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Brief report on Seattle NPMA Bed Bug Symposium; bed bug dog awareness among customers

nobugsonme — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:43:59 +0000

A brief report from KOMO in Seattle on Thursday’s NPMA Bed Bug Symposium.

It was interesting that the reporter noted that attendees who run hotels and buildings do not want to be filmed. They feared people would think their buildings have bed bugs, and they’d lose customers.

Since bed bugs can infest any multi-unit building, or any hotel, I would personally prefer to rent an apartment from a property manager (or a hotel room from a hotel manager) who attended educational events such as this one, and learned how to prevent, detect, and get rid of bed bugs in their property. I am sure many would agree with me on this.

One concern I have based on the KOMO news video alone is the reporter’s claim that bed bug sniffing k9 April “can come to your house and right away, let you know if you have a [bed bug] problem.”

Bed bug sniffing dogs can be a useful technology in the fight against bed bugs. But they are simply a tool: they alert to the presence of bed bugs; a diligent and careful search by the human handler is required to verify the presence of bed bugs.

Ideally, the dog’s alert is part of the process, not the entire procedure, but many dog handlers apparently don’t confirm the presence of bed bugs after an alert. I am not sure customers are generally knowledgeable about this — and news reports about the bed bug k9 industry are often misleading about how dog inspections should be carried out. In her discussion last night with David Letterman, Mary-Louise Parker also focused on the bed bug sniffing dog’s alert (”the dog sits!”) rather than the actual confirmation of the alert by a handler.

Perhaps Sean Rollo (of the Bed Bug Resource) or others who attended the Seattle symposium will share some highlights or other comments?

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Bed bugs in two patient units of a Columbus, Ohio children’s hospital

nobugsonme — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 04:10:53 +0000

A Columbus hospital has recently had bed bugs in two patient units, according to the Columbus Dispatch. Misti Crane writes:

Bedbugs found in two patient units at Nationwide Children’s Hospital prompted aggressive cleaning and the relocation of patients, according to a statement issued by the hospital.

It said the problem, which has been eliminated, was not due to poor sanitation, nor was it a health threat.

The hospital has hired a pest-control expert and is using a specially trained dog that can detect the presence of bedbugs. The hospital has many units of varying sizes, but officials would not say which units or how many rooms were affected.

“We will continue to take whatever measures are necessary to address this issue, which has unfortunately become chronic in central Ohio,” the statement says.

It’s not the first hospital to become infested with bed bugs, and it won’t be the last.

Bed bugs are hitchhikers: they come into hospitals with people, and other people may then leave the hospital with bed bugs too.

It’s important for hospitals to have a plan for this eventuality, so they can immediately take the necessary steps to get rid of the problem.

via The Columbus Dispatch : Hospital takes action against bedbugs.Similar Posts:

Bakersfield family gets bed bug help from the Discovery Channel

nobugsonme — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:48:54 +0000

Remember Kay Hammer, in Bakersfield, who we told you about last November? She had tossed out most of the family’s furniture. The landlord would not deal with the problem, so she called Eyewitness News 29.

Iso Tech Pest Management’s Mike Masterson brought in a bed bug dog and did a thermal treatment. They also found bed bugs in several other units of the building and in her daughter’s home across town.

The story will air on the Discover Channel’s Verminators series, probably in the summer. You can view the Eyewitness News 29 segment below.

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Bed bug sniffing dogs abound

nobugsonme — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:51:24 +0000

Dog Nose

Originally uploaded by jason044

The dog’s nose is a potentially powerful tool in the fight against bed bugs. It’s a war where the enemy is notoriously stealthy. We need all the help we can get.

Bed bug canines are always popular in the news media. Like some other bed bug-related services (such as structural fumigation and thermal treatment), every region does not have easy access to canine bed bug detection teams, so the news stories both do companies the favor of spreading the word about their existence, but also help bed bug sufferers, who might not know this option is out there. Luckily for us, they are popping up in more and more geographic areas.

One recent bed bug sniffing dog business was started in the Cincinnati area by LeAnne Montgomery and her husband John. LeAnne is better known to longtime participants on our Bedbugger Forums as “bugbait” — she was an active Bedbugger who came to the site to get support in dealing with her own bed bugs, long before the couple went into the bed bug dog business and started Canine Bed Bug Finder.

LeAnne and John did not have access to a bed bug k9 service when their home was infested. You can read a recent story here about the Montgomerys’ new bed bug sniffing dog Hershey, who was trained at Florida Canine Academy. Congratulations to LeAnne and John — I hope Hershey finds a lot of bed bugs!

There was also a recent story in the news about a new bed bug sniffing dog in Las Vegas.

Finally, Ontario’s Michael Goldman (of Purity Pest Control) and his bed bug sniffing dog Kody (who is said to have been the world’s first bed bug sniffing dog) were featured in a Discovery Channel story last week.

The segment on Kody starts about six minutes in (you can move the cursor past the iceberg story after the initial brief commercial). Click here to see the story.

It’s important to note that all bed bug sniffing dogs and handlers are not equally skilled. Dogs and handlers must constantly train in order to maintain the dog’s skills.

If you need help determining whether you have bed bugs, do your research, ask for k9 recommendations on the forums, or references from the handlers.

Are there any other specific questions readers should ask a bed bug dog handler, before hiring him/her? Please share your answers in the comments below.

Thanks to the anonymous tipster in the forums who pointed me to the segment on Kody!Similar Posts:

More bed bug coverage in New York — but not enough, considering

nobugsonme — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 14:00:29 +0000

We are getting more press on bed bugs this week, presumably due to the excellent City Council Hearing held on three bed bug bills on Tuesday. I personally don’t feel I am seeing enough coverage of the event itself.

The Daily News weighed in today with “Boro with the most bedbug calls: B’klyn 42% jump in complaints to 311.”

Newsday is working the same AMNY story I posted about Tuesday.

And the New York Times has what is mostly a standard-issue article about a bed bug dog team. No offense to Bedbug Finders in Connecticut, but the Times should be dealing with the bills covered in the Hearing and the related issues in more depth, this week.

When the last hearing on Intro. 57 happened in 2006, there were news stories on NY1 and another channel, including interviews with people who testified, people who had had bed bugs, as well as Council Member Gale Brewer.

Even though Brewer held a press conference Tuesday before the Hearing, I have not personally seen any footage in the television news. Have you?

(Stay tuned for more from me on the hearing.)
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San Diego State University: don’t wait for students to show you a bed bug

nobugsonme — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 20:18:40 +0000

The Daily Aztec (an independent student paper) reported yesterday on the bed bug situation at San Diego State University. Officials there say there are currently no known bed bug cases, though the article notes there have been bed bugs found on campus in recent months.

One place bed bugs were discovered: the “egg chairs” in the Counseling and Psychological Services office. (This makes sense: people with bed bugs are under a lot of stress, and liable to seek help!) Director of the center, Dr. Sandy Jorgensen-Funk:

“We immediately shut down the chairs,” Jorgensen-Funk said, “so that they weren’t used by students, as soon as we found this out.”

Jorgensen-Funk added that the chairs were then treated for a second time in November and again last month.

“We didn’t know what they were,” she said. “We just wanted to make sure that we weren’t exposing students to a problem.”

Whether any students were exposed to the problem before the treatments were conducted is not known at this time.

The existence of bed bugs in the egg chairs strongly suggests the existence of bed bugs elsewhere on campus.

Here’s why: the bed bugs did not spontaneously arise in the egg chairs. Someone who had been exposed to bed bugs sat in the chairs, and the bed bugs stayed there. They could have climbed off a person, or walked directly out of a person’s bag.

They may have come from a dorm. Or a student’s off-campus home. But either way, we have to consider that if the bed bugs hitchhiked to one location, they can (and probably did) go to others as well.

We do not know how many bed bugs were seen in the chair, but it is also possible that the bed bugs were not harboring in the chair but climbed up into it to bite the person. Rooms, structures, can be infested as easily as pieces of furniture. The actual harborage could have been a nearby desk, a crack in the wall, another chair.

It is highly likely that anyone who sat in the chairs was exposed to bed bugs, and may possibly have taken them to other places — classrooms, library, cafeterias, dorm rooms, off-campus housing, etc. Bed bugs are hitch-hikers.

However, although the presence of bed bugs in the egg chairs suggests bed bugs are somewhere else on campus, The Daily Aztec reports having heard several bed bug reports from various residences which were found to be “unsubstantiated after discussions with the Office of Housing Administration and Student Health Services.”

Benita Mann, manager of custodial and maintenance services for the OHA, said there hasn’t been any known bed bug problem in campus housing for some time.

“Several years ago we had a problem,” Mann said, “but those buildings have since been torn down.”

Yet those bed bugs did not spontaneously appear in the egg chairs. Whoever responded to the egg chair bed bug infestation must sure have been asking himself or herself “who brought those bed bugs in, and where else did bed bugs from the chairs end up?”

If students come to the on-campus health service suspecting bed bugs, the health service wants to see an actual insect sample before they take a bed bug complaint seriously:

Dr. Gregg Lichtenstein, medical director at SHS, said complaints of bed bug bites isn’t something SHS sees very often.

“It’s not anything regular,” Lichtenstein said. “We see people who come in with bites of various sorts on an occasional basis – and most of them are, frankly, flea bites.”

Lichtenstein said that student inquiries about bed bug bites are rare, and no one can actually recall seeing a bed bug being brought in to confirm a diagnosis.

While it is absolutely true that one cannot diagnose bed bugs based on skin reactions, it is also absolutely true that it is difficult — except in heavy infestations — to catch a bed bug.

Students simply cannot be expected to find, catch, and bring in a bed bug sample.

Instead, when bed bugs are suspected, the room should be inspected, either by a trained pest professional willing to spend a lot of time doing so, or perhaps by a bed bug sniffing dog.

Lichtenstein also misunderstands the health problems posed by bed bugs:

“Bed bugs are not vectors of disease. They may be annoying, but that’s about it.”

Yes, bed bugs are not known vectors of disease. But bed bugs are more than annoying. They can trouble students (who may have difficulty getting help, especially if evidence is not obvious). They can make people lose sleep and create stress. This in addition to skin reactions from bed bug bites which vary from nothing to severe. And in very, very few cases, people have had life-threatening allergic reactions to bed bug bites.

Not only do colleges need to react well to suspected bed bug infestations. Colleges also need to be proactive against bed bugs.

Here’s why: we are told that as many as 70% of the population may not react to bed bug bites (per Dr. Jerome Goddard the state medical entomologist with the Mississippi Department of Health in Jackson, Mississippi); this means many people may not suspect they have a bed bug problem until it is very far advanced — so far advanced as to be visually obvious, even in daytime.

And if your bed bug infestation has gotten to that point, bed bugs may have already spread beyond that particular room.

College officials need to understand that it is hard to see a bed bug or catch it in the act, since they generally feed in the wee small hours, and are designed to hide between meals in tight cracks, undetected.

They also need to understand that bed bugs are a problem no one should have to put up with — even if they are not yet known to spread disease.

Finally — and the article does not engage with this issue at all — college officials need to realize that bed bugs travel off-campus too.

Students exposed to bed bugs may bring bed bugs home from campus, causing their parents expensive problems of bed bug detection and treatment. And other students will just as surely bring bed bugs onto campus, from hotels or from home. Faculty and staff will likely do so too. Bed bugs are a pest of exposure, and no one is immune.

Since bed bugs have come back with such a vengeance in society at large, having bed bugs enter a college campus is inevitable. Being reactive is not enough, given the problems of quickly detecting bed bugs before they spread around. And college administrators who realize this, and are proactive, have a better chance of getting bed bugs under control.

Ultimately, I have a hunch that a good proactive and reactive bed bug program may seem expensive at first, but will save money in the long run, over other approaches.

To read more about how colleges are dealing with bed bugs on campus, see this post which considers the model of Texas A&M, which proactively uses bed bug sniffing dogs to detect bed bug problems before students do, and TempAir to treat bed bugs in one shot with thermal remediation.

Heat also features at the University of Florida, where mattresses and other infested items are heated in a makeshift oven, as part of bed bug treatment, according to this article frem Channel 2 in Charleston.Similar Posts:

University of Central Missouri (and other Missouri colleges) vs. bed bugs

nobugsonme — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:52:33 +0000

This article and video report from WCBD in Charleston reports that bed bugs have been found at colleges all over Missouri, including Northwest Missouri, Missouri State, and 70 cases at Wichita State.

However, the focus of this article is on the encounter between bed bugs and the University of Central Missouri:

It is a pest unexpected by college administrators.“We didn’t have them until about three years ago,” said Patrick Bradley, director of housing at the University of Central Missouri. At UCM, since the beginning of the last academic year, Bradley confirmed bed bugs in 32 rooms, treating many of them multiple times.

Some parents and students with infested rooms are angry, not only because those bed bugs keep returning, but because in some cases UCM has failed to fulfill it’s pledge to replace infested beds. Students say they discovered the discrepancy by marking their beds before officials displaced them to treat the room for bed bugs. Returning students then looked for their markings when they moved back into their treated rooms. Freshman Lauren Pulse was disturbed with the findings.

“It was the same mattress and the same bed frame,” Pulse said. “You ask them to do something and they don’t,” says freshman Molley Buckley

The university says it has since instituted tighter controls to ensure facilities employees dispose of bed bugs from infested rooms. “What we’re doing right now is everything we know,” Bradley said.

They may take a cue from the University of Florida, which decontaminates students’ infested items by heating them in a makeshift oven. Thermal methods may be very effective for treating mattresses, and would avoid the unnecessary expense of replacing mattresses.

Though I understand that students and parents think replacing beds is the solution, doing so actually does not ensure bed bugs have been removed from the room. If there are bed bugs there which persist after treatment, you may simply be giving them a new home.

Encasements are an option, though they must be treated with care so as not to rip. My own college had sealed mattresses (though I had no idea why at the time), and I wonder if colleges won’t start using these again.

The other thing UCM needs to think about is that experts say as many as 70% of people do not react to bed bug bites. Relying on students to react and then report the problem means many more students may have bed bugs, which feed and breed and spread, unknown to administrators.

It would be in the college’s interest to implement a proactive bed bug detection program. Bed bug sniffing k9s are not 100% accurate, but a good one is likely much more accurate than a human inspector. Texas A&M University has been flying bed bug detection dogs in to check for the pests before students start to complain of bed bug bites or bed bug sightings.

You can read the full article here or watch the video.

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Apartment Therapy on bed bugs, bed bug sniffing dogs

nobugsonme — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 19:00:38 +0000

Apartment Therapy/San Francisco has a new post mentioning AT blogger Sarahh’s encounter with Mr. Cimex Lectularius in a Santa Cruz motel (yikes!) and alerting readers to the existence of bed bug sniffing dogs.

For those of you who are wondering, we were lucky not to have brought any bedbugs back with us to our home from our unfortunate, and very unromantic, trip to Santa Cruz. We shook out all of our clothes and luggage and immediately drove back to the Bay Area where we laundered our clothing in very hot water and crossed our fingers for a few weeks that we hadn’t towed a few of those famous hitchhiking critters with us. We were lucky!

Lucky, indeed!

Sarahh also asks readers for input, if they’ve used bed bug k9s:

We love this [bed bug sniffing dog] idea because you can actually pinpoint the areas in a home where these tiny bloodsuckers are hiding, without having to spray dangerous chemicals throughout your whole apartment or house. We’ve heard that one company in the Bay Area, Pestec, uses a bedbug sniffing dog detective. Has anyone had an experience with this company or any other one that uses dogs for bedbug patrol? Let’s hear your story.

Luis Agurto (president of Pestec) and his beagle Lady Bug were featured in this San Francisco Gate article from April 2007 (one of my favorite articles, but I am biased for obvious reasons!)

Although ideally, bed bug dogs can detect locations of bed bug harborages, I would not say that their use necessarily obviates the need to spray pesticides throughout the home. First, bed bug dogs are not 100% effective. They may not find all harborages. Second, residual pesticides and dusts require bed bugs to make contact with them before they will be killed. Having the stuff in places bed bugs are moving around makes killing them more likely.

Still, bed bug sniffing k9s can be a valuable asset, especially in cases where bed bugs may have been recently introduced, such as immediately following a hotel visit involving bed bug bites, or (as poor Sarahh experienced) face-to-face bed bug encounters (yes, plural). Ugh.

Apartmenttherapy.com has not covered bed bugs in any way, shape or form (that we can see) since July of 2007, when they posted part 7 of Amanda’s bed bug saga.

We love Apartment Therapy and we hope that, despite the ick factor, they will cover bed bug issues a bit more often. Because nothing messes up your cool design scheme or puts the damper on your recent nifty flea market find than an apartment full of full, green garbage bags, bursting with all your clothes, or the lingering smell of pesticides.

Thanks also to Sarahh for pointing AT readers our way!Similar Posts:

Bed bugs at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania

nobugsonme — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 05:58:54 +0000

Bed bug have been found at Wilkes University, according to student paper, the Wilkes Beacon. They’ve been treated by Terminex, and students living in the affected building and their parents have been notified:

[Jeff] White [research entomologist for bedbugcentral.com] says that one of the most effective treatments against bed bugs is education.

Stanley says that the students and parents impacted by the bed bug outbreak at the residence hall was sent literature on bed bugs and the October edition of their parent newsletter will also include information on the subject.

(That’s Brenda Stanley, Wilkes’s Director of Residence Life.)

This is good, though I would follow the lead of some other colleges such as Stanford and SUNY Potsdam in trying to educate students outside of those living in the affected residence hall about bed bugs.

Bed bugs in one dorm can easily spread to others as students visit one another, stow stuff in gym lockers, sit in classrooms, hang out in cafes and bars, go to jobs, and so on. Students anywhere are at risk at picking bed bugs up, and should learn all they can about how to detect and avoid bed bugs.

And I also hope the information given in the literature is more comprehensive than that provided in the following excerpt from this article:

How does a student know if they have bed bugs?

“If someone has a series of bites on their body, typically on the chest/torso or leg/foot region, they should visit our Health and Wellness Office, located on the first floor of Evans Hall. The bites would have not pattern (random) and may appear to look like mosquito bites. A professional can determine if in fact, they are bedbug bites,” says Stanley.

There are two errors here. First, we are told doctors cannot identify bed bug bites with any certainty. They don’t always look the same. They can also be anywhere on the body. We’re told dermatologists cannot visually identify them. There are to my knowledge no tests to positively identify bed bugs as the cause of suspected bites.

In addition, the answer that people they will know they have bed bugs because they will get bed bug bites is not very helpful. There is a large percentage of the population who do not react in any way to bed bug bites. (Mississippi state medical entomologist Jerome Goddard claims 70% do not react). So waiting until you see bed bug bites or feel itchy can be bad news.

This is why some colleges, like Texas A&M, are taking it upon themselves to search proactively for bed bugs, for example, using bed bug sniffing dogs.

It seems that colleges are doing more than ever to educate about bed bugs, to detect them and get rid of them properly. Overall, this is not a bad article, but as this article and the one yesterday about SUNY Potsdam show, there is still room for improvement.

You can read the article from the Wilkes Beacon here.
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