed research on the topic. I wrote a short piece ranting and raving about the same problem with bed bugs in dorms.