Since used furniture is such a likely conduit, why, then, does the article tell us that “Health officials recommend getting rid of any infested furniture. . .”? Surely health officials that believe tossing infested furniture is always the best plan are not thinking about the neighbors who will inevitably pick up that furniture, move it in, and start a new infestation.

Yes, it is sometimes (maybe even often) necessary, as the University of Kentucky site tells us. But cities which tell people with bed bugs to toss out their stuff need to provide services for dealing with the refuse. They can’t have people tossing out stuff that isn’t properly wrapped and they can’t have the stuff picked up by neighbors or junk collectors who can “clean” or cover and resell mattresses, or give wooden furniture a new coat of paint.

Cincinnati does have dedicated trash pickup for bed bug-infested furniture, though we have not yet heard much about how well it’s working.

• Cincinnati Establishes Bed Bug Furniture Pick-Up Procedures and Hotline
• Why we need a massive public education campaign about bed bugs (reason #327)
• More bed bug stories from Cincinnati; also, pig spotted in sky over New York City
• Unlucky in Vegas

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To think that someone, somewhere, had to be convinced that bed bugs are indeed vermin.

Reader, I envy those people.

I am treading the dangerous space of quoting too much from an article, to make sure this information is preserved for posterity.  The Enquirer, cinncinnati.com reports:

By adding them to Cincinnati Municipal Code Section 1601-17, bedbugs are among the critters the city ordinance requires owners and occupants of buildings to control.

Council also voted Wednesday to ask the Cincinnati Board of Health to change all its regulations regarding vermin infestations.

Until council added bedbugs, it was illegal in Cincinnati to permit an infestation of “rodents, fleas, lice, roaches, weevils” and unspecified “other vermin.”

Harboring a vermin infestation is a fourth-degree misdemeanor, punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a $250 fine.

But in saying that “owners and occupants” must eliminate bed bugs or face a fine or jail time, can someone tell us if tenants = “occupants”?

In other words, are landlords liable for eliminating tenants’ bed bugs in Cincinnati?

In still other words, what happens when people can’t afford proper treatment to eliminate bed bugs? Will there be any assistance for them?

Bottom line: is this ruling going to mean fewer people suffer from bed bugs, or that more people face fines and jail time?

• More bad news about Denver’s bed bug-infested Halcyon House
• Urgent: if you’re in Cincinnati…
• Cincinnati Establishes Bed Bug Furniture Pick-Up Procedures and Hotline
• Council bed bug treatment in the UK: rates going up

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WCPO noted that the meeting was hosted by Ohio State Representative Dale Mallory and that “state representatives, the Cincinnati Health Department commissioner along with several city councilmembers and county commissioners will try to find solutions” to the bed bug problem. Another source, kypost.com, said the meeting attendees also included Hamilton County (Kentucky) Coroner O’dell Owens. (The Coroner! If the coroner is involved, surely bed bugs must be a health concern? I see from the Hamilton County Coroner’s Organizational Flowchart that Toxicology is the likely interest here. Or perhaps Forensics: bed bugs are criminals–guilty of stealing our blood.)

Owens said, “In 2005 there were five to seven complaints on bed bugs. They’ve already had 19 the month of January. And last year I think they had 180. So this is an issue that is growing to cross neighborhoods. This is not just for poor people. Other people need to understand that bed bugs is not from people being unclean. You can have a home in Indian Hill and have bed bugs.”

There is no mention of whether local bed bug experts were involved, but I truly hope they were.

• Urgent: if you’re in Cincinnati…
• Last week’s Town Hall Meeting in Cincinnati
• Bed bugs on increase in Ripley County, Indiana
• Cincinnati city/county combined bed bug task force drafts bed bug plan, not a moment too soon

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The article implies that treatments have occurred at four-week intervals:

Gateway Center officials said that after the first bug was found on the third floor in October, all floors were chemically treated.

Those treatments are scheduled on a monthly basis, officials said.

On the one hand, employees were said to have been educated on what bed bugs look like, and as many as five bugs have been found in the last few weeks (despite several PCO treatments):

The IRS building employs 5,000 workers at its Covington offices, and it told employees for what to look when they find a bug.

An IRS representative said that employees have found as many as five bugs in the past couple weeks, but the representative said that the company has been working with OSHA and an exterminator to keep things in check for the past two months.

“In check” is not enough. And monthly treatments may not be–many PCOs tell us they treat at about 2-week intervals. We know bed bug eggs can hatch within that timeframe, and leaving things longer can mean more hatch, feed, and begin growing to where they can breed.

And apparently, other employees claim they don’t know what to look for:

“I don’t even really know what they look like,” Gateway Center employee Joy Fox said.

Maybe the memo was not enough.

It sounds like the building needs to employ the most knowledgeable PCO firm they can, enlist their help in educating all employees not just on what bed bugs look like, but how they travel from here to there. Every single employee should (in my opinion) have their home inspected for bed bugs. People could be bringing them from home repeatedly. However, since it sounds like the sightings are not isolated to one person or department, it is “people,” rather than one person.

And wherever the bed bugs came from, they can now be going home with just about anyone.

Those employees need to know how to identify bed bugs, and they also need to know that Dr. Michael Potter estimates as many as 50% of people may be bitten and have no itchy bites (source linked here). Everyone should realize that seeing five bed bugs in broad daylight means there will probably be many more present.

One also wonders what’s being done besides spraying and (some kind of) an education campaign? If people getting treatment in their homes and dorms have to have posessions carefully inspected, possibly bagged for some part of treatment, and carefully exposed, then surely a place of business would have some kind of “prep” on its hands as well?

You can read the rest of the article from WLWT online here.

Update 1/12/2008:  Although WLWT says the Gateway Center is in Covington, Ohio, a reader pointed out that it appears to be in Covington, KY.

• Tampa Bay mental health facility closed for bed bug treatment
• Fox NY claims it became infested with bed bugs “a few weeks ago”; tipster tells Gawker they fired employee who brought them in
• Bed bugs at Hawai’i’s Halawa Correctional Facility
• Another top NYC lawfirm gets bed bugs

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The Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority will show the Health, Environment and Education Committee a presentation on the pests.

Officials said bed bugs are a big problem in the city’s public housing, which is overseen by the Housing Authority.

According to Channel 12, Cincinnati politicians are claiming some success against bed bugs:

The health department says it received 737 bedbug complaints last year, more than 300 in September and October alone. Since then, the numbers have gone down.

Dale Grigsby, Cincinnati Health Department: “It appears as though at least what we’ve been doing for the last 6 months has been effective, but I don’t want to say conclusively until we’ve seen some more data.”

The message not to re-use discarded mattresses and couches may be sinking in. But housing advocates say the bedbug problem is here to stay for at least a while longer.

Surely the work Cincinnati is doing is having an effect.

However, I would not use statistics based on complaints during the last two months as a barometer. It’s my sense that people taking action on their bed bug issues goes down between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. My sense is that people are celebrating and preparing to celebrate. Money and time are going to other things, and they do not want to deal with problems–especially one they may think they can deal with a bit later. I don’t think that –based on fewer calls to the city about bed bugs in November and December–one can declare any improvement just yet. It really is premature.

And a few months isn’t really long enough to assume those treated homes are really bed bug-free. Bed bugs are notoriously tenacious. Even though Cincinnati was helping people discard furniture carefully, and providing information, there is no reason to think existing bed bug cases have been abated and that they have not spread further. It can take months for people who were treated to realize their bed bugs are not actually gone, yet. Rick Cooper helpfully suggests that people wait 55 days after last seeing a bed bug or suffering a bite to declare themselves bed bug free. My own sense is that in a multi-unit building with multiple infestations–and especially possibly undiagnosed and untreated ones–you aren’t really sure the problem is gone for some time after that.

The article also contained a strange estimate of how many would suffer bed bugs:

Charles Tassell, Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Apartment Association: “It’s going to be one in seven houses by the year 2008 that will be infected. We’re at 2008 and we’re not at that number yet, but we’re going to see it continue to grow.”

On the video, Tassell attributes his estimate that 1 in 7 houses would have bed bugs by 2008 to unnamed “professionals”. I do not recall hearing this statistic before, and I don’t know if it refers to Cincinnati alone or some larger region. I Also assume Tassell means “homes” in particular, and “homes,” not houses. Perhaps a reader will know the source of this statistic.

The Local 12 article did not give any real basis for thinking things were either that bad, or that improved. We can consider the one actual case mentioned in the article:

Joyce Jones has the bites to prove it. When bedbugs showed up in her apartment last fall she asked for help.

Joyce Jones, Stanley Rowe Apartments: “I did everything…I called in a work order. They come in and I tell you what they do. They do this here and say we don’t see nothing.”

Joyce is one of many residents of Stanley Rowe Apartments that are fighting bedbugs. Because of complaints, city council demanded answers from the Metropolitan Housing Authority and health department. CMHA says it’s doing the best it can. The health department says bedbug education programs seem to making headway.

Reading this tells you little. Watch the video. It’s hard to tell exactly what Joyce Jones’s housing inspector did, but her implication is that the inspection was cursory and this is a familiar story to our readers. Some readers tell us they have PCOs, and in some cases housing inspectors, who do very limited “inspections.” While we know bed bugs can live in the baseboards or other places in the room, and in furniture besides beds, some inspections still don’t go beyond looking under the sheets and mattress, and if they do not find a live bed bug, the inspection is over. (Some PCOs and inspectors, readers tell us, don’t inspect at all.) There have been isolated reports from people in NYC of HPD inspectors unwilling to come into apartments after people filed bed bug complaints. Of course, that is clearly not HPD policy and any person making this accusation simply must pursue the matter further with HPD.

Local 12 says Jones is simply using extra bleach in the laundry until someone comes to help. Since Jones lives in the same bed bug-beleaguered high-rise senior apartment building as Samuel Blackmon, the man shown in this harrowing video, where his “apartment that was treated a month ago” was not surprisingly still literally crawling with bed bugs. (The full story was not clear, but that video implied Blackmon’s apartment may have been treated just once, as of October, and that a month had elapsed with nothing more being done.) I would hope inspections in every unit of the building would be very extensive indeed, and that treatments are much more aggressive and regular.

I appreciate the steps Cincinnati has taken, but I would guess they still have a long way to go in fighting bed bugs.  We have not heard anything about monetary assistance for tenants, landlords, and homeowners who need help both preparing for treatment and for covering costs of treatments themselves. 

I hope they will add such assistance to current programs of public education and refuse removal, and make sure everyone is getting proper, thorough inspections and treatment–until their bed bugs are truly gone.

View the brief Channel 9 article by Alyssa Bunn here.

View Local 12’s article here.

• Urgent: if you’re in Cincinnati…
• Adult home shut down in Monticello, NY with multiple housing violations; 40 beds contained “bed bugs and bed bug eggs”
• Last week’s Town Hall Meeting in Cincinnati
• Cincinnati: awareness spreading, funds needed to fight bed bugs

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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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It’s not a particularly helpful story, however.

For starters, there are inaccuracies. Let’s start with this caption below a photo of an adult bed bug:

Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/4 inch long. They are brown or red-brown in color…

No!

They are never 3/4 inches long. Bed bugs, fed or unfed, range from 1/32 to 1/6 inch long. After hatching from the egg, they have 5 nymphal stages and one adult stage. Unfed bed bug nymphs (first instars that have never eaten) are clear in color. Fed bed bugs can be anywhere from red to rust to brown in color.

(Editor’s note, the error was made less egregious: by late Sunday night, it said “Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/8 inch long.” This is still inaccurate, however.)

This matters because people considering whether they might have bed bugs need to know the correct size, and that unfed nymphs are translucent, not red or brown.

Also, the “do’s and don’ts” suggests people “bag books, papers, most loose objects, and contents of closets so exterminators have access to all cracks and crevices in the home.”

This is not good advice in and of itself. If you bag up everything in your home, or discard it (for that matter), before a Pest Control Operator (PCO) has inspected and verified the presence of bed bugs, then it may be very difficult for them to diagnose your problem. You may end up with all your stuff in bags and PCOs telling you you don’t have bed bugs. And they may be wrong.

What’s more, simply bagging stuff that contains bed bugs or their eggs means you have bags full of bed bugs. What are you going to do with that, now?

Your PCO may advice you to carefully inspect and clean and bag items, for a time during treatment. Make sure you do so only after the problem has been identified by the PCO, and after the PCO has told you when you will be removing stuff from those bags. The answers on that seem to vary. Reading this FAQ might help you be prepared to discuss the issue with your PCO.

One interesting tidbit was an update of the previous data from HPD on bed bug complaints and violations.

The numbers are off the charts: In 2004, New Yorkers placed 537 calls to 311 about bedbugs in their homes; the city slapped 82 landlords with bedbug violations, data show.

In the fiscal year that ended in June, 6,889 infestation complaints were logged and 2,008 building owners were hit with summonses.

They must get rid of the pests within 30 days or face possible action in Housing Court, the city Department of Housing, Preservation & Development says.

This would be for fiscal year July 2006-June 2007. You’ll recall that approximately 1/3 fewer complaints were logged by 311 the prior fiscal year, and less than half as many were declared actual bed bug cases.

But these numbers are misleading because they only represent cases where those with bed bugs were tenants in city apartments and called 311 to report their bed bugs. As I have been saying for more than a year, most people do not do this. Out of a hundred tenants in NYC with bed bugs, I’d be surprised if more than one or two called 311. Most people don’t even realize this is an option–they know from past experience that pest complaints are directed at landlords. Moreover, those who do know, more often than not, choose not to call, because they’d rather work through the landlord if possible, rather than file a housing complaint and risk alientating the landlord. (This is often the last resort.)

The numbers are also misleading because they don’t include public housing, which logged, “1,708 verified bedbug cases in 277 public housing projects this year, the city Housing Authority says.”

The numbers also do not include statistics for those who own co-operative apartments, condos, or other housing.

The statistics offered on bed bugs in the schools (50 schools suffered a total of 74 bed bug “cases”) don’t line up with data the same newspaper shared back in February 2007, when the same newspaper reported that 43 schools had identified a total of 95 live bed bugs. (The story is gone, so you will have to read about it here.) Though it’s interesting to know that only an additional 7 schools have discovered bed bugs in the last ten months, it seems they must be defining “bed bug case” differently now than then, to have gone from 95 “bugs” to 74 “cases”.

Any statistics from the schools are skewered, however, since teachers have to see, catch, and mail away a bed bug for verification before the presence of a bed bug in the classroom will be registered. And while this may seem reasonable, anyone here will tell you you can be bitten badly and for a very long time before you ever see one. A lone teacher in a busy NYC classroom has slim chance of finding a bed bug on a student. Shall we assume, then, there are more?

Perhaps the most intriguing story in the article was that of Bernard Spitzer’s apartment building. We’re told,

[Bed bugs] even contaminated five or six apartments in the swanky rental tower at 220 E. 72nd St. owned by Bernard Spitzer, the governor’s 83-year-old father.

Several tenants described a persistent, if intermittent, infestation on the 15th, 16th and 17th floors.

A few infested floors, midway up a high-rise: nothing unusual there. But wait:

Spitzer’s 28-story building sits atop the six-story home of Marymount Manhattan College, which discovered seven infestations in two residence halls. The problem was under control by October, a spokeswoman said.

Marymount Manhattan has three residences for students, none of which are in this building. It does cause one to wonder whether there is any connection between the incidents on the 15th-17th floors and in the homes of some of those who spend part of their time in the first six floors.

We also get an update on the city’s “response” to bed bugs:

City officials say HPD inspectors are increasing enforcement as complaints mushroom and the Health Department is handling education and prevention efforts. It’s not more actively involved because its focus is on disease-spreading pests, officials said.

“That’s not good enough,” said City Councilman Gale Brewer (D-upper West Side.) “It’s great that we’re not smoking as much, and great that we’re not eating trans fats, but we need to focus on bedbugs in the same aggressive manner.”

Brewer wants to create a Bedbug Task Force and bar the sale of reconditioned mattresses, which the Bloomberg administration opposes because it “would adversely impact lower-income New Yorkers,” a mayoral spokesman said.

I love Brewer’s comments about smoking and trans fats, both of which are banned from local restaurants. Bed bugs are not.

Brewer first went down this Bed Bug Task Force/resales of mattresses road in the fall of 2006, but we haven’t really seen any results yet from these initiatives.

All in all, the city’s response is very ostrich-like. Let’s compare with other cities in the US: San Francisco has guidelines for dealing with bed bugs in apartment buildings, hotels, and other locations, as does the state of California. Lexington, KY and Cincinnati, Ohio health departments (yes, health departments, Mr. Bloomberg) have both declared war on bed bugs.

Lexington tells residents to call the health department if they think they have bed bugs.

Cincinnati has a hotline just for bed bug information. They also have dedicated bed bug trash pickup for discarded furniture. We think encouraging residents to throw furniture away, rather than helping them pay for treatment, is misguided. But Cincinnati is trying. They think education is key. Hear that, Mr. Bloomberg?

San Francisco City Supervisor Chris Daly got $63,000 in this year’s budget to help low-income residents pay for laundry and freezing of possessions. San Francisco politicians listened to SRO activists who told them this money was needed. Because poor people seriously can’t afford to do the necessary tenant’s part of bed bug treatment.

And let me be clear: not one of these localities is doing enough to combat bed bugs. None of them, not by a long shot. Much more help is needed, especially laws about disclosure of infestations, tracking of infestations by government agencies (so someone is actually paying attention to where bed bugs are spreading), and financial assistance to landlords, homeowners, and tenants who are having trouble paying for preparations and effective treatment. Bringing back some of the recently outlawed, more effective pesticides for targeted bed bug use would go a long way (and no, I do not mean DDT).

Meanwhile, NYC is doing none of this. The NYC Department of Education has deployed “bed bug kits” to schools. Their website claims:

Schools are not an ideal location for bed bugs to reproduce, because they are nocturnal insects that require feeding prior to reproduction; but in the event that bedbugs do show up in our schools, the DOE’s Pest Management Unit is providing a Bed Bug Kit to deal with specimens.

This is erroneous information. Bed bugs are nocturnal if food is available at night, pure and simple. Transplanted to schools, they will bite, reproduce, and thrive. This is an example of wishful thinking, which seems to be the backbone of NYC’s bed bug policy.

NYC does not even tell tenants to call 311 about bed bugs, unless they wade through the HPD website looking for this directive.

And yet bases its assessment of the severity of the problem on those calls.

Discuss.

If you have trouble with the article link at top, try this one.

• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• Excerpt from article re NYC Department of Ed policy
• The UFT (NYC teachers’ union): how do we get the city to be proactive about bed bugs?
• Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington in NYC: latest bed bug lawsuit

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• Use bed bug registries and warn others about infested buildings and hotels!
• Bed bugs invade Chicago’s Presidential Towers, and another Vancouver Island detox
• Forget black mattress stains, bed bugs, shells, and eggs: NMPA press release tells consumers to look for “blood spots”
• Brown student wants to provide free bed bug treatment to those who can’t pay

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If your multi-unit building landlord, co-op association, condo board, YWCA manager, elderly housing provider are not taking action, make them watch this and remind them, your building can get to be this bad.

Stories like this are not that unusual–I have heard a number of them from pest control operators.

• Washington YWCA infested with bed bugs: more elderly, low-income residents being left to itch
• apartmentratings.com on bed bugs; realtor warns clients about bed bugs; tenant.net on bedbugs; more video from Cincinnati
• everyone should watch this bed bug video
• Bowling Green Towers: another infestation in elderly and disabled housing

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“This is an all-embracing examination of our need to sleep. . . . The very practical logistics of sleeping are also tackled: bedbugs and the luxury of a bed to oneself.” Bed bugs figure in exhibit on sleep at medical-themed-art centre in London.

Cincinnati YWCA Women’s Emergency Shelter has bed bugs, according to Porkopolis

“Now only new clothing can be accepted for donation, and all personal belongings of residents must be stored in large plastic bins. They’re also looking at replacing the sturdy, familiar wooden bunk beds with metal ones to help reduce infestations.”

RealTravel - Hotel Paradiso! | Bargara Travel Blog | Bargara Travel Reviews

Travel blogger claims Bargara, Queensland hostel was bedbugged, and more: “There were rats, mice, possums, bed-bugs, and one morning a kitchen full of maggots. gross. there were curious looking stains on the carpets, especially in our bedroom and there was possum s–t on our floor.”

Bed bugs, or incontinent possums: which is worse?  I’ll take the possums any day, mate.

• Bed bug Helloise: a nice, reasonably-priced white metal bed frame with no wooden slats
• More on bed bugs at the Montana Rescue Mission in Billings
• Spring break bed bug warnings!
• Bed bug news round-up: South Jersey apartment complex; Charlotte, North Carolina Salvation Army shelter

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