Bill Clinton’s offices have bed bugs, according to New York Daily News

Rush and Malloy’s Gossip column in the New York Daily News reports today that Bill Clinton’s offices are infested with bed bugs, and employees have been evacuated during treatment:

Bedbugs have sent Bill Clinton and his staff fleeing the former President’s offices, a source tells us. No word on whether WJC actually has a bed in his Harlem suite, but the infestation is said to have been so bad that exterminators told Clintonistas to take a few days off.

That’s all we know so far.

I do not wish bed bugs on anyone, but one positive outcome is that high profile bed bug infestations like this one (and the current one at Penguin) raise people’s awareness about the spread of bed bugs and about the possibility that any location really can become infested with bed bugs.

An infested set of offices in Harlem is not an isolated incident; bed bugs may have come to Clinton’s offices via someone’s infested home, or through the walls from an infested neighbor, via someone visiting the offices, or someone else’s commute to work.

I truly hope Clinton and his staffers are able to become educated and impassioned enough about bed bugs to help address the problem somehow in a bigger way, or at the very least that they are motivated to tell everyone what bed bugs are really like.

I suspect this incident will simply be fodder for political jokes, but let’s hope for more consciousness raising, shall we?

See: Side Dish: Bill Clinton’s bedbug battle.

Update (8/25): our own anonymous source tells us that Clinton’s offices are not the only ones in the building with bed bugs.