The New York City Health Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) apparently received an anonymous tip last week that the UA Theater Sheepshead Bay 14 on Shore Parkway, in Brooklyn had bed bugs.

Fox 5 News reports that

A manager on site did not want to speak with Fox 5’s Ti-Hua Chang about the reported problem, but a spokesperson for Regal Cinemas, the chain that runs the theater, issued a statement saying, in part, that “there exists no current health or safety risk for our guests or staff.”

Fox 5 found out about this because Celina De Leon (of the NYC Department of Health) emailed someone at Fox with the following message:

“The Health Department received an anonymous report last week about bed bugs at this theater. The Health Department worked with the theater manager … who indicated that they hired a pest control professional who responded to the problem.”

(Note, that memo is reproduced in the video segment below, but not in the short article accompanying it.)

It isn’t clear when Fox was contacted by De Leon, but obviously, this report was not made public until the theater had had a pest control firm in to “respond.” And, of course, we’re also not exactly sure what they responded to or how.

Now, the interesting thing here is not that an anonymous tipster told the NYC DOHMH that a movie theater had bed bugs.

Nor is it the fact that the theater then hired an environmental services firm to “respond to the problem.”

The real news here is that a New York City agency is passing along news about reported bed bug infestations in public to the news media.

Wow. That is new!

What’s next?

An official NYC-sponsored version of the Bed Bug Registry, warning others of infestations around businesses in the city?

Okay, don’t hold your breath on that one, but I do think this is a very interesting development.

It certainly puts the pressure on other businesses to respond to potential bed bug issues — so they can avoid such publicity, or at least show they responded quickly and appropriately.

It suggests that others who positively identify bed bugs in public places in New York City — whoever else they notify, such as the business owner — should also call the Department of Health.

Now, can New York City get a bed bug public education campaign?
An overhaul of the bed bug inspection process for tenants?
Some help for homeowners, landlords and business owners who are suffering both financially and from bed bugs, so they don’t cut corners with treatment?
Help with those difficult cases, where no one seems to be responsible for helping with prep?

I can’t wait to see what the New York City Bed Bug Advisory Board is working on.
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The New York Post reports that New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene workers are being bitten by bed bugs.

Workers in the department’s tuberculosis-prevention unit complain that the painful pests have invaded their offices on the eighth floor of 346 Broadway for the second time.

“People are really upset,” one worker said, adding that while it was never made public, a bedbug colony took up residence on the same site two years ago.

“They told us we were crazy,” the worker said, referring to higher-ups. “I said, ‘I know what I saw. I’m not crazy.’ ”

Officials confirmed that bedbugs were found in the TB unit in 2007 and again within the last few days. In both cases, exterminators were called in.

“It’s fairly common to have a couple of bedbugs brought in by an individual,” said department spokeswoman Jessica Scaperotti. “It’s not an infestation.”

The “condition” of bed bugs in the tuberculosis-prevention unit of the NYC DOHMH suggests that the DOHMH also needs a “bed bug prevention unit.”  Not for their building, but for the city.

Bed bugs don’t kill you like TB will (at least not in most cases) but they certainly are a quickly-spreading parasite which messes with one’s “mental hygiene” big time.

NY Magazine’s Daily Intel also questions the “it’s not an infestation” spin from John Jay and Department of Health, reminding me that “I’m not crazy” either.Similar Posts:

• New York City has a new bed bug bill!
• NYC Department of Education advertises for bed bug killer
• New York Daily News: NYC bed bug complaints up 34% in one year
• Bed bugs in Washington, D.C.? Yes! And growing in number daily.
• NH Bed Bugs: grassroots community organizing against bed bugs

According to the Washington City Paper’s City Desk:

The summit is skedded for March 27 from 10:00 am to 3 pm at 441 4th Street NW, Room 1107. Get ready for a “dialogue on creative and effective approaches to dealing with bedbugs.”

That’s in addition to the even bigger EPA National Bed Bug Summit in Washington D.C. Arlington, Viginia on April 14 and 15.

Go to New York vs. Bed Bugs for all the details on the new venue in Arlington, announced March 31st.

The EPA conference will be webcast, we’re told.

Could it be Gil Scott-Heron was wrong, and the revolution will indeed be televised?

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The Washington City Paper has a cover story today on bed bugs! In it, Audrey Dutton reports on the status of bed bugs in that city, and on the city’s plans to fight the problem.

We have known there were lots of bed bugs in D.C. for a long time. The Norwood Apartments tenants we mentioned back in 2007 have been battling them for years, with 10 units still infested, according to Dutton.

We haven’t heard from the ladies of D.C.’s Phillis Wheatley YWCA in a while, but I fear they may still be infested too.

And so this is very good to hear:  the city’s Department of Health is taking a keen (and hands-on) interest in bed bugs.  The article notes:

Gerard Brown, who heads the department’s rodent-control division, first spotted an issue with bedbugs in June. Ever since, these tiny pests have eaten up a sizable chunk of his anti-vermin portfolio.

Brown’s people operate under a different set of rules from the [D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which enforces the city's housing code] —instead of monitoring the infestations, the Department of Health can actually treat them and does so regularly in homeless shelters. It tries various methods to educate the public, including working with neighborhood groups to get the word out. It’s also been tracking reports since June.

“When we realized that it was a beginning to be a problem, then with the support of the mayor’s office and our director’s office, I started doing research,” says Brown.

So far Brown has taken calls on more than 50 properties. Almost one-fifth of those are hotels. The rest are single-family homes, apartment buildings, a school, and a dialysis center where a patient was infested. When Brown goes out to deliver presentations on bedbugs to community groups, senior housing centers, halfway houses, or property managers, he hears even more reports, he says. He was approached by a government worker whose own apartment building was “totally infested.”

Since the Department of Health is involved in dealing with bed bugs, they are developing a keen understanding of the reasons bed bugs are spreading and why they’re so tenacious, especially in multi-unit dwellings.  Dutton reports,

One of the reasons for the bugs’ ubiquity in multi-unit dwellings is that that property owners don’t want to pay to treat multiple units. So bugs in the unit that exterminators are paid to treat just pick up and move next door, or upstairs or downstairs. Two weeks later, a fresh crop of baby bugs hatches and settles into its new home.

Brown counters with a view of landlords not widely shared in the world of D.C. affordable housing. He says that landlords aren’t reluctant—they’re desperate to clear the infestations. “They will ask, ‘What can I do? Help me. I did this, I did this.’ They fax me invoices for the pest control and say, ‘What else can I do? If there’s something I can do I will do it,’” Brown says.

The city hopes to head off some of those questions via a public awareness campaign sponsored by the Health Department along with the Office of the Tenant Advocate and various tenants associations. The department just wrapped up filming on its first bedbug public service announcement. It was shot in a Norwood apartment whose residents agreed to cooperate in exchange for having the department treat a bedbug outbreak.

Besides those mentioned in the article, another reason bed bugs are thriving may be the District of Columbia’s housing code, which, as we understand from this 2007 article in the local press, requires landlords to treat for bed bugs only if there is more than one infested unit in a building.

This is a very bad policy where bed bugs are concerned, because it encourages tenants to ignore their infestations until they find out the bed bugs have spread to others (a situation I explain in more detail in this comment over on New York vs. Bed Bugs).

It’s exactly the sort of policy I would choose if I wanted bed bugs to spread around buildings.  It hurts tenants, and it means landlords end up shelling out much more than they would have if they had dealt with the infestation when it was first detected.

And if that isn’t bad enough, we can assume bed bugs probably just got a boost in DC by the huge influx of visitors who came to visit the city, stayed in its hotels, and in too many cases (because of an acute hotel room shortage), rented rooms in DC residents’ homes.  And, of course, plenty of DC bugs surely also migrated to other cities with Obama fans on their way home from the festivities.

Bed bugs spread when they walk (from one home to another) or hitch a ride.  They can “hitchhike” by getting into your car, into your bag or other stuff, or even into your clothing.  People often get bed bugs from hotels, but they just are surely take them there.

And the same goes for private homes.  Whether you’re hosting a long-lost friend, or renting out a room to a tourist, you can get bed bugs from those people.  Either party may have bed bugs and not realize it.  Or they may think bed bugs don’t spread easily, and that they aren’t putting you at risk.

So that brings us back to DC’s educational campaign about bed bugs.  A lack of knowledge of bed bugs is behind many different problems: people bringing bed bugs to other places, landlords not treating properly, tenants thinking they are bed bug-free because they have no bites, people picking up discarded furniture:  a little information could go a long, long way in making the bed bug problem not-as-bad.

We’ve been calling for PSAs about bed bugs in NYC since this website started in 2006, but the only time we see bed bugs on the subways posters or in television commercial breaks, they’re in ads: for Protect-a-Bed encasements on the subways, Bell Environmental bed bug treatments on NY1.

Of course, education alone won’t solve the bed bug problem.

But education makes solving bed bug problems (whether in one room, in a building, or city-wide) possible.

So bring it on, Washington, D.C.!Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs spread when no one who can pay for treating them is responsible for treating them
• Towels under the door: when cities abandon tenants with bed bugs
• Claridge Towers residents get help with their bed bugs from DC Housing Authority
• 18-story Dayton apartment building infested with bed bugs to be treated with Vikane gas
• Mark Sheperdigian on the limits of bed bug inspections

Click here to listen to this brief news item on New York City Council’s Intro. 873 from WNYC news, New York.

The tone of the item is dominated by the Health Department’s reminder that bed bugs are only “a stressful and unpleasant nuisance,” and that the health department already has a page on its website about bed bugs, and that “the Department of Housing, Preservation and Development takes complaints, performs inspections and issues violation summonses when appropriate.”

Yes, and the city’s response to bed bugs so far has been so effective that bed bugs are (somehow, still) spreading at an alarming rate. I judge this only by the reports to HPD, since we don’t have a more complete set of data.

Some cities, like Cincinnati (well, okay — only Cincinnati), actually attempt to find out what percentage of their inhabitants have (or have had) bed bugs. The answer — in Cincinnati? 14.5%.

I would not be surprised if a similar percentage of New Yorkers had been afflicted with bed bugs.

But the way things are going, we will never know, because we are completely in denial about it and no one is asking the question and therefore we don’t have to deal with the answer.

As a general rule, I don’t wish bed bugs on anyone. Not even my worst enemy.

But I do wish a knowledge of what it is like to have bed bugs on those who feel they are merely “a stressful and unpleasant nuisance.” Lice are a stressful and unpleasant nuisance. Detected and treated, they usually do not trouble a person for more than a few days.

We regularly hear from people in New York, Cincinnati, London, Boston, Vancouver, and all points in-between who are getting bed bug treatment and yet are troubled by bed bugs for weeks and even months on end.

They lose a lot of sleep.
They suffer a lot of stress.
They use money — often thousands of dollars which should go to health insurance, or medications, or buying vegetables for their kids — to pay for treatment, endless rounds of laundry, plastic bags, and more treatment.
They get their belongings gassed with sulfuryl flouride.
They sometimes have to move.
They go to job interviews with red welts all over their faces and remain unemployed.
They stop having friends and family over, for fear others will become infested.
Those in multi-unit buildings who cannot afford to move may never get rid of the problem.

Think this causes very real psychological and physical health problems? You bet.
It is a lot worse than a nuisance.
The health effects of bed bugs are often a lot more serious than a bit of stress.

In this economy, in this expensive city, the Health Department is being a bit short-sighted not to see the potential of any problem that causes ongoing stress and saps one’s financial resources as a genuine health concern.

More on Intro. 873 here.

And read Renee’s response on New York vs. Bed Bugs. She did not receive the Health Dept.’s comments well either.
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In reference to the Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2008, Budget Travel asks, “Should taxpayers fund the war against bed bugs?” The Act, H.R. 6068, is now in consideration by the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Consumer Protection,and would primarily give states funding to inspect hotel rooms for bed bugs.

(Welcome to Budget Travel readers who surfed in via the link! You might like to read this Bedbugger article on how to avoid bed bugs when you travel.)

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Meanwhile, the bill Dale Mallory is sponsoring in the Ohio House of Representatives, which would establish a hotline where Ohio residents could report bed bugs or get information about them, and would require the Dept. of Health to educate the public about bed bugs, is also getting coverage from Cleveland NBC affiliate WKYC and in Vindy.com.

H.B. 590 states,

The department of health shall make available on its web site information on the increasing incidences of bed bug (cimex lectularius) infestation and post notices that bed bugs are a public nuisance dangerous to public health.

You might protest that bed bugs are not a danger to public health, but then the World Health Organization includes bed bugs in its new book, The Public Health Significance of Urban Pests. (You can download a PDF on the right side of this page.) And the WHO not just includes bed bugs — as Renee reminds us in an analysis of the WHO study over on New York vs. Bed Bugs, a bed bug is on the cover, with a tick and a rat.

The WHO is concerned about the public health significance of bed bugs. Ohio, along with other states (and cities and countries) should be concerned too.Similar Posts:

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Ohio’s House introduced the following on Thursday June 12th, according to Fox 28 News:

HB 590 BED BUG AWARENESS — To establish the Bed Bug Awareness, Education, and Prevention Program and to make an appropriation.

According to the state legislature’s website, these are the details of the Bill, sponsored by Representative Dale Mallory:

A BILL

To enact sections 3701.136, 3701.137, 3701.138, and 3701.139 of the Revised Code to establish the Bed Bug Awareness, Education, and Prevention Program and to make an appropriation.

BE IT ENACTED BY THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE STATE OF OHIO:

Section 1. That sections 3701.136, 3701.137, 3701.138, and 3701.139 of the Revised Code be enacted to read as follows:

Sec. 3701.136. As used in sections 3701.136 to 3701.139 of the Revised Code:

(A) “Hotel” means every establishment kept, used, maintained, advertised, or held out to the public as a place where sleeping accommodations are offered to guests, in which five or more rooms are used for the accommodation of such guests, whether the rooms are in one or several structures.

(B) “Residential dwelling” means a building used or intended to be used as a personal residence by the owner, part owner, or lessee of the building, or any person authorized by such a person to use the building as a personal residence.

Sec. 3701.137. The bed bug awareness, education, and prevention program is hereby established in the department of health with the assistance of and in consultation with the research office of the division of travel and tourism of the department of development.

Sec. 3701.138. (A) The department of health shall make available on its web site information on the increasing incidences of bed bug (cimex lectularius) infestation and post notices that bed bugs are a public nuisance dangerous to public health. The director of health shall do all of the following:

(1) Educate hotel owners, residential dwellers, and citizens of this state on the difference between bed bugs and similar types of vermin so they can be easily recognized and treated accordingly.

(2) Encourage hotel owners and residential dwellers to closely monitor floors, carpets, and bed linen and mattresses for signs of infestation to facilitate effective, timely treatment to prevent the spread and incidence of infestation.

(3) Assist in and promote the development of safe and effective treatment methods or options to eradicate bed bug infestation in hotels and residential dwellings.

(B) The department of health shall adopt rules as necessary to implement this section. The rules shall be adopted in accordance with Chapter 119. of the Revised Code.

Sec. 3701.139. The department of health shall make available to the public a toll-free telephone number for any person seeking to report an incidence of bed bug infestation or to request information. The department may make the toll-free number available by maintaining a toll-free telephone line specifically for accepting calls regarding bed bugs or by using a toll-free telephone line that the department maintains for accepting calls regarding other matters.

Section 2. All items in this section are hereby appropriated as designated out of any moneys in the state treasury to the credit of the General Revenue Fund Group. For all appropriations made in this act, those in the first column are for fiscal year 2008 and those in the second column are for fiscal year 2009. The appropriations made in this act are in addition to any other appropriations made for the FY 2008-2009 biennium.

[Details of the appropriations are included, which --if I am reading it correctly -- appear to constutute $335,000 in fiscal year 2009.]

The bill continues,

Within the limits set forth in this act, the Director of Budget and Management shall establish accounts indicating the source and amount of funds for each appropriation made in this act, and shall determine the form and manner in which appropriation accounts shall be maintained. Expenditures from appropriations contained in this act shall be accounted for as though made in Am. Sub. H.B. 119 of the 127th General Assembly.

The appropriations made in this act are subject to all provisions of Am. Sub. H.B. 119 of the 127th General Assembly that are generally applicable to such appropriations.

Section 3. The sections of law contained in this act, and the items of which they are composed, are not subject to the referendum. Therefore, under Ohio Constitution, Article II, Section 1d and section 1.471 of the Revised Code, the sections of law contained in this act, and the items of which they are composed, go into immediate effect when this act becomes law.

The key points here appear to be: requiring the Department of Health to educate the public about bed bugs, and the provision of a hotline where residents can call to report an incidence of bed bugs or call for information about bed bugs.

The requirement that the DoH:

Assist in and promote the development of safe and effective treatment methods or options to eradicate bed bug infestation in hotels and residential dwellings.

… seems a bit nebulous as written, but like the rest of the bill, only seems like it can help.

Ohio residents should write to their State Representatives and voice your support for this bill. You can look up your representatives here, then follow the links to email them or look up phone numbers or snail mail addresses. It is worth taking 5 minutes to send an email and help your state get better legislation to support those dealing with bed bugs now and in the future.Similar Posts:

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I am delighted to report this news item from Patrick Meighan of the Nashua Telegraph in Nashua, New Hampshire. It’s a story about how Nashua city Health Officer Nelson Ortega and Deputy Health Officer Heidi Peek spent 4 and a half hours inspecting all 117 rooms in a rooming house in Nashua, and found 16 of them infested with bed bugs.

The inspection was prompted by tenants’ complaints to the health department. However, Ortega expected to–and found–that many more units were infested than the number of people who complained.

Complaints about bugs at 23-25 Temple St. prompted the inspection, Ortega said.

Given the tenant complaints his office received, Ortega said he expected the infestation to be even more widespread than what inspectors found.

“Sixteen is still a significant number,” Ortega said. “If they don’t hurry up and deal with it, it’s going to keep growing.”

He added, “the minute we left, they should be calling the pest companies.”

The building’s owner, 23-25 Temple Street Realty LLC, is expected to have exterminators come in as soon as possible, Ortega said. They’re required to spray not only the infected rooms, but also the adjacent rooms and the rooms directly above and below, he said.

Because the 16 rooms were scattered throughout, most of the building will have to be treated, Ortega said.

The owners also have 35 days to correct general maintenance violations, which range from the illegal use of extension cords and hotplates to unsanitary toilets and covers missing on wall outlets, Ortega said.

Health officials will do a follow-up inspection after the building owner has had time to spray for pests and correct the violations, he said.

I wish that all health officials were as wise to bed bugs, and as proactive as these.

I also wish every building owner (whether it’s a hotel, apartment building, rooming house, or whatever) would read this. All too often, people try to get away with treating only the units of people who notice and complain about bed bugs. And in such cases, they will often find bed bugs popping up again and again.

I am also glad to see this because it shows a case where people with bed bugs called a health department and got some action. Readers often tell us their landlords are not dealing with bed bugs, and they don’t know what to do. Or if their landlord is helping them, the problem is still hard to treat.

Well, even though your city health officer may not be as clued in about bed bugs as Nelson Ortega is, why not give them a call?

Cities and counties do not realize how many people have bed bugs unless you tell them. So please, consider googling your city or county health department and giving them a buzz.

And a reminder to tenants, landlords, and government officials alike, anywhere: take a hint from Nashua Deputy Health Officer Heidi Peek, who is quoted in the article as saying:

“The reason I really wanted to get in there, I had a hunch there were people who weren’t reporting (bedbugs) – which we found to be true.”

At least 50% of people bitten by bed bugs do not react to the bites, according to Michael Potter.

Many of these will have no idea they have them.

Many more will know they have them but fear being blamed and not report it.

Still others will simply put up with the situation (unbelieveable, yes, but we hear it time and again).

Do not assume people are bed bug-free simply because they say they are.

And certainly do not assume they are bed bug-free simply because they do not call a city information hotline.

Especially if calling a city information hotline is the least intuitive thing for them to do, as in the case of NYC tenants with bed bugs. Do you hear that, New York City HPD? If you want people in NYC to call a number to tell you they have bed bugs. You have to tell them to do it.Similar Posts:

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The lead story in the “News” section of today’s New York Daily News is on bed bugs. That’s good: it’s always good to see bed bugs in the news.

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.Similar Posts:

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