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:

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Channel 5 in Kansas City, Missouri reports that a woman says she found bed bugs in her room at the Value Place Hotel after noticing bed bug bites on her child. Instead of moving the woman to another room and dealing with the problem, the hotel simply evicted her:

After she alerted the front desk, [hotel customer Jackie] Trotter said she thought they were going to move her to another room. But when she insisted the hotel also clean all of their clothes she said they kicked them out.

“First I was stunned and just looked and asked, ‘Wait, my child got bed bugs from your hotel and you are putting me out?’ and she said that’s procedure,” Trotter said.

Trotter said she and her daughters just moved to town. She said they paid the motel for two weeks in advance and now they have no money to move elsewhere.

So the hotel actually had a bed bug protocol and this is it? Kick out the person who shows you there are bed bugs in the room?

A spokesman for Value Place responded in writing to KCTV5 News, saying, “Bedbugs are the single biggest issue the lodging industry faces today. These situations are brought into hotels by people.”

He added, “The best way that a property can deal with that matter is to isolate and eradicate that source from the property to protect the entire property. We followed the appropriate protocol.”

Well, this statement shows a lack of understanding about the “source” of bed bugs.

The hotel spokesperson is correct that “people” bring bed bugs into hotels. However, they are wrong in (apparently) assuming that the person to first notice and complain about bed bugs in a room is likely to be the source.

In fact, bed bugs can be in a room, unnoticed, for years, biting hotel guests. If a hotel wants to completely avoid the “source” of bed bugs, they need to close their doors right now. Or search every person coming through the door with a bed bug sniffing dog.

It might be better for business if they instead learn more about bed bugs and how to prevent them. They might also implement a program of regular bed bug inspections (human or canine or — preferably — both). Housekeeping staff need to be educated on the signs of bed bugs.

But kicking out customers who point out a room’s bed bugs amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.Similar Posts:

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KOB.com in New Mexico reports,

Tuesday’s Farmington Daily-Times reports three Santa Fe Police Department employees who recently stayed at the hotel had bug bites all over their bodies.

They say hotel managers told them “it was not the hotel’s problem.”

Not the hotel’s problem? Whose problem is it?

That is a delightful response to a customer complaint of blood-sucking insects in a bed paid for for the night. The hotel has assigned a new manager to this Days Inn, but that hardly solves the problem of guests having to put up with bed bugs.

Apparently, there’s no one to complain to:

The police officers also discovered that no state agency has authority to do anything about the problem.

That is a very distressing statement.

The Daily Times of Farmington reports that State Sen. William E. Sharer, R-San Juan notes this is not the first time bed bugs were found in this Days Inn:

“During the summer of 2007, I was informed of a bedbug infestation occurring at the Days Inn in Farmington,” Sharer wrote to Albert Vigil, secretary of New Mexico Department of Health, on Feb. 5. “Unfortunately, a second incident has recently occurred at the same motel.

Sharer expressed frustration that “no governmental agency has clear authority to regulate this issue because there are presently no enforceable standards.”

No enforceable standards? Governments can set enforceable standards regarding bed bugs in homes and hotels.

I hope the people of New Mexico, and those who travel there, will start asking their politicians about this. They might start by writing to State Senator Sharer himself.

Update (10/1/2008):

More from the Daily Times today.

Apparently a lawsuit was already pending, filed by four plaintiffs who claim to have been bitten by bed bugs in the same hotel in summer 2007. Their attorney, Rich Valle, says the two sets of two clients were staying on different floors in the hotel and met at a local urgent care center, after seeking treatment for their bites.

Valle claims the hotel got what seems to be sound advice about treating for bed bugs, but didn’t take it:

A local exterminator recommended the hotel treat rooms adjacent to those in which the 2007 bug biting incidents happened, Valle said. He estimated the cost of the additional treatment at $150, a charge Valle said hotel managers opted not to pay because they deemed it excessive.

Days Inn management offered one of his clients a “bed bug discount” after he complained, Valle said. A similar $15 per bug discount was offered to the police officers after they took a bug to the front desk clerk working Sept. 21.

“I hope some of this changes,” Valle said. “I hoped our lawsuit would make this stop.”

Before Valle read a related story in Tuesday’s edition and contacted The Daily Times, a woman identifying herself only as “Bernice” called the newspaper to say she sustained bites at the same hotel about one year ago.

“I tried to contact the hotel manager, but I never heard back,” she said. “I finally gave up.”

No regulations exist to oversee cleanliness issues at lodging establishments in New Mexico. Unless a lodging business is a member of New Mexico Lodging Association, consumers have nowhere to turn for redress.

Let’s not think for a moment that this particular hotel is the only one with bed bug infestations that are being allowed to get worse and worse.

This can happen in any hotel, chain or family-run, expensive or cheap.

Obviously, the hotel industry needs guidance about bed bugs, and what is required to get rid of them. And if no one on the government end of things gives a hoot, citizens are not only going to increasingly get bitten by bed bugs, they’re increasingly going to bring them home.Similar Posts:

• Farmington Days Inn treats for bed bugs; New Mexico’s laws still need attention

According to a TripAdvisor survey,

Eighty percent of travelers said they are concerned about bed bugs when visiting a hotel. Eight percent of travelers surveyed said they have experienced bed bugs at a hotel.

I suspect Tripadvisor.com regulars would be among the more informed travelers, hence the greater awareness of and concern about bed bugs.

It may seem improbable that 8% claimed to have encountered bed bugs in a hotel.

However, one study showed 0.6% of hotel rooms were infested in a three-year period.

It would not take many trips or hotel stays for 8% of a group of fairly-frequent travelers to encounter bed bugs at least once.

The first key to avoiding them in the room (and ultimately, to avoid taking them home): learn to search your hotel room for bed bugs. This FAQ provides more tips.Similar Posts:

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Some tourists come to Colorado looking for the “Wild West.” However, I don’t think bed bugs are what they have in mind. The Durango Herald, in Durango, Colorado, reported Tuesday on a recent bed bug encounter in a Cortez, Colorado hotel:

German tourists Billy and Helga Held didn’t travel to Cortez to have a close encounter with bedbugs, but that’s exactly what they got.

In the wee hours of Aug. 18, before they were to visit Mesa Verde National Park, the couple awoke at 1:21 a.m. to discover bugs in their bed at the Comfort Inn.

“At first I was in a panic,” said Billy. “My bedsheet was completely full of bed bugs. My wife was crying.”

Helga stripped the sheets and took them straight to the reception desk.

“The boy at the front desk took them and just put them in the washing room,” she said. “He said, ‘Do not make a big deal of this – you can move to a new room.’”

Oh that’s very reassuring! Customer service these days…

In fairness, the hotel did call out a pest control operator, and refunded the couple’s room costs.

Comfort Inn Owner, Ryan Griglak, said their hotel has tried to be as proactive as possible in controlling bed bugs – by employing Orkin to spray as well as relocating the people to another room.

Griglak said after Orkin inspected all the rooms, they found the only two infested were the two where the German family had been.

They were moved to a second room, and these two rooms were the only ones found to be infested!

Let this be a warning to hoteliers who simply move people to the next room, without attempting to help them decontaminate their belongings first.

The article also reports that the branch of Orkin in Cortez has had a 50% increase in bed bug calls in the past year. You can read the rest of the article here.Similar Posts:

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This MSNBC article by Anya Yurchyshyn, a Budget Travel writer, describes how Motel 6 is changing its room designs to make the rooms cooler and more functional.

The upgrades may also make rooms less bed bug-friendly than traditional-style US hotel rooms.

Of particular relevance to our topic of interest: upgrades to beds and flooring.

The Motel 6 beds are moving to simple, clean platforms and ditching the box springs and bed skirts:

3. Bed Platform

Beds give the room a sense of openness because guests can see beneath them; the sight line isn’t interrupted by a bed frame and skirt. There’s also more room to store luggage.

I hope you don’t mean we should store luggage under the bed!  That’s a big no-no, where bed bugs are concerned.

Anyway, the beds look like they have a clean, washable covering, as opposed to the bedspread idea traditional in US hotels.

And floors are going naked:

5. Floors

The carpeting is being replaced by floors made of composite wood and plastic laminate. “A lot of people feel that carpets aren’t very clean,” says Priestman.

(That’s Paul Priestman of Brit design firm Priestman and Goode.)

Yes, you can still get bed bugs in a room that has simple furniture and no carpeting.  (And it does not matter how cheap or expensive the hotel is.)

But with fewer frills and fewer layers, it’s easier to locate bed bugs when you inspect the room, and if they’re found, it’s easier for a pest control professional to get rid of them.

Rooms like this make it easier for staff to inspect rooms for bed bugs (as I really hope they are doing), and easier for them to spot bed bugs. It’s therefore easier to respond to bed bug problems if and when they arise.

Since I (cough) “became aware of” bed bugs, I admit to choosing my hotels from tripadvisor.com based not only on reviews (or rather, the lack of reviews mentioning bed bugs), but also in part on the design apparent in room photos.

I prefer hotel rooms that have the kind of bed coverings which need to be washed regularly (like uncovered white comforters), and beds without a lot of frilly action in the bedskirt and bedspread department.

And I’d rather inspect a room where I can really see under the bed, look at the edges of the floor, etc. All in all, I am happy to see any motel chain moving in this design direction.Similar Posts:

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Bed bugs are now more widely found on media reports on broader topics than bed bug infestations and new bed bug-proof mattress encasements. For example, this article from Time about Barack Obama’s upcoming week-long vacation visit to his native Hawai’i:

Obama is also scheduled to hold a fundraiser at the posh Halekulani Hotel in Waikiki that could rake in more than $500,000, reaping the rewards of being the first presidential nominee to travel to Hawaii since Richard Nixon in 1960. There’s no word on where he might be staying during his visit, but he may want to avoid that particular hotel, which suffered a plague of bed bugs in April, according to the Pacific Business Journal.

This is a past story from Bedbugger about a woman who claimed to encounter bed bugs at a function at the Halekulani Hotel, and bring them home.

You may be interested to know that, unlike the head of the Tennessee Hotel and Lodging Association who was quoted here yesterday as calling bed bugs a “non-issue” in Tennessee hotels, the Hawai’i hotel industry group is admitting bed bugs are a problem in Hawai’i, and is taking steps to improve the situation.

According to this article in the Pacific Business Journal,

The state House approved a nonbinding resolution in 2006 that asked the Department of Health to work with the state’s tourism liaison and the Hawaii Hotel & Lodging Association to raise awareness on dealing with bedbugs.

A symposium on dealing with bedbugs is in the works, said Murray Towill, president of the Hawaii Hotel & Lodging Association.

Great news! I am glad to hear that government and industry are admitting there is a bed bug issue in Hawai’i, and working to address it together.

There’s no doubt in my mind that bed bugs are spreading in hotels in all fifty states. Hotel industry folks everywhere should be working on stopping the spread of bed bugs, not playing ostrich and hiding their heads in the sand.

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Several articles came out Wednesday about the spread of bed bugs in Nashville, Tennessee, both in hotels and in homes.

The Tennesseean reports that the Metro Health Department in Nashville investigates complaints about bed bugs in hotels, and keeps track of them:

The Metro Health Department has received 30 complaints of bedbugs at area hotels and motels in the first seven months of 2008, compared with 35 complaints in 2007.

That means the rate of bed bug complaints in Nashville hotels has gone up from an average of 2.9 a month in 2007 to 4.2 a month so far in 2008. That’s a significant increase.

But the increase does not concern the head of the Tennesee Hotel and Lodging Association:

Still, Walt Baker, chief executive officer of the Tennessee Hotel and Lodging Association, said visitors to Nashville can rest easy.

He noted there are 23,000 hotel rooms in Davidson County, 60 percent of which are occupied on any given night. So, he said, 30 complaints in 2008 is insignificant.

“Bedbugs are really a non-issue,” he said. “It’s not on our radar screen, it’s so small.”

If there were only 4.2 cases of bed bugs in Nashville hotels every month, some would argue that this is a small problem. (I’d still say it is worth taking seriously, especially given the increase from the previous year, and considering the havoc those bed bugs can wreak in the homes of paying customers who take them home.)

But we should assume that since a sizeable percentage of people do not react to bed bug bites and will have no idea they were bitten, that there are likely more bed bug encounters in Nashville hotels.

Add to this the fact that it probably does not occur to most people to call the local public health department when they encounter a pest in a hotel, and still others simply won’t bother. I’d assume that if you have 4.2 complaints per month, there are many more actual cases.

Now, I’m not much of a litigious sort. But if I encountered bed bugs in a Nashville hotel, Walt Baker’s dismissal of the bed bug problem as a “non-issue” would make me want to sue the pants off the hotel where I was bitten or where I picked up bed bugs and brought them home.

This dismissive attitude from the head of the lodging trade group in Tennessee definitely does not make me want to spend my tourist dollars in that town anytime soon.

News Channel 5 in Nashville tells viewers,

To check if a specific hotel has bedbugs, call the Metro Public Health Department at 615-340-5630.

And if you encounter bed bugs in a Nashville hotel or motel, why not call Metro Public Health at that same number, and report it?Similar Posts:

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This article in The Sun (UK) tells the story of a party of guests that fled the Park House View Hotel in Edinburgh after being bitten by bed bugs in room 23.

The report focuses on the “amusing” nature of the situation:

Paula said: “I can laugh about it now but it was a dreadful experience at the time.

“Fawlty Towers hasn’t got a look-in compared to this place.”

Paula stayed at the hotel with friends Debbie Singh and Paula Murphy.

She said: “I went to bed and woke up being eaten alive by bed bugs.

“I was so shocked that I screamed and knocked on all the doors in panic. Another party were also complaining.”

Others in the party called the police and the group were refunded the money for the room. They fled in taxis and spent the night waiting for a train.

Unfortunately, this article does not recognize that the group’s problems may only just have begun. I know it is too much to ask for The Sun to provide helpful information, such as noting that bed bugs spread easily, and that the hotel guests could discover themselves living with bed bugs at home a few weeks or months from now.

And some of them may not react to bed bug bites, and so may not have a clue they brought them home until they are in a very advanced state of infestation and are seeing bed bugs on the walls in daylight.

The story concludes with hotel owner Saeed Akhtar describing the treatment the hotel ordered:

Mr Akhtar said: “There was a problem with bed bugs in Room 23. We have changed the bed, taken up the wooden floors, and everything has been sprayed.

One traditional spray in one room is unlikely to solve this problem.

I can see how comparing a bad night in a hotel to the John Cleese comedy “Fawlty Towers” is a funny story The Sun’s readers can enjoy. But lurking behind the tale is the possibility of a long, costly struggle with bed bugs in the home which may plague Paula Carr or her friends down the line.Similar Posts:

• Woman notifies hotel desk about bed bugs in room, is evicted from hotel
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• More on bed bugs in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: again with the HAZMAT showers?!?

In reference to the Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008, Budget Travel asks, “Should taxpayers fund the war against bed bugs?” The Act, H.R. 6068, is now in consideration by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection,and would primarily give states funding to inspect hotel rooms for bed bugs.

(Welcome to Budget Travel readers who surfed in via the link! You might like to read this Bedbugger article on how to avoid bed bugs when you travel.)

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Meanwhile, the bill Dale Mallory is sponsoring in the Ohio House of Representatives, which would establish a hotline where Ohio residents could report bed bugs or get information about them, and would require the Dept. of Health to educate the public about bed bugs, is also getting coverage from Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC and in Vindy.com.

H.B. 590 states,

The department of health shall make available on its web site information on the increasing incidences of bed bug (cimex lectularius) infestation and post notices that bed bugs are a public nuisance dangerous to public health.

You might protest that bed bugs are not a danger to public health, but then the World Health Organization includes bed bugs in its new book, The Public Health Significance of Urban Pests. (You can download a PDF on the right side of this page.) And the WHO not just includes bed bugs — as Renee reminds us in an analysis of the WHO study over on New York vs. Bed Bugs, a bed bug is on the cover, with a tick and a rat.

The WHO is concerned about the public health significance of bed bugs. Ohio, along with other states (and cities and countries) should be concerned too.Similar Posts:

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