According to Fox 31 News in Colorado, JoDean Persichetti says she did not have bed bugs in her apartment until after her shipment of rented furniture arrived:

“Those bugs were not in the apartment before the furniture arrived, it’s a brand new unit,” she said.

JoDean asked Rent-A-Center to pick up the furniture but the company refused, saying an insurance adjuster would have to inspect the furniture first, and if JoDean moved it herself she would be held liable for any damages.

“You just want to scratch your skin until you bleed,” JoDean said. She moved her mattress outside, but she says the bugs in her bedroom are still there.

Though Rent-a-Center claimed they inspected the furniture and found it bed bug-free before delivery, the Aurora store is paying to have Orkin treat Persichetti’s home for bed bugs.

Rental furniture is at risk of picking up bed bugs in one home, and having them carried to another. In addition, items not infested with bed bugs might become infested while being carried together with infested items in a truck.

I believe all furniture rental companies should be taking steps to ensure without a doubt that their stock is bed bug-free. Possible methods for doing so include professional thermal treatment and/or vikane (sulfuryl fluoride) gas fumigation of trucks full of stock.Similar Posts:

• Nashville woman files suit with Rent-a-Center over bedbugs
• Bed bugs “a disaster no different from a fire” Brattleboro, VT Selectboard is told
• 160-unit Richmond, California complex evacuated for tent fumigation of bed bugs
• Depot Square in St. Johnsbury, VT: 39 of 47 units infested
• Bed bugs on Today with Meredith Viera and Janice Lieberman, today

Diep Huynh and Oanh Nguyen, a Pennsauken, NJ couple who claim they got bed bugs from a new bedroom furniture set, won $49,000 in a jury trial.

Today a jury awarded the Pennsauken, N.J. couple $49,000 finding that the bedroom furniture they purchased at J.C. Penney in Cherry Hill was infested with bed bugs. “For months, they didn’t know what was causing all their problems and the itching. When they found out that it was the bed bugs, it’s kind of like, it freaks you out a little bit,” said Kevin Siegel, an attorney for the family.

The family bought the furniture back in May of 2006. It was delivered 3 months later in June. It included a chest, dresser and bed-frame with a headboard, costing about $1600.

The family says they were given no choice but to sue after the company agreed to pay to remove the furniture, and to exterminate their room.

But that apparently never happened.

Their lawyer was Kevin Siegel.

You can read the full article or watch the video of Jessica Borg’s news report from WPVI Philadelphia here.Similar Posts:

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Hints from Bed Bug Helloise has been on a long hiatus.

Our Helloise doesn’t often see anything she wants to share with Bedbuggers. We all have too much stuff anyway, don’t we?

But she recently came across this item: the Hollywood Purse Hook.

The manufacturers claim it will hold a purse dangling from a table edge or chair armrest. It keeps your bag off the floor. It puts several inches of lovely metal between your purse and the table.

The manufacturers of this brand of purse hook claim it will hold a purse or laptop up to 35 pounds, though we are skeptical about the larger and heavier items.

But we know how skeeved you get putting your bag on the floor of public places, post-bed bugs.

It comes with a velvet carrying case, presumably to protect the contents of your purse.

Has anyone tried one of these, or a similar idea in another brand? If so, do write in and tell Helloise if you like it.

Other brands of purse hooks below make their own claims as to maximum weights held, saying their purse hooks will hold up to 15 or 20 pounds. YMMV!

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In the video below from 5/19/2008, Fox News NY visits a mattress recycling operation in Woodside to report on bed bugs in “refurbished” mattresses.

It is perfectly legal to spritz, recover, and resell used mattresses in New York. They have to be sanitized and labeled properly.

There is currently no way we know of to spray “sanitize” used mattresses to reliably remove all bed bugs and eggs. There is no spray treatment that will definitely de-bug a mattess, unless the bed bugs are hit directly with a contact kill spray or they cross a residual — and there’s no way to guarantee this.

(It would probably be possible to safely sanitize used mattresses using thermal heat, but we do not know of any mattress resellers who are doing this at this time.)

Perhaps the only possibility for reliably removing bed bugs would be using heat (over 120 F for 3+ hours) or Vikane gas (which — if done correctly, and it is not always done correctly — should be 100% effective, but would probably raise the cost of refurbished mattresses to the point where no one would buy them).

The recycling of mattresses is shameful and the New York government must put an end to this practice which spreads bed bugs to so many.

And don’t think you’re safe if you never buy a used mattress. If your hotel, school, granddaughter’s day care, child’s friend’s parents, neighbor, building employee, or the person who sat in the movie theater before you bought a used mattress, that’s enough to give you bed bugs.

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• National Post: Bed bugs invade Toronto
  East Toronto city councillor Paula Fletcher asked the Toronto public health unit on Monday to study what it could do to eradicate the problem of bed bugs. Right now the public health unit does not track infestations, but simply offers phone advice to suff
  (tags: Toronto tippingpoint nationalpost canada ontario bedbugs nov2007 2007 PaulaFletcher Torontopublichealthunit)
• Bedbugs Found in Mountainview: SUNY Binghamton
  Bed bugs have been found in two separate dorms at Binghamton University (SUNY) in New York state. This time it’s in Cascade Hall in Mountainview College.
  (tags: nov2007 bedbugs 2007 bedbug mountainview cayuga cascade treatment universities students dorms colleges newyork binghamton SUNY)
• Bed bugs at Cayuga Hall, College-in-the-Woods, Binghamton University (SUNY)
  Bed bugs found in the Cayuga Hall dorm at Binghamton University. A subsequent article on Nov. 13 notes that a bed bug was later found wandering a hallway in Cayuga. Within the week, bed bugs were also found in Cascade Hall.
  (tags: bedbugs cayuga collegeinthewoods binghamton SUNY universities colleges students dorms nov2007 2007 newyork)
• Curbed SF: Marina Bedbug Removal: Not Cheap
  An article in the latest Business Week SmallBiz cites a Marina District property manager’s infestation (5 rooms, hallways, and in-between walls in a 28-unit complex) as costing $40k, which included almost $10 grand to one litigious resident.
  (tags: bedbugs curbed curbedSF sanfrancisco cost money bedbug infestation epidemic business lawsuits media nov2007 2007)

(The following is not really bed bug news, but a reminder of a time not long ago when encountering a bed bug in a place of business was a bit like finding a hair in your salad, but maybe more common.)


• Urban Legends Reference Pages: The Bedbug Letter
  The standard groveling letter from a corporation that doesn’t give a hoot about the consumer’s experience, was once called “the bed bug letter.”
  (tags: bedbugletter snopes.com history)

(These last two are not really bed bug stories, but they tell us something about how widely known bed bugs are becoming: they’re starting to mean something in popular parlance once again.)

• Four months of boom, bust, and fleeing foreign credit – Los Angeles Times
  Yet another appropriation of bed bugs as a metaphor. Hopelessnomo calls this a Tipping Point, and I agree. This article begins, “Have you considered lately how similar the U.S. economy is to the pesky bedbug?”
  (tags: bedbugs popularmedia popularculture vernacular English metaphor spread tippingpoint)
‘Operation Bed Bug’ Rounds Up Suspects :: WRAL.com
This is about alleged criminals being roused from their beds in a sunrise raid. Wise hopelessnomo called it as a Tipping Point. Ironically, jail is apparently a great place to pick up bed bugs…
(tags: tippingpoint police operationbedbug)

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On the Today show this morning, Katie Couric Meredith Viera said, “You can’t live in New York without finding old mattresses and TVs along the curbside because people don’t know what else to do with them. But there is someone who will take them.”

Her interviewee, Chip Giller of Grist.org, suggested going to Craigslist or freecycle.org to offer your mattress to others.

Grist says in the related article their website,

In most areas of the U.S., you can’t recycle your mattresses, and they’re even hard to give away — charities like Goodwill often refuse to take them. Old TVs can be tough to unload too. But if your items are still in functional condition, consider that other R, “reuse,” instead of just “recycle.”

One of the best ways to give new life to your old belongings is through the Freecycle Network, an online community with chapters all over the U.S. and around the world, through which people offer up items they no longer want and other people happily snap them up. (Read an article about Freecycle’s founding.) The online bulletin board Craigslist, which also has hundreds of local versions, has a section where you can offer things up for free too. You can get rid of just about any usable item (and some items you didn’t even think were usable) via Freecycle and Craigslist, and you can find great free stuff too.

While this may seem like a good idea, these days mattresses you see curbside (and there is one pictured in the Grist article linked to above) are often there because people had bed bugs and threw them out. While tossing out mattresses and furniture is not usually necessary (or even a good idea), it is a really common reaction to discovering bed bugs.

While Giller and Viera might assume that people would not offer their bed bug-infested mattresses on these online communities, the sad fact is that you can easily have bed bugs without knowing it–a significant percentage of people do not react to their bites. (I’ve heard estimates from 30% to 70%, but I don’t think there is good data on this yet.) Mattresses and furniture items do not always look infested. And bed bugs are spreading at an alarming rate, all over the US, from New York to Cincinnati, San Francisco to Boston, as well as in other countries.

This is probably why Goodwill does not accept used mattresses. (It’s likely they have enough trouble keeping bed bugs out of their shops and warehouses due to donations of furniture, clothing, and other items they do accept.)

While I strive to be as Green as I am able to be, I can tell you that getting bed bugs can do some serious damage to the environment, in the form of tossed out, destroyed, and replaced items, the use of plastic bags to isolate infested materials, the unusual amount of laundry, not to mention the spraying of pesticides.

A typical bedbugger’s XL ziplocs used during an infestation would probably make for a nice little landfill mountain. Bed bugs are not easy to get rid of, and spread easily to neighbors and others. One bed bug-infested mattress can lead to many people getting bed bugs and tossing out lots of otherwise-good stuff. So encouraging people to reuse and share mattresses, when this can spread bed bugs further, just does not make sense. The best thing for the environment would be for fewer people to get bed bugs in the first place.

Avoiding someone else’s Craigslist or Freecycle mattress is a good idea, because you cannot be certain it came from a bed bug free home, and neither can the person who donated it.

Caveat dumpster, and Caveat Craigslist.*

If you’d like to drop Today a note about this concern, as I did, you can email them: today@msnbc.com

*Yes, I know my Latin is not grammatical. It should be Caveat Dumpster-Diver. And Caveat Cragislist-user. But it’s catchy don’t you think? ,

Thanks to poorBugger for mentioning this segment in the Forums.Similar Posts:

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Men’s Health magazine on bed bugs, this month: it’s just a brief snippet in an article of travel tips, but it hits home:

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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In an article today entitled “Hard-worker sniffs out bedbugs,” from the Taranaki Daily News (New Zealand), Sharon Marris writes about bed bug dog Joni who works with Pro-Tek Systems owner John Morley in New Zealand.

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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This article about bed bugs in North Carolina comes from South Carolina’s The State (republished from the Raleigh, NC News and Observer).

“There’s a lot of folks who don’t bother to call us. They’re embarrassed. The social connotation goes back to the early 1900s; they were associated with slummy places. And that’s not the case now,” said Michael Waldvogel, an entomologist with the N.C. Cooperative Extension. The bugs are a problem all over the country, experts say.

Waldvogel says he has gotten reports of bedbugs from across the state — some tied to vacationers bringing them home from beach houses or hotels.

Perhaps a few of them can also be tied to the reselling of used, unsanitized mattresses in Charlotte, N.C. This woman claimed to purchase a heavily infested bedroom suite from another N.C. retailer. Judging from these two stories alone, we can see how easily North Carolina, or any other state, would acquire a bed bug epidemic.

Getting back to the article,

… getting rid of [bed bugs] isn’t simple. Waldvogel advises hiring a skilled professional, in part because it’s important to consider carefully what chemicals to spray in living areas such as bedrooms.

“The person who treats your home should spend more time with a flashlight than a sprayer,” he said.

We’ve heard that advice before, but Bedbuggers tell us this PCO is a rare find indeed.

At Bayer Environmental Science in Research Triangle Park, entomologists are working to develop new techniques and make existing products more effective against bedbugs. Training is a big component of Bayer’s work, said Byron Reid, product development manager.

“There are thousands of pest control professionals out there who have never had to do the bedbug job,” he said. Bayer runs a training facility for pest control operators in Clayton, N.C., where it can re-create bedrooms and apartments to train in proper techniques.

If they want additional training grounds, maybe Advanced Hotel Services in Charlotte could just hand over a list of hotels who purchased mattresses from them while they had 600 unsanitized used hotel mattresses in stock. And then the hotels could hand over a list of people who stayed in the rooms in which those mattresses are used.

I bet some of them are suffering pretty badly right now and would not mind some PCOs coming in and learning bed bug-fighting techniques in their homes. Break out those flashlights, fellas!Similar Posts:

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We’ve been following the saga in Cincinnati, the first city in the USA to declare war on bed bugs.

This story from WLWT.com (channel 5) on Thursday indicates that the city is surprised by the persistence of bed bugs. It focuses on Cincinnati resident Samuel Blackmon.

On Friday, Blackmon showed off his apartment to some guests: City Councilman Chris Monzel, Ohio Rep. Dale Mallory and News 5’s Michelle Hopkins.

“It’s horrible. It gives me the creeps. I get chills every time I think about it,” Mallory said.

“I’ve got to buy all new furniture. I don’t know how I’m going to do it,” Blackmon said.

In his bathtub, more dead bugs. Blackmon said they are falling from his ceiling.

Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority bosses said Blackmon’s apartment was treated a month ago.

“We are committed, and we have been successful in reducing the numbers dramatically of infestations,” director Donald Troendle said.

Troendle said his agency’s spent $500,000 to get rid of the bugs, but Blackmon’s apartment showed that it hadn’t worked.

Blackmon’s apartment “was treated a month ago.” But since he lives in a multi-unit building, a high-rise called Stanley Rowe with many infested units, treatment must be aggressive, persistent, and will probably take many weeks of follow-ups, spaced around 2 weeks apart. All infested units must be treated as aggressively. Frankly, in such circumstances, the whole building may need treatment if there really is to be an end to the problem.

The confusion and surprise the officials feel is not unusual. But what is unusual in Cincinnati, is that there does seem to be an awareness and recognition that more is needed:

“This is just totally unacceptable to be occuring in public housing,” Monzel said. “What we really need to do is look at attacking the problem, from inspections to cleaning to reinspections, to make sure these folks are living in places that are free of bedbugs.”

Yes.

“These are folks who have lived a good life. They don’t deserve to have the last years of their lives eaten by bedbugs,” Monzel said.

Monzel and Mallory said they did this inspection to bring more light to the bedbug problem in public housing.

They said they’re both working to get more money and resources to stamp out the problem.

One reader pointed out that Cincinnati officials were not listening closely enough to local entomologists and pest control experts. If that’s true, now would be a good time to do so. Was Mr. Blackmon’s apartment treated once, a month ago? Twice? I could have told Cincinnati officials that this would not be enough under the circumstances. Aren’t they working with a PCO who can tell them the same thing?

Mr. Blackmon’s situation is horrifying and tragic. But the fact that officials are persisting with trying to find a solution, is a positive thing. That the local media is reporting on the persistence of the problem “despite treatment” is good. What they need to be saying is that everyone with bed bugs will need persistent, aggressive, repeated treatments.

And no one is immune: Another recent story from WLWT news tells us those in “luxury” $1000-a-month rentals at Union Station Apartments in West Chester as just as much in need of help as those in public housing.Similar Posts:

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