A recent article from the Vancouver Courier was prompted by a woman’s sighting of bugs on a seat,

Kara Ardan was sitting near the back of a Hastings Street bus earlier this month, when something on the seat in front of her made her jump to her feet.

“I just saw something move,” she said. “It was probably a body louse. A good sized one, too. There were a few of them just hanging out there on the back of the seat.”

So the Vancouver Courier asks the valid question of whether local public transportation buses have bed bugs, and we’re told that

… Derek Zabel, the manager of media relations for Coast Mountain Bus Company, says Coast Mountain has had few reports of bugs on buses and none of its vehicles have been fumigated. Every three to four months each bus is scrubbed from top to bottom and a steam cleaning “extractor” sucks the contents out of the cushy seats.

TransLink switched to cloth seats in 2006 and 2007 because people with limited mobility could too easily slip off the old vinyl seats. Of its fleet of 1,400 buses, about 480 have cloth seats.

Then the following claim:

Brian Johnston, a supervisor in environmental health with Vancouver Coastal Health, doubts cloth or vinyl matters when it comes to bugs. He said bed bugs aren’t often transported on people. They generally feed when their human victims are in their deepest slumber, from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and then hide. Johnston said bed bugs are lazy, or smart. They don’t stray far from their food source, so if bed bugs bite your ankles, they’re probably living near the foot of your bed.

[Emphasis mine.]

We’ve actually heard that bed bugs are proficient hitchhikers.

Reports of bed bugs on public transportation used to be commonplace.

If bed bugs don’t get transported on people or their stuff, how in the world would bed bugs be spreading from place to place, not just within buildings? How would they have gotten into this Victoria, BC pediatric unit? Or this Vancouver Island detox? Or this fancy hotel?

Just because bed bugs are most likely to be found in beds, does not mean they do not travel.

Perhaps Johnston’s point is that everyone with bed bugs is not going to be carrying them and distributing them everywhere they go all the time. (True.)

However, bed bugs do travel with people, make no mistake.

That’s how our friend Sneaky Simes gets around all the time.

See Coast Mountain denies buses infested with bugs.

See also this related story: Times Article on Spread of Bed Bugs via Trains, Planes and Automobiles.Similar Posts:

• Megan McArdle on Atlantic.com: bed bugs and Craigslist
• Bed bugs bite Edmonton
• Bed bugs continue to multiply in Winnipeg
• Pest Control Technology’s Aug. 2009 bed bug supplement
• Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2009: new and improved

This Reuters piece was about how passengers on Nigerian motorcycle taxis were putting calabashes and portions of tires on their heads to avoid using the taxi’s passenger helmets, under a new law that requires motorcycle riders to wear helmets.

Newspapers quoted passengers as saying they feared the helmets could be laced with magic spells so as to knock the wearer unconscious and make them easier to rob, while others feared they would pick up an infection.

But the interesting point was this:

One columnist said transportation can already carry a health risk, and recounted how he had picked up a bedbug while sitting on a bus.

“The story is that people who have scabies, craw-craw, ringworm, dandruff and all other such diseases would easily infect others with them through the helmets,” Steve Nwosu wrote in the Daily Sun.

I’m not sure I’d want to share helmets with New York City motorcycle taxi riders either.

But Reuters readers should be aware you can get bed bugs from planes, subways, buses, and trams in Manhattan, Toronto, Prague, and the City of London, just as you can in Capetown or Lagos.

Enjoy!
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• Residents sue motel on Staten Island due to bed bugs

A Times (UK) article today on the spread of bed bugs emphasized the role of travel, specifically, the spread of bed bugs in public transportation:

Savvas Othon, technical director at Rentokil, said: “The short turnaround times for planes and other forms of transport means they are sometimes not inspected as thoroughly as they used to be. What should happen is a good vacuum around the back of seats and in the creases of seats. Any small gap is ideal for a bedbug, which can go for quite some time without a meal.”

Pest Control company Rentokil said it was now treating all kinds of public vehicles for bed bugs:

Rentokil says that it has seen a 24 per cent increase in work related to airlines, a 51 per cent increase in road-related call-outs, a 59 per cent jump in the shipping sector and a 9 per cent rise on rail in the past 12 months, compared with the year before.

“Bedbug infestations will continue to rise,” Mr Othon said. “Delays at airports don’t help as people sit in airport terminals, take things out of their bags and the bedbug jumps out and goes in search of another source of blood.”

While the general public is starting to think about hotel rooms as potential sites of infestation, it’s helpful to see a major newspaper highlighting the spread of bed bugs in airports, airplanes, trains, cars, and ships.

Awareness is key, as David Cain of Bed-bugs.co.uk stressed to the Times:

He said: “The number one reason for the spread of bedbugs is the lack of public awareness. People simply do not know how to detect them in the way they would have done in the 1950s and 1960s.

“They are a problem on buses, trains and subway systems, and on cruise ships too — any form of transport where there is a high turnover, really. Recently, on an overground train in South London, I pulled at the parting of the upholstery and found at least four months of dirt and debris.”

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