The inspection was prompted by tenants’ complaints to the health department. However, Ortega expected to–and found–that many more units were infested than the number of people who complained.

Complaints about bugs at 23-25 Temple St. prompted the inspection, Ortega said.

Given the tenant complaints his office received, Ortega said he expected the infestation to be even more widespread than what inspectors found.

“Sixteen is still a significant number,” Ortega said. “If they don’t hurry up and deal with it, it’s going to keep growing.”

He added, “the minute we left, they should be calling the pest companies.”

The building’s owner, 23-25 Temple Street Realty LLC, is expected to have exterminators come in as soon as possible, Ortega said. They’re required to spray not only the infected rooms, but also the adjacent rooms and the rooms directly above and below, he said.

Because the 16 rooms were scattered throughout, most of the building will have to be treated, Ortega said.

The owners also have 35 days to correct general maintenance violations, which range from the illegal use of extension cords and hotplates to unsanitary toilets and covers missing on wall outlets, Ortega said.

Health officials will do a follow-up inspection after the building owner has had time to spray for pests and correct the violations, he said.

I wish that all health officials were as wise to bed bugs, and as proactive as these.

I also wish every building owner (whether it’s a hotel, apartment building, rooming house, or whatever) would read this. All too often, people try to get away with treating only the units of people who notice and complain about bed bugs. And in such cases, they will often find bed bugs popping up again and again.

I am also glad to see this because it shows a case where people with bed bugs called a health department and got some action. Readers often tell us their landlords are not dealing with bed bugs, and they don’t know what to do. Or if their landlord is helping them, the problem is still hard to treat.

Well, even though your city health officer may not be as clued in about bed bugs as Nelson Ortega is, why not give them a call?

Cities and counties do not realize how many people have bed bugs unless you tell them. So please, consider googling your city or county health department and giving them a buzz.

And a reminder to tenants, landlords, and government officials alike, anywhere: take a hint from Nashua Deputy Health Officer Heidi Peek, who is quoted in the article as saying:

“The reason I really wanted to get in there, I had a hunch there were people who weren’t reporting (bedbugs) – which we found to be true.”

At least 50% of people bitten by bed bugs do not react to the bites, according to Michael Potter.

Many of these will have no idea they have them.

Many more will know they have them but fear being blamed and not report it.

Still others will simply put up with the situation (unbelieveable, yes, but we hear it time and again).

Do not assume people are bed bug-free simply because they say they are.

And certainly do not assume they are bed bug-free simply because they do not call a city information hotline.

Especially if calling a city information hotline is the least intuitive thing for them to do, as in the case of NYC tenants with bed bugs. Do you hear that, New York City HPD? If you want people in NYC to call a number to tell you they have bed bugs. You have to tell them to do it.

• More bed bugs in Nashua, NH: rooming-house tenant goes to court
• Nashua, N.H. laws may change in part based on recent bed bug cases there
• Still more from Nashua, New Hampshire: fewer bed bugs at 23-25 Temple St.
• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities

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The Daily News reports that New York City is going to get a bed bug education campaign.

The article reports that there will be town hall meetings about bed bugs in Washington Heights (1/28), Astoria (2/5) and Bushwick (3/12).

Housing officials will roll out the campaign with a town hall meeting Jan. 28 in Washington Heights, where the creatures have rampaged through tenements, churches, bodegas, taxi garages and upscale co-ops overlooking the Hudson River.

Residents there have been under siege: The number of complaints has skyrocketed from 62 in 2005 to 366 last year, when 119 landlords were hit with violations.

More community forums will follow in two other neighborhoods with recent bedbug outbreaks: Astoria on Feb. 5, and Bushwick, Brooklyn, on March 12.

Tenants, homeowners and community leaders will be taught in English and Spanish how to identify bedbugs, exterminate them in a safe and low-cost manner and guard against future contaminations.

Just as important, they’ll be told what not to do, like spray an apartment, which can scatter the pests, or pour gasoline on mattresses, which poses a fire hazard.

This is all good, but I hope it will be just the start of a wider campaign to raise awareness. Television, billboard, newspaper, and bus shelter advertisements should be implemented to raise awareness, though there has been no suggestion this will happen. If the city wants to fight bed bugs, it is going to cost money, but not nearly as much as continuing to ignore the problem would have cost us in lost tourist income.

Awareness is just the start; as we’ve been saying for a long time, we need local government to track infestations. Someone needs to know where the bed bugs are and how widespread infestations are. Calls to 311 are just the tip of the iceberg. The city is still in denial about the true scope of the problem.

Another goal of the campaign: Alerting immigrants with limited English to watch out for unscrupulous merchants.

“Selling refurnished mattresses to Dominican immigrants who think they’re brand new - without telling them they’ve been reserviced - is a big business in my district,” said City Councilman Miguel Martinez (D-Washington Heights). “Unfortunately, many of those mattresses are crawling with bedbugs.”

This is important. The resale of mattresses should be banned. It should be illegal to pick up and resell any items marked as infested with bed bugs. And people need to learn to mark them as such.
Ultimately, though, the city is going to need to take a tougher line with landlords and tenants. Tenants must report bed bugs, landlords must treat them properly, PCOs must be contracted to come back until bed bugs are gone.

City inspectors should consider employing bed bug dogs to help them detect bed bugs, since visual inspections are time consuming and quick inspections often miss bed bugs.

Finally, financial assistance will be needed on several levels: homeowners and landlords may need assistance with proper treatment. And elderly, disabled, and other people will need physical and financial assistance with doing proper preparation for treatment.

I hope the city will institute a bed bug task force and staff it with entomologists who are true experts on bed bugs–and I hope these experts will be listened to and their suggestions followed. And soon.

This is no hero on a white horse, folks, but it is a start.

Check out the Daily News story here.

Update later in the day on 1/15:

Here’s a video from ABC7 Eyewitness News at 5 pm today.  (Click on the number “2″ next to the bed bug photo, to see the video.)

It is not clear what the city is going to do, besides hold these meetings and work on the mattress resale issue. I guess we will know more tomorrow when the plan is officially unveiled.

The ABC7 video features Jeffery Eisenberg of Pest Away, and a Pest Away tech reporting that they use two chemicals in fighting bed bugs (Suspend and Gentrol).

The newscasters quipped to one another at the end,

“You said you’d get a new bed, right?”

“And you said you’d get a new house!”

Sorry ladies. It’s not that easy.

• bed bugs, news at 11
• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• Last week’s Town Hall Meeting in Cincinnati
• The first “bed bug seminar” hit New York City last night

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It’s not a particularly helpful story, however.

For starters, there are inaccuracies. Let’s start with this caption below a photo of an adult bed bug:

Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/4 inch long. They are brown or red-brown in color…

No!

They are never 3/4 inches long. Bed bugs, fed or unfed, range from 1/32 to 1/6 inch long. After hatching from the egg, they have 5 nymphal stages and one adult stage. Unfed bed bug nymphs (first instars that have never eaten) are clear in color. Fed bed bugs can be anywhere from red to rust to brown in color.

(Editor’s note, the error was made less egregious: by late Sunday night, it said “Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/8 inch long.” This is still inaccurate, however.)

This matters because people considering whether they might have bed bugs need to know the correct size, and that unfed nymphs are translucent, not red or brown.

Also, the “do’s and don’ts” suggests people “bag books, papers, most loose objects, and contents of closets so exterminators have access to all cracks and crevices in the home.”

This is not good advice in and of itself. If you bag up everything in your home, or discard it (for that matter), before a Pest Control Operator (PCO) has inspected and verified the presence of bed bugs, then it may be very difficult for them to diagnose your problem. You may end up with all your stuff in bags and PCOs telling you you don’t have bed bugs. And they may be wrong.

What’s more, simply bagging stuff that contains bed bugs or their eggs means you have bags full of bed bugs. What are you going to do with that, now?

Your PCO may advice you to carefully inspect and clean and bag items, for a time during treatment. Make sure you do so only after the problem has been identified by the PCO, and after the PCO has told you when you will be removing stuff from those bags. The answers on that seem to vary. Reading this FAQ might help you be prepared to discuss the issue with your PCO.

One interesting tidbit was an update of the previous data from HPD on bed bug complaints and violations.

The numbers are off the charts: In 2004, New Yorkers placed 537 calls to 311 about bedbugs in their homes; the city slapped 82 landlords with bedbug violations, data show.

In the fiscal year that ended in June, 6,889 infestation complaints were logged and 2,008 building owners were hit with summonses.

They must get rid of the pests within 30 days or face possible action in Housing Court, the city Department of Housing, Preservation & Development says.

This would be for fiscal year July 2006-June 2007. You’ll recall that approximately 1/3 fewer complaints were logged by 311 the prior fiscal year, and less than half as many were declared actual bed bug cases.

But these numbers are misleading because they only represent cases where those with bed bugs were tenants in city apartments and called 311 to report their bed bugs. As I have been saying for more than a year, most people do not do this. Out of a hundred tenants in NYC with bed bugs, I’d be surprised if more than one or two called 311. Most people don’t even realize this is an option–they know from past experience that pest complaints are directed at landlords. Moreover, those who do know, more often than not, choose not to call, because they’d rather work through the landlord if possible, rather than file a housing complaint and risk alientating the landlord. (This is often the last resort.)

The numbers are also misleading because they don’t include public housing, which logged, “1,708 verified bedbug cases in 277 public housing projects this year, the city Housing Authority says.”

The numbers also do not include statistics for those who own co-operative apartments, condos, or other housing.

The statistics offered on bed bugs in the schools (50 schools suffered a total of 74 bed bug “cases”) don’t line up with data the same newspaper shared back in February 2007, when the same newspaper reported that 43 schools had identified a total of 95 live bed bugs. (The story is gone, so you will have to read about it here.) Though it’s interesting to know that only an additional 7 schools have discovered bed bugs in the last ten months, it seems they must be defining “bed bug case” differently now than then, to have gone from 95 “bugs” to 74 “cases”.

Any statistics from the schools are skewered, however, since teachers have to see, catch, and mail away a bed bug for verification before the presence of a bed bug in the classroom will be registered. And while this may seem reasonable, anyone here will tell you you can be bitten badly and for a very long time before you ever see one. A lone teacher in a busy NYC classroom has slim chance of finding a bed bug on a student. Shall we assume, then, there are more?

Perhaps the most intriguing story in the article was that of Bernard Spitzer’s apartment building. We’re told,

[Bed bugs] even contaminated five or six apartments in the swanky rental tower at 220 E. 72nd St. owned by Bernard Spitzer, the governor’s 83-year-old father.

Several tenants described a persistent, if intermittent, infestation on the 15th, 16th and 17th floors.

A few infested floors, midway up a high-rise: nothing unusual there. But wait:

Spitzer’s 28-story building sits atop the six-story home of Marymount Manhattan College, which discovered seven infestations in two residence halls. The problem was under control by October, a spokeswoman said.

Marymount Manhattan has three residences for students, none of which are in this building. It does cause one to wonder whether there is any connection between the incidents on the 15th-17th floors and in the homes of some of those who spend part of their time in the first six floors.

We also get an update on the city’s “response” to bed bugs:

City officials say HPD inspectors are increasing enforcement as complaints mushroom and the Health Department is handling education and prevention efforts. It’s not more actively involved because its focus is on disease-spreading pests, officials said.

“That’s not good enough,” said City Councilman Gale Brewer (D-upper West Side.) “It’s great that we’re not smoking as much, and great that we’re not eating trans fats, but we need to focus on bedbugs in the same aggressive manner.”

Brewer wants to create a Bedbug Task Force and bar the sale of reconditioned mattresses, which the Bloomberg administration opposes because it “would adversely impact lower-income New Yorkers,” a mayoral spokesman said.

I love Brewer’s comments about smoking and trans fats, both of which are banned from local restaurants. Bed bugs are not.

Brewer first went down this Bed Bug Task Force/resales of mattresses road in the fall of 2006, but we haven’t really seen any results yet from these initiatives.

All in all, the city’s response is very ostrich-like. Let’s compare with other cities in the US: San Francisco has guidelines for dealing with bed bugs in apartment buildings, hotels, and other locations, as does the state of California. Lexington, KY and Cincinnati, Ohio health departments (yes, health departments, Mr. Bloomberg) have both declared war on bed bugs.

Lexington tells residents to call the health department if they think they have bed bugs.

Cincinnati has a hotline just for bed bug information. They also have dedicated bed bug trash pickup for discarded furniture. We think encouraging residents to throw furniture away, rather than helping them pay for treatment, is misguided. But Cincinnati is trying. They think education is key. Hear that, Mr. Bloomberg?

San Francisco City Supervisor Chris Daly got $63,000 in this year’s budget to help low-income residents pay for laundry and freezing of possessions. San Francisco politicians listened to SRO activists who told them this money was needed. Because poor people seriously can’t afford to do the necessary tenant’s part of bed bug treatment.

And let me be clear: not one of these localities is doing enough to combat bed bugs. None of them, not by a long shot. Much more help is needed, especially laws about disclosure of infestations, tracking of infestations by government agencies (so someone is actually paying attention to where bed bugs are spreading), and financial assistance to landlords, homeowners, and tenants who are having trouble paying for preparations and effective treatment. Bringing back some of the recently outlawed, more effective pesticides for targeted bed bug use would go a long way (and no, I do not mean DDT).

Meanwhile, NYC is doing none of this. The NYC Department of Education has deployed “bed bug kits” to schools. Their website claims:

Schools are not an ideal location for bed bugs to reproduce, because they are nocturnal insects that require feeding prior to reproduction; but in the event that bedbugs do show up in our schools, the DOE’s Pest Management Unit is providing a Bed Bug Kit to deal with specimens.

This is erroneous information. Bed bugs are nocturnal if food is available at night, pure and simple. Transplanted to schools, they will bite, reproduce, and thrive. This is an example of wishful thinking, which seems to be the backbone of NYC’s bed bug policy.

NYC does not even tell tenants to call 311 about bed bugs, unless they wade through the HPD website looking for this directive.

And yet bases its assessment of the severity of the problem on those calls.

Discuss.

If you have trouble with the article link at top, try this one.

• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• Excerpt from article re NYC Department of Ed policy
• The UFT (NYC teachers’ union): how do we get the city to be proactive about bed bugs?
• Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington in NYC: latest bed bug lawsuit

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But this article in Friday’s Toronto Sun has some interesting statistics. On the one hand,

According to Reg Ayre, the city’s Healthy Environments manager, Toronto Public Health received 194 calls for bed bug inquiries in 2004, 147 calls in 2005 and 160 in the first nine months of 2006.

That’s just calls to the public health department, though.

The little insects are spreading their non-existent wings and once again showing up in beds, and homes, across Canada, making them a significant issue of public concern.

“We started receiving anecdotal reports that bed bugs were on the rise,” Ayre said. “Prior to 2003-04 it was a non-issue for us.”

Four years later, Ayre says they are constantly sending investigators out to bed bug calls around the city.

From surveys of pest control companies, Ayre said it’s clear all communities are seeing an increase in bed bugs this year.

Disturbingly, individual Toronto PCOs record much higher figures, with one PCO seeing as many as four times TPH’s yearly figure per month.

One company said it performs 1,200 bed bug treatments per year while another said it’s spraying 400-500 homes per month.

Readers will recall a similar discrepancy between official complaints and PCOs’ reports in New York City: six months after the HPD tallied around 4600 calls and 1190 actual bed bug cases reported to 311 in twelve months (summer 2005-summer 2006), one well-known PCO claimed to be getting 85 actual bed bug calls a day (and presumably another 15 false alarms). That’s 22,100 cases per year for one PCO alone, if numbers held steady. (And that was a year ago.)

Clearly someone needs to get data on the full number of homes–public and private rentals, owned homes, as well as institutions– treated every year. Data on bed bugs in hotels and other businesses needs to be collected too. Even if bed bugs have not been proven to transmit disease, they definitely cause stress and much loss of property and income. They hurt individuals and business owners.

I’ve long said we need actual data on bed bug cases in New York City, where the only official data on bed bug cases comes from renters’ calls to 311 (the city’s information line). How people are supposed to know to call 311 with a pest complaint, which everyone knows is something you call your landlord about, is a mystery.

However, why most people don’t call 311 in such circumstances is not a mystery: want to stay in your apartment and not piss off the landlord? Give him/her a chance to solve your pest problem before reporting the building to the housing department.

And that, my friends, means most cases are under the government’s radar, and NYC does not have any reliable data about how many people here have bed bugs. We need a bed bug study done in New York, and so does Toronto.

Read about the 2003 Toronto data here on the CDC website.

• bed bugs: incidence studies needed in NYC and elsewhere
• Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington in NYC: latest bed bug lawsuit
• Toronto Public Health now has a Bed Bug Action Committee. Action, people.
• Reg Ayre of Toronto Public Health: bed bugs a “health concern,” not a “health hazard”

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I am astonished to find that, not even three months later, a second “The Hunt” column results in a bedbugged apartment. In this case, a young couple (Jon Werberg and Helene Mattera) moved into a semi-gut-renovated apartment on East 117th Street, only to find various troubles, including the elusive cimex lectularius, Mr. Bed Bug.

When the two arrived in late summer, the workers weren’t quite finished. “The hassles started right from the beginning,” Mr. Werberg said. They included sporadic hot water, trash in the hallways, rats and — worst of all — bedbugs. The couple spent hundreds of dollars on laundry. They now wish they had thought harder about building maintenance and general cleanliness.

Although bed bugs can often accompany poor building maintenance and hygiene problems, there is no relation between them, and it’s important to keep this in mind.

Ms. Mattera continues,

“My favorite thing about the apartment is the fact that two of my good friends live within minutes,” Ms. Mattera said. “That is the greatest thing, just calling them and saying, ‘I’ll meet you downstairs.’”

Which is fine, if the bed bugs are gone. If they’re not, it kind of takes all the fun out of the apartment.

It does make you wonder, if the New York Times can follow two couples in an apartment search leading to bed bugs, twice in twelve weeks, how many people in NYC are moving into bedbugged digs?

We know bed bugs in NYC are spreading like wildfire.

Maybe the New York Times should spend some time investigating how far bed bugs have truly spread, and how common they now are. Besides the two “The Hunt” columns, and an op ed, the paper last covered bed bugs in October 2006, using the city’s data on bed bug violations from the summer of 2006 (only those cases reported to 311 and declared “bed bugs” by city inspectors). It’s time to challenge the relevance of data that relies on people calling the city’s information hotline to report a pest most only call their landlords or a PCO about. It’s time for real  data.

You can read all about this failed “Hunt” and weep, here.

• Bed bugs: now appearing in news articles which are not about bed bugs
• Washington Post prints correction thanks to bed bug activist
• Fox employee suing building management, maintenance over bed bug bites
• How bad are bed bugs in Toronto? Nobody knows for sure.

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Bushwick, Brooklyn is home to two large dueling loft buildings: 248 and 255 McKibben Street. Yes, that’s right: they’re buildings so hip, fun, and now, they have their own myspace pages. (Don’t laugh, but we have one too.)

Gawker did an article today about the buildings’ problems with bed bugs, though judging from the comments there and on myspace, only the residents of 248 are claiming to have a problem with bed bugs.

The Bed Bug Registry has complaints from thirteen different tenants about the building. (For its neighbor 255 McKibben, there are none.)

248 McKibben also has a whole blog running on myspace about the building’s alleged bed bug epidemic. It makes for interesting reading. The residents are correct that the entire building must be treated, if the infestation is as extensive as they claim it is. There’s a reluctancy on the part of some residents to call HPD (311) and file a housing complaint, for fear they won’t get references from their landlord in future.

Such concerns abound on our forums too. I have not heard from anyone who has filed an HPD report on a landlord and who has not been able to rent after that. I do know multiple people who have “pissed landlords off” by expecting to have pest problems, leaks, etc. fixed, and whose landlords were so happy to see such “troublemakers” move on that they gave the next landlord glowing reviews!

So I think the idea is kind of an urban myth. If it happens, though, surely the tenants could clip articles about how infested their building was, and show it to future real estate brokers as evidence that they had good reason to file an HPD report. Frankly, shouldn’t the real estate brokers recognize that if HPD agrees with the tenant that their building is infested (and files said report), then the tenant should not be blacklisted in this way?

Or are we all going to end up living with bed bugs because we’re afraid our landlords will not give us a good reference when we want to move to another building with different amenities and more bed bugs? Because if everyone is afraid to demand their landlords treat the problem, we’ll all have bed bugs soon.

• Shameful landlord AIMCO: biggest landlord in USA refuses to deal with bed bugs
• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• 25 Grant Street in Denver, Colorado: bed bugs for two years
• Bed bugs in homeless shelters, casinos, hotels, apartments: Waynesboro, Atlantic City, Greenpoint, Toronto

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But why don’t people call 311?

Although technically anyone who is a renter and has bed bugs can do it, most people don’t. Why? Well, most of us are used to calling our building managers, superintendants, etc. when a problem of any kind arises. It even seems like the courteous thing to do–to tell the landlord, rather than simply ratting them out. And so most of us would only report bed bugs in our homes if the landlord has been notified by us and is either doing nothing, or slow to take action, or taking action which is not solving the problem.

We have not had a lot of reports from readers who called 311–in fact I can remember a couple in hundreds and hundreds of readers who described their NYC bed bug sagas on the site, the yahoo group, or the forums. This is merely one reason why I insist that NYC has far, far more bed bug cases than the “official” tally the city produces. The city is basing its sense of the scope of the city’s bed bug problem only on renters who call 311, which is why they report fewer than 4600 complaints and over 1100 actual cases in fiscal year 2005-2006. These figures leave out renters who complain to landlords directly (which I would venture is the vast majority), all tenants of NYCHA (public housing) buildings, who are supposed to call their building staff (not 311), all co-op and condo and other homeowners, and residents of hospitals, college dorms, in addition to hotels and hostels.

Leaving aside for a moment the need for tenants’ cooperation with treatment (which is vital), many tenants have landlords that do not do anything, take half-arsed steps (for example, inspecting and treating only the “complainer’s” unit), or hire PCOs who do not solve the problem (either because they don’t know what to do, or in many case because the landlord won’t authorize and pay them to do everything they need to, like come multiple times, or treat multiple units). And even when this is the case, and treatment does not occur or fails, it seems like most people still won’t follow up with 311. We hear that for many it’s due to fear of getting a bad reference when they next move (and let me tell you, at this point, they usually really want to move.)

I wish the city had some way of collecting data on infestations that could record every infestation. It need not be terribly complicated (for example, as Toronto did in 2003, they could require PCOs to disclose locations of all treated homes to the city). If this were implemented, we’d know how big the problem really is, and maybe the city would have to do more to help fight bed bugs. Ah, maybe that’s why the City of New York doesn’t want to know how many people really have bed bugs!

Anyway, what happens when you call 311 to report bed bugs?

I have obtained some reliable information on this.

When you call 311, the HPD will let the owner of the building know of the complaint and assign it a number.

An HPD inspector will come to your home.

S/he’ll check key areas where bed bugs may be hiding, but s/he won’t touch or remove any of your stuff. S/he may ask you to move things, lift cushions, blankets, etc.
If the home has evidence of a bed bug infestation, the inspector will issue a violation, but s/he won’t do this based on bites, on the basis that you may have been bitten elsewhere. They also cannot diagnose based on the smell (which is probably a good thing, since so few people claim to have smelled “the bed bug smell”).

The bed bug violation is based on Administrative Code section 27-2017 (which related to owner’s responsibility for keeping homes free of certain insects including bed bugs). The owner will have 30 days to correct the problem, and they have to certify that it’s been corrected two weeks after the 30 days are up. They may ask for 30 days more. (This is reasonable, since bed bugs usually take three or more treatments).

Here’s where it gets interesting: if there are several infested apartments in the building, HPD sends the violation to the Department of Mental Health and Hygiene (DOHMH), and DOHMH issues an “Order to Abate.” This orders the landlord to deal with the problem throughout the building.

I am really not sure what this means in practice, but it suggests that if you have bed bugs in NYC, and your landlord is not treating them swiftly, or thoroughly, then it might be in your interest to not only call 311, but ensure other infested tenants do too. It might be well worth your while to talk to others at length about bed bugs and the signs of them (besides bites, which many people with bed bugs apparently do not suffer from). Because if you are going the 311 route, and the inspectors find bed bugs in several units, the problem may well be addressed more thoroughly and more swiftly. I’d love to hear from people who networked with fellow tenants in this way.

I also have some concerns about the actual inspections. We have heard many stories of well-experienced PCOs who’d treated many bed bug cases, and still often find it challenging to locate bed bugs. Parakeets recently attended a bed bug conference where the story was shared that multiple experienced bed bug PCOs could not find the bed bugs they knew for a fact were in a particular room. Knowing that a careful inspection can take a lot of time (and might require the inspector to actually touch things himself or herself), I am concerned about how thoroughly HPD’s bed bug inspections are carried out.

I hope that the HPD is making sure its inspectors are being trained on subtle signs of bed bugs (like the “poppy seed” fecal specks, and tiny or larger blood spots on sheets–which can be a pinprick where you bled, or a bed bug sized one where a bug was squashed). This is important, since many people do not see bed bugs or do not see them often, no matter how many times they overturn their mattresses, part their sofa cushions, or fling back the sheets. It stands to reason that housing inspectors are probably trained to recognize the most obvious signs (as PCOs without bed bug experience doubtless are)–the classic fecal stains on a mattress, fecal stains on a headboard, actual bed bugs clinging to a mattress–the signs we see on websites in photos.

Click to see the host of University of Kentucky entomologist Michael Potter’s photo: the Purdue University page on bed bugs

Ask around on Bedbugger and you’ll find out that in so many cases, our mattresses did not look “like that.” Our sofas did not look “like that.” We don’t find insects hanging around in daylight and we don’t know why they’re called “wall lice” since we don’t see them scurrying or hanging around. Many do, but it is not the majority in my experience. We go to dermatologists because we don’t know we have bed bugs for a very long time. Those who are allergic are in many cases going to file a complaint long before signs are obvious or visible without a whole lot of searching.

I’d welcome your thoughts on the HPD process as described above. If you filed a complaint with 311, please tell us what happened. If you didn’t, tell us why not. Let’s make a statement here about what’s wrong with this system. Of course, if you feel like it worked for you, I’d love to know that too!

• FAQ: My landlord hired a PCO who comes twice a month, and we still have bed bugs
• New Yorkers: a real-life “I called 311 to report bed bugs” story
• Nashua, NH Health Officers on prowl for bed bugs
• Bed bugs & tenant organizing: don’t take this lying down

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According to the Lexington Herald-Leader of 10/14/2006, Lexington, KY had a huge increase in reported cases of bed bugs in the last few years:

Complaints about bedbugs in Lexington have almost tripled since 2005, the Lexington-Fayette County Health Department said yesterday, and it warned residents to take precautions against a problem that is growing here and nationwide.

Public health officials said they’ve investigated 19 complaints about bedbugs in various areas of Lexington so far this year, compared to seven complaints in all of 2005. In response, the health department has formed a task force, in cooperation with the Urban County Government, to start distributing educational pamphlets, spokeswoman Jessica Cobb said.

Meanwhile, much larger New York, NY also had a huge increase in reported cases of bed bugs in the last few years:

In the last fiscal year, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development received 4,638 complaints about bedbugs in rental housing – nearly five times as many in the previous year.

Lexington: 19 complaints last year; NYC: 4,638 complaints last year. In New York, it is notable that these 4,638 cases only represent tenants who reported cases to the city. Homeowners with infestations would not call 311 to report bed bugs. And most tenants wouldn’t either; the normal course of action when a tenant has a pest, is for the tenant to call the landlord or superintendent. I would never think of calling 311 unless my landlord did not respond to a complaint. In short, 4,638 is the tip of the iceberg. I’d be surprised if there were not 10 times as many tenants with infestations who did not call 311. And many more homeowners, who would never have call to report their home’s infestation to a city agency.

Lexington 2000 (human) population: 260512; NYC 2000 (human) population: 8008278.

There are almost 31 times as many people in NYC as in Lexington.

There were 244 times as many reports of bed bug infestations in the last year in NYC compared to Lexington.

New York’s reported infestations are up five times in one year.

Lexington’s are up three times in one year.

And yet the New York City government, after 4,638 reported cases, is not doing anything; our short-sighted city officials recently claimed poor people should have the right to save money by purchasing used mattresses, a known cause of the spread of bed bugs.

And the government in Lexington, after 19 reported cases, is spearheading a leafleting campaign, to educate the populace.

Discuss.

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