Earlier this week, there was the bed bug bill in the U.S. Congress.

And yesterday, an article in the Maine Switch (a website for those in Greater Portland) about the city’s yearly trash pick-up of bulky trash items. Not surprisingly, the day is a yearly impromptu festival for bargain hunters and curb-crawling small-time entrepreneurs:

Just like spring flowers, the sprouting of ratty recliners and beat-up toys on the sidewalk is a sign of the changing seasons in Portland. These cast-off belongings cluttering the grassy strip between the pavement and the sidewalk represent the city’s annual bulky waste pick-up. And like a siren song, yard sale buffs, bargain-hunters and freegans can’t resist this annual opportunity to turn trash into treasure.

I’ve known people who’ve practically furnished their whole apartments with curbside finds. One of the best was the gorgeous sleigh bed a friend found a few years ago. One of the worst was a couch covered in cat hair (and god know what else), which, thankfully, only made a brief appearance in another friend’s apartment.

But the main point of the article, discussed at length, is the dangers of bed bugs lurking in used items.

Oh, but beware those mattresses. Should you haul one home (like one hapless Craigslist poster did recently), you may gain some unwelcome roommates.

“If you’re picking up a mattress or other pieces of furniture, you need to be conscious that they may have bed bugs,” says Doug Gardner, Portland’s director of health and human services. “There’s no way to tell with 100% accuracy.”

That is until you install your lovely find in your home and begin to wonder why you’re suddenly covered in little red bumps.

Unfortunately, unlike Doug Gardner, the author mostly fixates on “mattresses,” whereas any used items might potentially bring bed bugs to your home. Although to her credit, the author later notes wooden furninture is also a problem, I’d stress that other items are also potentially infested. Many, many people throw out everything they own, even though it’s almost never necessary (and they’re not usually acting on the advice of bed bug experts). Throwing everything out can cost you lots of money, won’t get rid of your bed bugs, and will spread them to neighbors and others.

The article has two other Bedbugger points of interest.

First, because of bed bugs, Portland started giving their refuse collectors Tyvek suits last year for the annual bulky trash pickup day. Unfortunately, the city isn’t itself attempting to warn trash pickers about bed bugs, for example here, or here on this PDF flyer. Even a brief one-line warning would help. I understand from this article that they don’t want to seem to be condoning the practice of trash picking during the bulky trash days, but warning against it would not do so and would be germane to avoiding further spread of the problem.

Second point of interest: if you have bed bugs and rent in Portland, the article notes that your landlord does need to get rid of them. If not, you can call the city inspections department:

If apartment renters find themselves assaulted by bed bugs and can’t get their landlord to respond, [city inspections director Jeanie] Bourke’s office fields the complaints. Her team of inspectors then makes sure the landlord hires a pesticide company to spray the place down and that the residents follow a tightly regimented routine requiring the washing of everything and the sealing of clothes and mattresses in plastic.

Thanks to the Maine Switch for focusing readers’ attention on the dangers of trash picking in 2008.

• Portland’s public housing and bed bugs
• Chinches de cama en Espanol
• How to spread bed bugs, in three easy steps!
• bed bugs at Pace University; bed bug buzz in Portland, Oregon

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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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