Some Souvenirs Have Legs

Hotels are a haven for bedbugs. Pest-control companies say hotels account for more than 37 percent of their bedbug business, according to Pest Control Technology magazine.

I don’t think I’ve seen that statistic before.

The solution: Search for your hotel on bedbugregistry.com. Scan mattress and couch creases for the reddish brown bloodsuckers and their black droppings, says Jason Rasgon, Ph.D., a public-health professor at Johns Hopkins. At home, dry your clothes on high for 45 minutes to kill stowaways.

Note: many dryers would take longer than 45 minutes to get wet clothes really hot and dry (I’d say “bone dry plus 20 minutes, on hot”. Dry clothes, on the other hand, can do with much less time.

More tips on avoiding bed bugs when you travel here.

It’s always good to see bed bugs in the media. Especially when it’s a warning, and not someone’s Tale of Bed Bug Woe.

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We’re familiar with bed bug dogs, here at Bedbugger, but it is interesting to read of the situation in NZ.

“She’s not big, she’s clean and she’s a clever dog,” Mr Morley said of the three-year-old. “She can get into little places and sniff inside mattresses.”

Well, I bet she’s less clean when she comes out of some of those mattresses.

Yesterday Joni worked through 20 rooms and even detected bedbugs that were behind a headboard fixed to the wall.

When she finds something, she will tap at it with her paw before Mr Morley asks her to check again with her nose. After bedbugs are found, each surface of the room can be treated with steam within a day whereas chemical treatments could see a room shut off for many days. Mr Morley says the combination of Joni and steam produces a 98 per cent success rate. Manual treatments have a 20 per cent success rate.

I found this interesting, and I’d like to hear more about companies working with a combination of dogs and steam. What it sounds like Morley is describing is a situation in which the dog pinpoints the exact location of bed bugs (or eggs, which the article tells us she can also detect), and then that area is carefully steamed (I assume with a dry steam machine). Steaming that pinpoints a specific area does seem both more reliable and easier than steaming the whole area, hoping to strike bed bug gold.

I’d also like to know what that 98% success rate represents: I assume it means 98% of cases need not be serviced twice. (Or does it mean most cases eliminate 98% of their bed bugs? Big difference, no?)

This does sound promising, though as a customer, I would not mind if they then employed a bit of residual or mechanical (dust) killer to seal the deal. When it comes to killing bed bugs, I don’t think there’s such a thing as overkill.

It sounds like Joni does a lot of sleuthing looking for bed bugs in hotels, and a regular run through with the bedbug dog and an industrial steamer would be greatly reassuring to me as a prospective hotel guest.

In Australia, similar dogs are used to sniff out termites, which mainly affect the coastal urban areas of the country. Joni was trained in Queensland, one of five dogs around the world trained to sniff out bedbugs.

I think this may be based on outdated statistics, since I know of at least five bed bug-sniffing dogs currently working in the United States! Nevertheless, it does sound like bedbuggers in New Zealand and at least some parts of Australia have or will soon have access to this service, which is spreading quickly, as is (unfortunately) the need for it.

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The plaintiff Elizabeth Glenn and her daughter stayed at the Rodeway Inn, and later experienced itchy welts. Glenn called the local health department, who inspected the room.

An official later inspected the room where she and her daughter stayed and found bed bugs in the bed. Glenn and her daughter’s belongings were damaged when they were sprayed with a sanitizing liquid and insect killer.

In the lawsuit, attorney Barry R. Taylor said it was the hotel’s responsibility to maintain the premises and take reasonable precautions to protect guests. However, the hotel breached those duties when it allowed the rooms to become infested with biting, disease-carrying bed bugs, he said.

“The defendant’s conduct was so outrageous and egregious that it offends the community standards of morals and decency,” wrote Taylor in the suit.

A manager who answered the telephone at Rodeway Inn said the hotel had not been served the lawsuit on Monday and declined to comment on any insect problems.

This is the second recent article in which hotel guests who saw (or in this case suspected) bed bugs in the hotel room, called the health department and had the room inspected by them and found to have bed bugs. I would definitely recommend that people call the local health department, as well as leaving a review on tripadvisor.com, and in the Bed Bug Registry (see links), whenever they encounter (or think they encounter) bed bugs in a hotel or motel.

UPDATE (11/4):

According to Patrick Terpstra of WVEC.com,health inspectors found “one living bed bug,” and ordered the hotel to “clean”:

The Health Department searched room 208, where the family stayed, and found one living bed bug in the room. Inspectors ordered the hotel to clean the room immediately.

The owner, Sanjay Gandhi, says he’s kept 208 off the market ever since and threw out the sheets and mattresses.

“I’ve never saw any bed bugs here and I don’t know what else I can say,” said Gandhi.

It does not sound like a pest control operator was employed. If there were more bed bugs in the room, then closing it off may have encouraged them to spread and seek other sources of food.

This does not sound good, if the story is accurate.

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UPPER WEST SIDE—It seems there is a little detail about the condo conversion at 30 Lincoln Plaza that may have been overlooked: “You failed to mention that the building is infested with bed bugs…the management has confirmed this and is handing out pamphlets and they have even had a bedbug sniffing dog in some apartments..who knew! I would think this situation is going to really boost sales on those $1,185,000 647 sq/ft one bedrooms.” Bedbug sniffing dogs?!? Excellent. [CurbedWire Inbox]

While it’s always surprising to find out another building has bed bugs, it’s a good thing that the building management is aware and is taking action. I hope they undertake aggressive treatment throughout. (Imagine, hypothetically, the legal activity that would ensue if some units were infested but did not identify the presence of pests, were not treated, and were sold infested.)

This item from Curbed.com reminds me that a lot of the interesting bed bug “news” in the last four days has been leaked via gossip blogs: legal gossip, real estate gossip, ivy league college gossip (although this one probably had another itchy culprit).

Unlike “real” news–which is covered in the newspapers, and on TV and radio–like the spread of MRSA drug-resistant staph bacteria, which tragically killed a 7th grader in Brooklyn, bed bugs aren’t yet confirmed to cause disease and death. They have been unofficially confirmed to cause distress, stress, anxiety, sleeping trouble–and in rare cases, allergic reactions so severe they can kill. But nothing compared with the threat of deadly MRSA. I saw an ABC news segment here in NYC Friday night–kids at the school that youngster attended, were carrying bottles of purell, and startled parents and teachers were looking on in amazement as they reported washing their hands after using the lavatory (ABC7 produced multiple clips in which the students admitted this was new behavior.) The segment also featured a poster on the door of the school, and though it was not shown close-up, I am pretty certain it warned that the school had been exposed to MRSA and that people had to take precautions not to catch it.

Since bed bugs aren’t on the same level of threat, the reasoning seems to go, we don’t need to actually warn people about bed bugs in specific locations. And so “bed bug reports” are confined to the realm of gossip blogs.

Yes, it is true that hotels, real estate developers and brokers, restaurants, theaters and other businesses that are reported to have bed bugs in the mainstream media, will face worried customers and may lose business. The hotel industry in NYC, in particular, will be hard hit. One can only assume Mayor Bloomberg chooses to avoid confronting and admitting the true number of infested homes and businesses in this city (which I first considered in this post), because it would scare off tourists, who contribute so much to the city, as well as negatively affecting real estate, and maybe even how people spend their leisure time (and money).

But it does not follow that if we do not discuss bed bugs, publicly, then they will go away. The opposite is true: as long as businesses are in denial, or putting up a bed-bug-free front, the problem will keep spreading at an alarming rate, and eventually, I believe, the hit on businesses will be greater.

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Having heard nothing since then, I was glad to see that yesterday the New York Observer (in their 10/23 online and 10/29 print edition) re-told the bed bugs at Cadwalader story, that the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ.com law blog (housed in the same building as Cadwalader!) covered the Observer’s coverage. After all, the more people realize you can have bed bugs at work–even in very classy workplaces–the better.

The Observer’s David Lat also edits the online legal tabloid AbovetheLaw.com, where we picked up the original leaked-memo bed bug story. We missed this, but on October 3rd, Above the Law also covered a second report of bed bugs in the same offices, this time on the 20th floor:

It is believed that said bedbug infiltrated the premises through a delivery or box shipment. Perhaps it was hidden in a document production from opposing counsel?

While this is entirely possible, since bed bugs had previously been found in the same building, I would not be surprised if other locations in the building were infested. Maybe (gasp!) the blamed employee was fired for nothing. It is very difficult to locate blame for a bed bug infestation.

And remember, the original memo made this claim:

“A single treatment by an exterminator usually controls bed bugs and prevents reinfestation for several months.”

Perhaps one treatment was not enough.

In October, management was more careful to avoid the leaked-memo scenario:

Attorneys were notified of this breach in CWT’s bed bug security via email. We haven’t seen the email message, which we understand was protected against forwarding, printing, or copying.

Too bad. The first memo was fascinating.

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Health department inspectors were called to the East State Street and Bell School Road hotel after a guest found the tiny bugs crawling in the sheets of his bed. The inspectors closed 56 out of 108 rooms.

Dixon resident Robert McLean said he first spotted the little brown bugs on his sheets when he woke up Friday. Initially, he saw three or four bugs, but he said a search of the mattress revealed countless more, some of which he collected on pieces of clear tape.

“It was like a Halloween nightmare,” McLean said. “You almost want to bring your own bedding from now on.”

Unfortunately, bringing your own bedding will not prevent bed bugs. You’d have to bring your own building, frankly, and set it up over there, away from the hotel.

McLean said he reported the bugs to the hotel’s front desk, who sent a maintenance crew to look at the bugs. They took pictures, McLean said.

The hotel shut down the 56-room wing for 48 hours, during treatment, and will keep the room the guest was in closed for 5 days. However, we know that one traditional bed bug treatment is rarely enough. I hope the Red Roof Inn is being very aggressive with treatments. I would love to hear from PCOs as to what protocol they would follow in a hotel. After all, when individuals have bed bugs at home, we have to sleep in the room to draw the bed bugs out to cross the pesticides. If hotels are using traditional spray treatments, won’t customers be forced to sleep with bed bugs?!?

One also has to wonder how many other people were bitten in this hotel, and reported the bed bug bites. Or did not realize it and took them home. Could this much of a hotel be affected and the hotel be completely unaware of it?

Winnebago County appears to be inviting anyone with bed bugs in that area to call and report them to the Health Department:

[Winnebago County Health Department spokeswoman Sue] Fuller said anyone who finds bed bugs are asked to call the Winnebago County Health Department at 815-720-4100 to file a complaint.

This is interesting — I have not heard many city health departments invite such calls.

This story reinforces my idea that those who find bed bugs in hotel rooms should not simply tell the management, and then post a review on tripadvisor.com to warn others. They should also call the local health department (a number they can get via the room’s phone book, before they flee). Health departments may not consider bed bugs a health risk, but they should. And if enough people call, they may take action.

Update (11/2): the Rockford Register Star now reports the rooms are now reopened–except for the one where the bed bugs are found.

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Calvin Merritt’s problems at Hillrise Apartments are pretty simple.

“Mostly bugs, roaches and all that…”

The “all that” is bed bugs. Dead ones were easy to find under Calvin’s mattress, and piles of them behind the bed. When exterminators come in to spray here, their work’s easy to see, pesticide stains run down Calvin’s walls. Calvin pays 313 dollars a month for this one bedroom…what little furniture he had was mostly pitched, because it was infested.

Calvin Merritt, Resident: “I done lost everything got here, my couch, my other chairs, all the stuff I had was new, I had to get rid of all of that.”

At the other end of the hall, Jeanette Jessie doesn’t have any bedbugs, but she worries about them just the same.

Jeanette Jessie, Resident: “They just spread them from one end of the building to the other, this is crazy, get this place cleaned up, spray it at one time and get rid of this mess.”

It sounds a bit like the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington DC, Halcyon House in Denver, and Warren Towers in East Moline, Illinois. Elderly people, disabled people, and anyone in low-income housing is being dealt a raw deal when it comes to getting rid of bed bugs. Let’s face it, bed bugs are expensive to treat. They’re also a rather sudden problem no one was expecting and no one has budgeted for.

Bed bugs are difficult to treat, too. Traditional treatments require multiple pest control visits at short intervals. Residents must prepare for treatment, which can be a lengthy process and costly too (especially for those on a fixed income).

However, make no mistake: non-aggressive treatment (treating only some of the infested units, treating at too-long intervals, or not coming as many times as needed), waiting for tenants who might be unaware they have bed bugs to report them, and not providing assistance with preparation costs and physical labor–all of these reactions from landlords and housing managers mean that bed bugs will be around longer, spread into more units, and cost much more to get rid of.

It just does not make sense on any practical level to not be aggressive, thorough, and quick to treat bed bugs in a building you are responsible for. It is simply a display of ignorance about the nature of this beast.

We can’t entirely blame landlords for this ignorance; none of us were expecting bed bugs. But we need to educate the public about the signs of bed bugs, and we need to educate professionals in all walks of life (from those who provide housing, to hospitality services, to health care, education, and on and on) about the need for a bed bug protocol which includes both proactive searching for signs of bed bugs, and swift reactions to any bed bug signs or sightings.

Too many people seem to be hoping they’ll just go away. Good luck with that. In the meantime:

Channel 12 reports,

Officials from the Cincinnati Health Department tell us they’ll soon be taking a closer look at conditions in the apartments.

I love the Cincinnati Health Department. But you knew that.

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So he is trying to sell the place to us, and he leads off with THIS gem/tidbit of marketing info: “The Blue Moon Hotel is CERTIFIED BED BUG FREE.” And he points to a framed certificate on the wall- I’m not making this up- it was nicely framed and had a drawing of a nasty bed bug with a big red “zero/slash” around it. GNARLY.

Then the lady at the reception chimes in, and she starts bragging about how a real beagle dog came and did the sniff-inspection, and that was supposed to really impress us, to show us exactly how bed-bug-free this newly-opened hotel was.

Well, fishouttawater was jolted out of a blissful, no-knowledge-of-bedbugs’-existence state. But many people who travel to NYC are aware that most NYC hotels are infested with bed bugs.

What I want to know is who did the certification, and how often does that bed bug dog walk through the rooms and corridors and inspect for bed bugs? Because as we all know, they can be brought in any time. If the inspections are very regular, it certainly would be a comforting feature.

All I can say is, when someone is able to offer this service regularly in lower-priced accommodations, I am going to sleep a lot easier while traveling.

Or will I? A google search for “certified bed bug free” brought up this website for K-9 Bed Bug Detection Services, where a bed bug dog inspection service offers to certify accommodation as such:

How do you get Certified Bed Bug-Free?

We will customize an inspection program for your property - either monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly. Once you property is inspected and any areas alerted to are treated, we will issue you a framed certificate indicating your bed bug-free status. This can be displayed to show your guests and residents that your facility meets the highest standard in bed bug-free properties.

I assume that this company was not the one that certified the Blue Moon, since the picture of the certificate on their website does not match fishouttawater’s description.

I am sure that bed bug inspections at either monthly, bimonthly or quarterly intervals are much better than no bed bug inspections. However, I feel that monthly inspections are the minimum. No one wants to stay in a hotel room where bed bugs have been feeding on people and breeding for two or even four months. Yes, I realize that hotel room prices are going to go up based on this additional cost.

Certified Bed Bug-Free announces that you have taken every possible precaution to ensure that your property is free from these elusive pests. In turn, this could limit your liability in the event of a lawsuit.

Note to travelers: like so much in this “Bed Bug Gold Rush” period, a Certified Bed Bug Free sign does not mean anything in particular. (Neither does “bed bug dog,” for that matter: they’re not all the same, and have varied skills and levels of effectiveness.)

If you find this sign, well, obviously, it’s a good sign. But you should realize it can mean the hotel was checked once, is checked yearly, quarterly, bimonthly, monthly, weekly, or after every guest walks out the door. Hopefully hoteliers will be honest when you enquire about that.

Thanks to Hopelessnomo for the fishouttawater tip!

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A teacher (Sonya Johnstone) who was attending the conference saw what she thought were bed bugs in her bed. The next day, she met up with a colleague who had broken out in red welts.

The two compared notes about their rooms at the Hilton Garden Inn.

“I told her about my room, so we checked hers and sure enough, when we flipped up the mattress by the headboard, we saw a bunch scurry off,” Johnstone said, describing the area as sprinkled with black pepper-like feces.

“When you look at the granite counters in the hotel and how nice the room is, you would never expect to find these things here.”

And then a third conference-goer, staying 7 floors away in the same hotel, had what sound like serious bite reactions.

The women were on the hotel’s fourth floor, but a colleague from the 11th floor showed off tell-tale bite marks “all over his body — across his stomach and back,” Johnstone said.

The Hilton’s Saskatoon general manager Lynn Flury said there has been no confirmation the sightings by guests are indeed bed bugs.

“In one room there is something, but we are still waiting on a report,” she said, adding nothing was found in the complainants’ rooms. “It could be little black beetles that hide under flower pots have found their way in.”

Bed bugs also closely resemble wood ticks, she noted.

Little black beetles? I am sorry.

As far as I know, neither beetles nor wood ticks hang out in groups under mattresses.

“It’s a tricky thing. If it is (bed bugs) we will take aggressive steps, even if it means shutting down an entire floor to do it,” she said. “We take this very seriously.”

The hotel has a regular intensive cleaning process that involves using a black light to search for things not visible to the naked eye. At the same time, Flury said, “we don’t live in a perfect world.”

I know that the customer is not always right (truly, they’re not!) but when three hotel guests present with stories of bed bugs in the bed, and obvious welts, I would think the manager would spring into action.

And Sonya Johnstone knows a bit about bed bugs. In fact,

Johnstone is certain the crawlies were bed bugs. She recently watched a CBC Marketplace segment on the insect, she said, in which she learned to identify the flat, brownish-red bugs and where to find them.

Yes, I can hear the hotel manager’s eyes rolling into the top of her head, “You saw a news report, huh?”

It’s true that a little knowledge is often enough to make one look for bed bugs, but not always enough to help them identify them properly. But actually, the CBC video is highly educational. It’s also in-depth and 15 minutes long: there’s a lot of footage.

The more people see bed bugs of all life stages, in videos and in photos, the more apt they are to recognize them.
My sister-in-law found a bed bug in a store changing room after seeing the in-depth bed bug segment on Dateline. If you truly know what they look like, they don’t look like ticks, or flower pot beetles. But the key is, you must know what they look like.

My advice to you, dear reader, is to circulate that CBC video. Watch it. Get your non-bedbugged friends to watch it, especially before they travel. Get your teenager going to camp or your kid going off to college to watch it. It shows how to inspect a bed for bed bugs. And it shows the effects of bed bugs, which will help your loved ones understand what you’re going through. The aim is not to freak people out, but to educate. It used to be normal to check for bed bugs when sleeping away from home. Unfortunately, it should be the norm now too.

I firmly believe that if Sonya Johnstone, and you and I can learn to identify bed bugs from photos and video, and learn how to find them in a hotel room, then so can hotel staff, restaurant staff, day care staff, people working in travel, and so on. Everyone can and should learn about bed bugs and the signs of bed bugs. And yes, it is true you can be bitten and still have lots of trouble finding bed bugs. But in most cases where people suffer significant bites in hotel rooms, they later inspect and find bed bugs or clear signs.

And hotel chains, take note: customers are not idiots. Yes, sometimes people think they have bed bugs and don’t. But three guests, in three rooms, and on two widely separated floors, with similar stories? This is something to take seriously. I hope hotels realize that members of professional organizations do have sway over where their conferences are held.

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A woman spent two nights in a Hilton in Ohio, got 150 bed bug bites, and is proceeding with a $5 million dollar lawsuit charging physical scarring, emotional distress, and embarrassment.

The plaintiff, Sai Kim, alleges that she checked into Room 336 at the Hilton Garden Inn in Columbus, Ohio on March 26 during a business trip. After a two-night stay in the room, Kim allegedly discovered more than 150 bed-bug bites on her hands, feet, face, fingers, toes, legs, neck, back, chest, stomach and genitals.

“As a direct result of exposure to bed bugs,” the complaint alleges, the plaintiff “was left physically scarred and emotionally damaged and that these consequences were a direct result of the defendant’s negligence.”

The complaint alleges that the Hilton Corporation breached its duty to provide reasonably safe accommodations, which in turn led to “embarrassing injury and tremendous emotional distress.”

On the one hand, my sympathies go out to anyone who pays for a hotel room and suffers what must be the presence of a very large infestation (assuming somewhere between 50 and 150 bed bugs bit her in the space of two nights).

On the other hand, to people who suffer months of discomfort from bed bugs, receive many more bites, and suffer a much more prolonged disruption to home, health, and sanity, who are far more damaged and yet not in the position to sue a landlord in this way, it seems unfair that someone in this position would be able to seek such a large payout.

So what did Hilton say?

In its answer to the complaint, Hilton denied negligence and asserted contributory negligence and assumption of risk on the plaintiff’s part. The corporation’s answer also cast blame on the owner/operator of the hotel in question.

I’m interested in the assertion of the plaintiff’s “contributory negligence.” Her “assumption of risk” (as in, presumably, “sleep here at your own risk?) is more apparent. However, like the swimming pool with no lifeguard attendant, perhaps hotels need to hang up a sign stating that we’re risking bed bugs when we sleep there.

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