“Bed bugs are back, and we’re not ready.”

Those are the words Sean Meagher told a crowd of 100 people who gathered in Toronto today to discuss a new report on the city’s bed bug problem.

CBC has a video about this event here (though I was glad to see it, it also contained some dodgy suggestions for people with bed bugs, for example “if all else fails, call an exterminator”).

In Toronto, the CBC notes, reports of bed bug infestations are up 1000% in the last year.

Meagher (President of Public Interest)  is one of the authors of the new report funded in part by the city and the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long Term Care.   This second CBC story tells us the report

. . . found that over an eight-month period in 2008, Toronto Public Health received 1,500 reports of bed bug infestations.For all of 2003, in comparison, the city’s public health department received 46 such complaints.

The report says a rise in infestations isn’t unique to Toronto — Ontario towns like Ottawa, Owen Sound and London have also been hit. Meanwhile, New York City and even some cities in Australia have reported similar spikes in the past five years.

More than 100 people —including social workers, MPs and landlords — crammed into a conference room at City Hall on Monday to discuss the report’s findings with its authors.

No one who has been watching our inadequate and uncoordinated collective response to the bed bug problem is at all surprised that they continue to spread and become a more and more serious problem.

This report from CityNews includes additional comments from Sean Meagher, and an interview with a woman who talks about her bed bug bites, and about how she has been banned by her employer from her place of work until she gets rid of her bed bug infestation.

Similar Posts:

• Toronto municipal councillor pushes for bed bugs to be declared a health hazard
• Bed bugs infest multiple areas of New York’s John Jay College (CUNY)
• Tennessee Hotel and Lodging Association: “Bedbugs are really a non-issue”
• Bed bugs bite Edmonton
• Bed bugs in Grand Forks, North Dakota public housing

Remember the “bed bug sauna” which was designed into the new Lux residence by Vancouver supportive housing developer RainCity?  There’s an article on the building in The Province today, which notes:

The latest supportive housing building to officially open in the Downtown Eastside has something no other building in the city has: a bedbug sauna.

The nine-storey Lux on 65 E. Hastings boasts a 400-square-foot hot room on the ground floor that heats up to 65 C to cook the voracious apple-seed-size parasites that plague many Metro Vancouver homes and Downtown Eastside hotel rooms.

It’s already seen a lot of use from Lux tenants.

“I’ve already brought my couch down two times now, said Greg Cornish, 50. “It’s a really great feature.”

And yes, it also cooks bed bugs which are not “apple-seed-size” but are as small as first instar 1/32″ (1mm) long nymphs.

I want one in my building!  That and the luxe bamboo flooring… sweet.Similar Posts:

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The Edmonton Sun reports that

Swarms of bloodthirsty bedbugs are taking over entire apartment buildings across the city, and public health officials warn that it’s only getting worse.

And how do bed bugs come to take over “entire apartment buildings”?

Step one: when tenants complain of bed bugs, treat once and never follow up.

[Tenant April Lariviere] first noticed the bugs in her furniture last spring. It’s gotten so bad in her northside apartment that she’s had to throw out their mattresses, couches and chairs. They now sleep on air mattresses on the living room floor.

“We’re living in Tupperware containers,” she said. “Everything has to be sealed up to keep the bedbugs off.”

She said the building was fumigated in the spring, but the bugs came right back.

“Nothing’s happened since them,” she said. “There was no follow-up.”

[Emphasis mine.]

Bed bugs are not new to Edmonton; the city has been struggling for years.

What are the laws regarding bed bugs in Edmonton?  According to the CBC,

Alberta’s public health act and housing regulations require a landlord to provide a tenant with a healthy and habitable environment. A tenant with bedbugs is advised to report the dwelling to the regional health authority. Health inspectors will then assess the problem and in most cases order the landlord to take care of it.

In the Sun article, Ken Dong, a senior environmental health official with Alberta Health, notes matters are complicated in the building Lariviere lives in, because many tenants are renting their suites from individual condo owners who live out of town.  But Alberta Health is now on the case:

After several complaints from tenants, Dong said, a health inspector recently went through the place again and informally told the management company to work with the condominium board and tenants to get rid of the pests.

Dong acknowledged that it’s complicated because most of the suites’ owners live out of town and rent them out.

He said inspectors will continue to monitor the building, and if they’re not satisfied with how the infestation is being handled, they can slap the condo board with a formal order. Failure to comply with the order could result in fines. They can also order suites vacated.

It would be a shame if the tenants lost their homes after having suffered from bed bugs for so long.  Let’s hope it does not come to that.

Living in the Edmonton area? 

Capital Health has a Bed Bug Prevention PDF and a Bedbugs Fact Sheet; you can download both here.Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs bite in Edmonton sleep disorder clinic
• Bed bugs in Madison, Wisconsin: warnings on moving day
• Bed bugs in the media: David Cain on British radio, Dr. Susan Jones in the Plain Dealer
• Round, round, get around, bed bugs get around all the time
• Depot Square in St. Johnsbury, VT: 39 of 47 units infested

Remember when we reported back in June 2008 that a new RainCity Housing development in Vancouver was going to contain a “bed bug sauna” for treatment of infested items?

The new building “The Lux”, at 65 Hastings Street, is in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a highly infested neighborhood, and provides 25 transitional housing units, and 67 supported long-term housing units.  And they’ve started baking tenants’ bed bugs.

RainCity is a chartiable organization which provides housing to people who need it.  Their website states,

The men and women who benefit from the services of RainCity Housing are treated with dignity and respect, and are offered a safe place to live, independence and improved quality of life.

Nothing says “dignity and respect” as much as helping people to live without the presence of bed bugs.

The Vancouver Courier reported of the new sauna room, that

Staff take bed bug-infested furniture to a 200-square-foot cream-coloured room with a grey cement floor and four metal troughs. A gas boiler heats water and an electric fan spreads heat throughout the room. Simpson, operations manager for RainCity, wraps infested mattresses, carries them carefully to the ground floor room, cranks the dry heat to 60 degrees Celsius for four to six hours, and watches bed bugs creep from the highest point of an item down, until they dry out and fall off.

It does not replace bed bug treatment for the unit, but does mean tenants do not have to throw out belongings which they may have been asked to toss in the past.

However,

RainCity hasn’t run the belongings of tenants moving into The Lux through the oven before they get set up, but it might do so when the flow of tenants moving in decreases. The nine-storey building provides low-barrier transitional housing with intensive staffing on two floors, and provides apartments for men and women who have a history of homelessness.

In my opinion, it would be best to run new tenants’ belongings through the unit.   Many people will not notice they have bed bugs until the problem is pronounced — especially since many people do not react to bed bug bites.  And tenants with bed bugs can spread bed bugs to others via common areas, and outside of the building (buses, hangouts, etc.).

With construction and consultant costs, Simpson estimates the bed bug room cost $8,000 out of the $22 million it took to construct 92 new social housing units in the Downtown Eastside. Extra money was spent in an attempt to seal each unit. Electrical outlets include flanges to keep bed bugs at bay. RainCity’s maintenance contract with a pest control company continues but in this new building, treating rooms above, below and next to an infested one shouldn’t be necessary.

$8000 out of $22 million?   Peanuts.

And simply sealing each unit carefully from the outset may go a long way to helping prevent bed bugs spreading.

The bed bug sauna idea is attracting interest from public housing provider BC Housing:

Bill Briscall, RainCity’s communications manager, said B.C. Housing is interested in including bed bug saunas at each of the 12 city-owned sites where social housing is planned. RainCity Housing runs shelters, including the controversial HEAT shelters under Granville Bridge, long-term housing, outreach programs, life skills and food services.

The Globe and Mail also reported on the Bed Bug Sauna at The Lux (PDF here).Similar Posts:

• 160-unit Richmond, California complex evacuated for tent fumigation of bed bugs
• Entire Kansas City high-rise gets thermal treatment for bed bugs
• Bed bugs bite in Richmond, California public housing development
• Towels under the door: when cities abandon tenants with bed bugs
• Mark Sheperdigian on the limits of bed bug inspections

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
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• Pest Control Technology’s Aug. 2009 bed bug supplement
• Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2009: new and improved

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:

• Brief report on Seattle NPMA Bed Bug Symposium; bed bug dog awareness among customers
• Apartment Therapy on bed bugs, bed bug sniffing dogs
• Milwaukee Housing Authority purchases bed bug sniffing dog
• Bed bug sniffing dog and handler to be featured on Animal Planet
• Co-op pays $250K after bed bugs found in several units, storage area, stairwells

The Structural Pest Management Association of British Columbia (SPMABC) will be hosting a free information session on bed bugs and related topics this Saturday (February 28th) at Library Square from 9:00am – 1:00pm. Admission is free, but on a first come, first served basis (the room holds 300 people).

Topics will include:

• General Bed Bug Information
• Prevention Tips
• Detection Methods
• Health Concerns
• Tenant Rights
• Landlord Obligations

For more information please email info@spmabc.com.Similar Posts:

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This week, Canada’s CTV has been featuring stories on pests that invade the home. There’s a video story on bed bugs in an Ottawa home — an in-depth examination of what it’s like to live with, and fight bed bugs.

The young woman interviewed (anonymously) in this interview is the daughter of Itchy-Scratchy, a Bedbugger forums regular.

Click here and go down to the item entitled “CTV Ottawa Joanne Schnurr on getting rid of bed bugs.”

We’re all really grateful to Itchy-Scratchy for all the support she provides in the forums, and to Itchy-Scratchy and her daughter for trying to educate the world about bed bugs.

We hope their own bed bug problem is gone for good very soon.

More stories on bed bugs in Ottawa.Similar Posts:

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Orkin in Vancouver has just acquired a bed bug sniffing dog.

Vancouver, meet Frankie!

Frankie was rescued from a shelter and trained for 600 hours at Florida Canine Academy (run by Bill Whitstine).

An Orkin employee wrote to Bedbugger,

For a VERY limited time our company will be offering free inspections to those in the Vancouver area that fear they have bed bugs but professionals have not been able to turn up any evidence.

It is important to note that we will not be doing inspections for people that have not yet had any pest control professionals do an inspection first.

They will need to provide proof that the pest professionals are stating that they did not find evidence. We will also only be able to do this free of charge for a limited number of people.

Just to repeat, you must have already been told by a pest control operator that you do not have bed bugs, based on an inspection.

This will surely be a good offer for some in the area. Thanks to Orkin for sharing it with us.

If you’re in Vancouver and qualify, please call the Burnaby manager at (604) 434-6641 and tell them Bedbugger sent you.Similar Posts:

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Joe Fiorito has an excellent new article today, and it represents a departure from many of his past bed bug stories, which focused on individual stories of life with bed bugs, often focusing on low-income and elderly tenants.

This time, Fiorito reports on a presentation by Dr. Michael Potter, long one of our favorite entomologists, who spoke at a Canadian pest control conference recently.

He describes the wonders of thermal treatment (which we agree is very appealing, but will not work and should not be tried as a do-it-yourself remedy). He also notes that bed bugs developed resistance to DDT (which we already knew).

Fiorito also notes that Potter questions why health departments are so reluctant to declare bed bugs a public health pest:

Potter noted that cities were quite willing in the past to declare bedbugs a public health menace. He seemed puzzled by our reluctance to do so today. He said, “This is the most serious pest of our generation.”

He’s right.

It’s important to remember that while having your city actively engaged in fighting bed bugs (as Toronto is, and most cities aren’t) is hugely important, it is not a cure-all. It’s just a start.

Bed bugs remain, and they stink.

Please do read Bed Bug News Only Gets Worse in the Toronto Star, today.Similar Posts:

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