The story focuses on Lisa Courtney’s bed bug battle:

Courtney tossed out her bed, mattress and linens. CityHousing, Hamilton’s social housing agency, had her Cumberland Avenue apartment treated and life returned to normal.

But now, the bedbugs are back. Courtney’s anxiety has shot up with reports of three neighbours with the same problem.

“I’m psychotic now, because people down the hall have them, too,” she said.

Landlords need to learn that you can’t simply treat the unit of the person who complains about bed bug bites. You have to have all adjacent units (above, below, and on all sides) carefully inspected and treated if necessary.

Apartment managers would be advised to read this article from Techletter.com about dealing with bed bugs in the properties under their care.

Since bed bugs can be hard to detect, especially in the early stages of infestation, landlords may also consider that treating all adjacent units where bed bugs have not been found may be a good idea. The City of Boston’s Housing Division actually requires this when the Inspectional Services Department finds bed bugs in an apartment:

Our Standard bed bug notice of violation also requires that owners inspect all units in the dwelling, and they must treat all horizontally and vertically adjacent units to the infested unit(s).

Boston landlords treat adjacent units even if they turn up no visible signs of bed bugs.

You don’t know how often Bedbuggers tell us (often in the forums) both of the following: (a) I have had 4+ bed bug treatments and the problem persists, and (b) none of my neighbors have bed bugs. When pressed, people invariably say neighbors were “asked.” Since as many as 50% of people don’t react to bites, asking doesn’t do much. Many times, inspection also turns up nothing. And then a few months later, lo and behold, bed bugs are back.

You also don’t know how often I hear (often in discreet emails) about professionals eventually discovering the badly-infested unit, with so many bed bugs they’re falling from the walls in broad daylight — invariably a bed bug infestation later discovered in a building where some other poor soul thought they were the only ones infested. Sometimes neighbors don’t know they have bed bugs because they can’t see them.

Other times bed bugs are clearly visible, but residents don’t know what they are, or fear repercussions for bringing the problem to light, or are impaired in some way such that they cannot recognize the problem or act on it, or (in rare cases) they know and just don’t care (shudder).

The good news is Hamilton is taking bed bugs seriously:

Stan Yung, a Hamilton public health manager, says the city is already intervening. It has been tracking cases since 2005 and now has a new public education campaign.

(I look forward to hearing how they are tracking infestations.)

• Bed bugs & tenant organizing: don’t take this lying down
• Boston and bed bugs: Mayor Bloomberg in NYC could learn a thing or two
• Bed bugs in North Jersey
• Bed bugs in Ventura County (Thousand Oaks, California)

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Ironically, when these men have made the choice to leave homelessness behind, they’re made to live in housing that makes the street look attractive.  (This is a problem elsewhere too.)

There have been rat droppings on the old, musty carpet and frequent mouse sightings near holes in the pocked, plaster walls. For months, exterminators have fought an infestation of bedbugs, which left at least one client with bite marks so bad he was treated at a hospital. Watermarks stain the aging ceiling, and some window frames are so old and ill-fitting that duct tape was used to stop drafts. In bathrooms, many of the urinals, toilets, and sinks are out of order.

Officials at the Cardinal Medeiros Transitional Program say they have complained about the conditions for years, but they contend that the YMCA Greater Boston, their landlord in the century-old building on Huntington Avenue, has ignored them while investing in top-of-the-line equipment for its gym. They accuse the Y of neglecting the 63 formerly homeless men who live there after an effort to terminate the program’s lease failed four years ago.

Now, program officials are threatening to withhold state lease payments to cover the cost of renovations, which they estimate could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Click here to read the rest of this Boston Globe story.

• Portland’s public housing and bed bugs
• A tale of another city: Monticello, NY low-income tenants 1, slumlord 0
• Homeless people wandering streets, refusing to stay in infested homeless shelter
• Brown student wants to provide free bed bug treatment to those who can’t pay

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She wants the health department to investigate whether they’re a health hazard:

Toronto Councillor Paula Fletcher (Ward 30, Toronto-Danforth) has received so many calls from constituents she’s asked the health department to declare them a health hazard. Last month, Fletcher met with Toronto’s Medical Officer of Health. It was decided the Board of Health would issue a report in February on what should be done about bedbugs in the city and whether they should be declared a health hazard.

Here’s a hint, Toronto: stress, anxiety, loss of sleep, are all health issues. You need look no further. Something more sinister is clearly a possibility, but these other concerns are not to be taken lightly.

Next, Fletcher wants people to talk about how to get rid of bed bugs, and prevent their spread:

In the meantime, says Fletcher, “We will have a bedbug summit with all the people who are interested in and involved in this issue.” Fletcher is advocating the city address the problem with education, not enforcement.

“Some people said they were living beside a house and the bugs were travelling from the house or apartment next door,” she said. “I’d like to see a focus on what needs to change in terms of behaviours; what do you need to do to stop bringing them in and what do you need to do to get rid of the bedbugs.”

This is all familiar ground for us.

Fletcher seems a bit distracted by the idea that bed bugs primarily affect a certain region of Toronto:

The bedbug problem seems to be concentrated in areas south of Bloor Street, says Fletcher.

“They might be north of Bloor, but the infestations and pockets are definitely south of Bloor. Right now tracking them is not a requirement but that’s one thing we’re looking at is how are we going to track and where are we finding them?”

While they may be more common in certain neighborhoods (and certainly spread more easily to those next door than to those across town), they will spread anywhere, and are certainly moving in all directions. And not just from neighbor to neighbor, but to workplaces, co-workers, people who frequent the same gyms, doctors, schools, and shops. Public transportation is likely to be affected. (David Cain tells stories of encountering this situation in London.)
Fletcher mentions the concern of people bringing in used furniture, and getting them to not do so is a public education issue. But her ideas about eradication methods are quite progressive:

“Sometimes people are bringing bedbugs into a whole building inadvertently and they are travelling unit-to-unit. I’d like to see a model where there are teams of people who go into a building to assist and not simply spraying, but cleaning, washing, getting rid of them and then when the spraying happens, you have a better chance to eradicate them.”

The article also quotes PCO and bed bug dog handler Michael Goldman of Purity Pest Control, who claims that “most hotels” have bed bugs, at least in one room. This is a far cry from the claims made by other companies.

The article also concerns itself with the need for notification of other tenants when bed bugs are found in a building.

Unlike schools that send home letters when lice are found in a school, superintendents rarely post a notice saying bedbugs were a problem in a unit, says Fletcher.

Finally, there’s a nod to Vancouver, which has some of the more progressive bed bug-fighting protocols in place (though we rarely get details of them).

Vancouver has launched one of the best pilot projects in its downtown east side as the city prepares for the 2010 Winter Olympics. “They’re vigorously trying to figure out what to do with bedbugs and they have a program set up but it’s very labour-intensive.”

The Vancouver pilot included tenant and landlord education, public education workshops, pest control and development of a health and safety protocol.

I hope politicians in New York City and other US cities with bed bugs (from Boston to Cincinnati) will take note, and that they’ll trade notes with their counterparts in other cities, from San Francisco to Toronto and Vancouver.

The number one complaint I’ve heard now from professionals (entomologists and PCOs) in several cities is that their local politicians will not listen to those with bed bug experience. This is a grave mistake.

Though it is not explicitly mentioned here, it’s clear Paula Fletcher is listening.

However, there was one small problem. This:

“The chemical approach isn’t necessarily the only way or best way to go. It’s one piece of a bigger puzzle,” says Fletcher, who would like the city to help people control bedbugs. “What people have to learn is that to control bedbugs they must become good at cleaning their bedding. People have to be taught how to do that.”

People do not get bed bugs, nor do bed bugs persist, because people do not know how to clean their bedding.

Reminds me of  when the chief medical health officer in Vancouver, John Blatherwick, implied bed bugs were spreading in Vancouver due to hanky panky in downtown eastside hotels.  Doing or not doing “naughty things” had no bearing on the spread of bed bugs.  What is it with politicians and their weird ideas?

Read the rest of the article here.

• bed bug news for 2007-11-16
• Reg Ayre of Toronto Public Health: bed bugs a “health concern,” not a “health hazard”
• Toronto Board of Health gearing up to fight bed bugs
• Vancouver official blames hanky-panky for bed bugs in nice areas

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In the 3 1/2 years it’s been open, Jurys Boston Hotel has never found bedbugs on its premises, nor have its guests complained about being bitten. Still, the luxury hotel in the Back Bay began dispatching a bedbug-sniffing dog to each of its 225 guest rooms last year. And when the canine detective barked, after detecting the suspicious scent of the itch-inducing insects or their eggs, the hotel fumigated two rooms and burned the mattresses.

“At the first sign or suggestion of a problem, our reaction would be to treat the room with chemicals, no questions asked,” said general manager Stephen Johnston, who calls the dog in every three months.

Every three months hardly means you won’t be bitten by bed bugs in the hotel, but it is definitely a start, and would prompt many of us to choose such a hotel over another that has no strategies to detect or prevent bed bugs.

Jurys isn’t the only hotel to take a proactive approach to bedbugs. The Omni Parker House brings in an insect-sniffing mixed Labrador from Advanced K9 Detectives LLC, the same Milford, Conn., firm that Jurys and about 10 other Boston-area hotels use. The Omni’s general manager, John Murtha, is also considering buying special encasements for mattresses and box springs to prevent bedbugs from building homes on them.

My advice to hotels is not to think too long about mattress encasements–just get them. They won’t prevent customers from being bitten but make it hard for bed bugs to hide on the actual mattress, and can mean you don’t have to destroy mattresses or spend considerable time and expense sanitizing them if an infestation does occur.

In addition, I hope all hotels and motels will educate staff about how to prevent spreading and detect bed bug infestations. Stephen Doggett’s article for Executive Housekeeping (an Australian hotel industry journal) is a must-read for industry professionals. Click here to load a PDF.

How many hotels are infested?

Judith Black, technical director at Steritech Group Inc., a pest-control company that serves the hospitality industry, found only 0.6 percent of the almost 76,000 rooms the company inspected between November 2002 and April 2006 needed to be treated for bedbugs, but those infestations were spread across 24.4 percent of the nearly 700 US hotels it studied.

I’d take those numbers with a grain of salt, and consider them in juxtaposition with another statistic the article offered:

Scientists are trying to find ways to fight the bugs, too. The Entomological Society of America’s annual conference, held in San Diego last month, featured three half-day symposiums on the insects, with nearly 30 scientific presentations on topics like “How bedbugs survive long xeric periods between blood meals” and “The effect of sex-ratio on dispersal and aggregation behavior of the common bedbug.”

Three years ago, no one at the conference presented any bedbug research.

So in 2004, bed bugs were not considered important enough to merit one single panel presentation at the ESA annual conference, and this year the topic merited thirty presentations.  To me, this obvious growth in bed bugs signals that perhaps Steritech’s data from 2002-6 is largely outdated.  (Steritech’s data also seems to be based on hotels who hired their services, in which case it is already biased towards hotels which are more proactive against bed bugs.)

Assume many more than 24% of hotels are affected, but try to keep this in perspective: remember that “a hotel with bed bugs” may have them in only a room or two.

In my opinion, with the requisite precautions, it is still safe to travel. Click here to download the CBC video for a good lesson in searching a room for bed bugs, and read our travel FAQs. Seeing the world is too good to miss. Let’s hope all hotels, motels, and hostels soon see having a sound bed bug protocol as being as important as changing the sheets.

Read the rest of the Boston Globe article here.

• 25% of hotel rooms have bed bugs? I don’t think so.
• Second Greater Boston Bed Bug Conference
• “Disproportionate Horror”: Vancouver Hoteliers Get Schooled
• Bed bug dog Joni: fighting bed bugs in New Zealand and Australia

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Dear Pennypacker Resident:

After reading the Crimson opinion piece from October 22, 2007, “I’ve
Got an Itch”, it seems worthwhile to review where things stand after
the incidents of skin complaints two weekends ago at Pennypacker.

At that time, three individuals came to university health services
(UHS) with similar symptoms. After being evaluated by a physician at
After Hours Urgent Care, the possibility of scabies was considered.
Discussion with proctors at Pennypacker revealed that there were at
least 5 or 6 students at Pennypacker with itching skin and rash, though
only three of them wished to be examined.

Given the symptoms, also under consideration was the possibility of bed
bugs, though the skin findings were not classic for this diagnosis. A
scraping from the skin of one student was done to look for mites, but
these were not seen. It’s important to note the presence of mites on a
skin scraping absolutely confirms the diagnosis of scabies; if they are
absent, though, the diagnosis is not excluded. Frequently, the
diagnosis of scabies is difficult to make, and it takes several
examinations of a patient over time before other possibilities are
excluded. This is because the rash associated with scabies can be
fairly non-specific, and the “burrows” are often not seen.

But the three students’ rashes had cleared up within three days, leading an entomologist to speculate that scabies was not to blame:

Four days later, Dr. Michael Alpert, an entomologist from the Harvard School of
Public Health came to Pennypacker and talked to three symptomatic
individuals and concluded that scabies was unlikely, given the rapid
clearing. He speculated that the causative bug could have been
mosquitoes, though he never saw the bites when they were present. The
physician who did see the bites, said that the appearance of the bites
was not consistent with mosquitoes, and that their locations on the skin
was more consistent with scabies. As is frequently the case with rashes,
the simple symptoms can lead to a variety of diagnosis, and it
is often difficult to tell, in the absence of definitive testing, which
one is correct.

This memo above to students was from Doctors Sohayla Gharib and Gregory Johnson of the Harvard University Health Service, who also had this to say,

If the diagnosis was not scabies, it is
possible that there was another insect involved, though it does not
appear to be bedbugs (because there are no ongoing symptoms and there
was no evidence for bed bugs when the pest control team evaluated the
dormitory), nor appear to be mosquitoes. Whatever the ultimate source,
it is now eradicated from Pennypacker thanks to your response and
cooperation.

Let’s all hope that Pennypacker is itch-free for some time to come.

Get the full story from IvyGate.

Also, here’s a Columbia University gossip blog, BWOG (put out by writers from the student magazine) alleging bed bugs are in Schapiro 12 (student housing at Columbia University):

According to Bwog,

Now that a few students have been bitten severely, Housing has finally admitted that there are bedbugs. Two rooms have been fumigated, one of them twice. Unfortunately, Housing still refuses to clean the hallway and carpet even though bedbugs can easily travel from one room to another. Housing, you’ve really let yourself go on this one…

• Johns Hopkins suggests SCRATCH method for diagnosing insect bites in kids
• Bed bugs at the College of New Jersey
• teaching doctors to diagnose bed bug bites
• FAQ: What are bed bugs? Do I have them? What else could be causing this?

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A BU junior said during her first night in the BU dorm Crofton in late May, she received small, red marks, each a centimeter wide, around her feet, legs and ankles. When she spoke with the associate director of British Programmes a month later after repeated unsuccessful attempts to meet, she was accused of making the marks herself, said the student, who wished to remain anonymous for fear of not being allowed to study abroad again.

The junior said she noticed the bites became larger and puffier and had spread over her entire body, but she and her roommate, Newbury College junior Michelle Beaton, did not complain until the second week. After their complaints, housekeepers sprayed the room using an aerosol insecticide and changed bed linens.

The aerosol insecticide worked briefly, but of course, the bed bugs came back with a vengeance:

Housekeeping and exterminators did not find evidence of a bedbug infestation in the students’ room, said Joe Finkhouse, international programs director of institutional relations, in an email to BU spokesman Colin Riley, to whom comments about the issue were directed.

“They wouldn’t admit we had bedbugs,” Beaton said. “We had all the symptoms of bedbugs.”

The students said the aerosol insecticide worked briefly, but eventually they began to notice more marks. Bedbugs do not spread diseases, nor are their bites particularly harmful to people.

“I was using makeup on my legs,” the BU junior said. “It was all over me. It was horrible.”

After the first spraying, the bugs got out of control, and she began seeing them, she said.

The junior said she tried contacting British Programmes Associate Director Alison Campbell after her room was first sprayed, but Campbell did not hear her case until about a month after. When they spoke, the BU junior said Campbell accused her of making the marks herself and said she “wasn’t allowed to tell anyone” about the situation.

BU’s Joe Finkhouse, international programs director of institutional relations, had this to say:

“Pests are not an ongoing problem in the London program or any other program site,” Finkhouse said in an email. “In fact, this was the first incident of its kind in London in over nine years. Over 4,000 students have participated in the London programs during that time. There have been no further reports since June.”

Well, it’s no great surprise, if students suffering from bites are threatened with retaliation for speaking about their experiences, as these students claim they were.

Students eventually got assistance with clothing cleaning bills and were moved to faculty housing at Lexam Gardens. (Hmmm… I wonder what happens to faculty who complain about bed bugs in their housing?)

Finkhouse had more to say:

“Fortunately, pest problems are extremely uncommon in our programs abroad,” he said. “We’re satisfied that the situation was handled well and quickly under the circumstances.”

What college administrators need to realize is that bed bugs are increasingly common everywhere. There’s no shame in contracting bed bugs; you will be judged not on the basis of having them, but on how you react to them, once a problem is identified.

I hope that BU’s study abroad program, and all international and domestic providers of student services, develop a proactive plan for preventing bed bugs, and dealing with them should they arise. Any complaints need to be met with a prompt, thorough inspection by a PCO and treatment by a PCO of the affected units. In this case, students claimed housekeeping staff coming in twice with an aerosol bottle represented the only treatment. It is extremely difficult to treat bed bugs, and professional, experienced pest control operators are the way to go. Unless more has been done since then, it is likely this dorm is still infested with bed bugs.

• Bed bug hotel claim in Isle of Wight; study/travel abroad and bed bugs
• Stanford bed bugs: university fights back
• bedbugs at Stanford University dorms (again)
• 80% of Single Room Occupancy units in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are infested with bed bugs; also Rensselaer Polytechnic’s dorms

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The context is that interviewer Tony Phillips is apologizing for not having more suggestions for Cho’s stay in NYC:

Tony Phillips: So I wish I could have been more helpful with the New York tips, but I do want to leave you with this: stay out of Bushwick. It’s this trendy ‘hood in Brooklyn and I’m quite sure people will try and drag you out there, but stay away. There’s a huge bed bug problem. It’s all over Gawker today.

Margaret Cho: What? They have bed bugs? What the hell are bed bugs?

Tony Phillips: It’s very Ashley Judd. They’re these little bugs transmitted through bedding and they suck your blood. I mean, share needles, fine, whatever. But who the fuck is sharing bedding?

Margaret Cho: Your trick is going to bring a pillow. Nuh-uh, that’s nasty.

Tony Phillips: It’s fat Janet nasty.

Margaret Cho: And so New York. I can’t wait.

Some observations:

On the one hand, there are still people who do not know bed bugs exist. (People who are fairly tuned in to the media and who live in major cities, mind you.)

On the other hand, there are people who know nothing about Bushwick except that it is infested with bed bugs. (Not exactly accurate, but a testament to the power of a Gawker article.)

What’s most striking, though, is that everyone talks about the bed bugs as if they are elsewhere. Watch out for bed bugs in NYC? Tony, my friend, watch out in Boston.

• Some recent press about bed bugs
• New York City is behind in the bed bug wars
• Bed bugs in the New York subway, going viral
• Hawai’i PCO says bed bugs are an epidemic there

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The health department also received complaints of infestations of two apartments at 553 South Main St., and one apartment each in apartment buildings or multifamily homes at 42 Pine St. (the Wilby Apartments), 107 South Leonard St., 182 West Main St., 148 Grand St. and 995 Bank St.

Also, there is a report of bedbugs in the Salvation Army shelter. A complaint received in April resulted in a notice of infestation in the entire building at 148 Grand St. The owner hired an exterminator to take care of the problem.

In most cases, the Health Department ordered property owners to take care of the problem by hiring a licensed PCO.

Meanwhile, in Boston, Massachusetts Institute of Technology student residents of Ashdown House, which has been under attack by bed bugs since last spring, are beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Danielle Piskorz reported Friday for MIT’s The Tech newspaper:

A bedbug problem that has been plaguing Ashdown since last spring is close to being resolved. An exterminator contracted to MIT has been visiting rooms several times a week over the course of the summer, and sticky-trap style bug monitors newly installed in each room show no sign of new activity.

I hope that this testing has been done since students have been resident in the rooms. We do know that bed bugs living in rooms or apartments that have been vacated will often move to another location (if humans are sleeping elsewhere in the vicinity, say a neighboring room or another floor). We are also told they may go “dormant,” hiding out until people return. Killing bed bugs is hard when no one is in residence, since they need to be attracted out to bite someone in order to cross the poison and/or mechanical killer and die.

How did MIT deal with Ashdown’s bed bugs? Fairly persistently, from the sound of things:

In Ashdown, the residents of the infested suites were required to have their rooms and clothes cleaned entirely to rid the area of bugs. They were also given new mattresses with covers to prevent the bedbugs from finding a new place to live. The contracted exterminator used “a clear, odorless, safe treatment” to kill the bedbugs, according to an e-mail sent to Ashdown residents from Denise Lanfranchi, Ashdown’s house manager.

According to Bajpayee, exterminating procedures ran in cycles, with the first spraying killing the adults and the second killing their offspring. A problem arose when the original floor was sprayed for bedbugs and the surviving insects ran up to the next. The total number of rooms affected was eight or nine, said Bajpayee. Ashdown has a total of 264 rooms.

To reduce the probabilities of bedbug problems in the future, MIT Housing may consider banning students from bringing used furniture into the dorms, Collins said. Until then, students should “be conscious of who and where they are buying [their used furniture] from.”

“Everybody should be careful,” Bajpayee said.

• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• Bed bugs at the University of Vermont
• Bed bugs at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec
• Adult home shut down in Monticello, NY with multiple housing violations; 40 beds contained “bed bugs and bed bug eggs”

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Advocacy group fights bed bug outbreak

VANCOUVER - Community advocacy group the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users VANDU is trying to fight a massive outbreak of bedbugs in that city’s Downtown Eastside by gutting infested rooms.

The group’s Anne Livingston says residents have had six weeks notice to decide what to do with their possesions.

After the rooms are gutted, crews move in to spray with powerful chemicals to kill the bed bugs.
Livingston says residents get to bring 60 pounds of clothing out of their apartments that will be laundered and returned to them.

Anne Livingston and VANDU were mentioned here in a post in March. Last summer, they got a $51,000 government grant to provide a round of 2 PCO treatments for bed bugs in two badly infested Downtown Eastside hotels. The residents also got replacement furniture and beds.

The city commissioned a study which said 1/2 of those rooms were bed bug free two months later.

Although the funding was probably was not enough treatment to achieve a higher success rate (which would likely require more PCO visits in many cases), the VANDU activisits definitely know what they’re doing. Back in March, we quoted an article in which Livingston said,

“You really need to create a system whereby you can knock on the door, get a room prepped, get the spray guys in and come back in 10 days and do it again,” said Livingston.

“And then, the real project is to not have people pulling bedbug-infested garbage out of the alley into another place. This creates constant reinfection. So that’s why it needs to be a neighbourhood campaign.”

Livingstone said bedbugs are a growing problem everywhere in Vancouver, and trying to get rid of them in the city’s poorest neighbourhood is money well spent.

Education, as we keep saying, is key–for residents of every treated building, I might add, whether it’s an SRO hotel, an expensive NYC co-op apartment building, a tenement, or a homeless shelter. (Remember, I live in NYC, where well-to-do professionals shop at bohemian flea markets, and yuppies take used furniture off the curb.)

I applaud the work of Livingston and the other folks at VANDU. I know with more funding and support, they will be able to continue to make a huge difference in peoples’ lives.

I hate that community activists like VANDU and the Allston-Brighton Community Development Corporation in Boston have to step in, since I think we need more infrastructure and government assistance helping people get good bed bug treatment and supplies they need (from XL ziplocs to furniture). Both of these groups have had government funding, which is great. I just think they probably need a lot more.

And is anyone in NYC or San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto, or anywhere else doing similar work? We’d love to hear about it.

• Vancouver community activists urge city to pay for bed bug eradication
• Government money needed to help people pay for bed bug treatment
• 80% of Single Room Occupancy units in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are infested with bed bugs; also Rensselaer Polytechnic’s dorms
• Itchy the Bed Bug: an Olympic Mascot for Vancouver

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The ABCDC is the only group in Massachusetts that helps people pay for treatment. Boston, surrounding towns, and especially Allston-Brighton, has a serious bed bug epidemic.

We’ve covered the ABCDC’s bed bug prevention and treatment efforts before. We think they’re awesome. It’s just sad that more help is not available. If governments (local, state, federal) and corporations want to stop the spread of bed bugs, more help is needed for homeowners, landlords, and renters. If people can’t pay for what’s needed to get rid of bed bugs, they will eventually spread to everyone. I’d like to see the government helping people directly, but until then, I hope more community / social service agencies will step forward and build on the ABCDC model. And I hope people will fund them.

Thanks to Keets for pointing us to the article!

• Vancouver community activists urge city to pay for bed bug eradication
• Boston and bed bugs: Mayor Bloomberg in NYC could learn a thing or two
• And another ray of hope from Vancouver’s VANDU
• And so, it gets worse: bed bugs on the move

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