But it contains this interesting tidbit. At a recent Multi-Family Housing Conference in Atlantic City, NJ, Richard Cooper announced that,

He’s also developing a long-sought tool in the fight: a bedbug trap to determine if a location is infested.

Cooper told the conference that a test of the trap in an occupied dwelling unit with no signs of bedbugs caught seven of them in a 12-hour period. In a vacant unit, where the bedbugs were dormant with no people to feed on, the trap captured 500 in 12 hours.

That’s very promising news indeed. Trying to detect bed bugs in many cases is very difficult. I hope these traps are available to the public swiftly.

• Bed bug trap on its way, finally
• Today’s bed bug conference in Cincinnati
• How can I catch a bed bug? How do I know I have bed bugs?
• Second Greater Boston Bed Bug Conference

ShareThis

And can anyone tell us which outfit trained Mr. K?

The news story is imperfect otherwise, but wanted to share this because people are always looking for ways of detecting bed bugs.

(Thanks, insomnia, for the tip!) 

• Consumers, before you hire one, find out what that bed bug dog can do!
• Abbey the Bed Bug Dog: news report
• Results of University of Florida tests on bed bug dog effectiveness are out
• The Daily News on bed bug dogs; a Bedbugger idea for avoiding bed bugs while traveling

ShareThis

A few of the roughly 200 residents in Bowling Green Towers at 1149 College St. have had restless nights due to a pesky problem. Several apartment-dwellers have reported an infestation of bedbugs - but health officials say trouble is being squashed before it spreads.

Barry Turner of the Barren River District Health Department said his office has gotten a few recent calls from Towers residents, so he called property manager Jennifer Mitchell, who gave him the impression that it wasn’t widespread. She told him managers were dealing with it and had contacted an exterminator, Turner said.

“We haven’t dispatched anybody over there, and probably don’t plan to,” he said.

(Well, as long as they said they were dealing with it.)

This is another situation of bed bugs spreading in housing for the elderly and disabled. Remember Halcyon House in Denver? The Hillrise Apartment Building in Cincinnati? Warren Towers in Moline, Illinois? The Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, DC?

Like Halcyon House, Bowling Green Towers is privately-owned and subsidized by HUD:

The towers are privately owned by Germantown, Tenn.-based TESCO Properties, but rents for the elderly and disabled residents are subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD exercises some oversight through that financial relationship.

Since the property manager has told the health department that the problem is not widespread, we might ask how this was determined.

A spokesperson for HUD’s Louisville office said the agency contacted the Towers’ management Friday after learning of the problem from media inquiries. Building managers said the infestation was limited to four units, the HUD spokesperson said. HUD was told that an exterminator had been called and that employees were inspecting all the apartments one at a time, looking for any more problems.

It is not clear to me whether this means that employees of the Towers, or employees of the exterminator hired by the Towers, were doing these inspections, but it does sound like the former. If this is true, it is worrisome. We’re told by pest control operators how difficult visual inspections of properties for bed bugs can be, even for experienced PCOs. Employees of the building are very unlikely to be trained to spot all but the most advanced infestations.

A bit of sleuthing would not go amiss. Are the infested units physically connected (next door, above one another)? If the four infested units are all attached, then perhaps they and other adjacent units could be treated, and that may be it.

If the four units are not attached, then further investigation is worthwhile. I would then investigate whether there were any connections between these that can be traced. Are the residents with infestations friends who visit one another? Does a particular staff member assist those residents? Do they go for weekly outings using a particular car service?

That may all seem like an exhausting process. What I would not do, however, is assume that four non-attached units just happened to become infested with bed bugs simultaneously (if this appears to be the case). Bed bugs spread, and it is likely such cases would be related.

In any case, it is likely others have bed bugs too, but do not notice. (If they do not react to bed bug bites, they can have bed bugs and not know it.) It would be worth trying to trace a trail of some kind between the infested units, and trying to figure out what other units may have been exposed.

Detecting bed bugs can be really tricky for anyone, and elderly and disabled people can be at a disadvantage in many cases, due to sight and mobility limitations. They need all the help they can get to avoid having to suffer from this problem.

Let’s hope the Bowling Green Towers and the Barren River District Health Department take this seriously–clearing it up quickly and avoiding further infestations.

• Bowling Green Towers: residents organize to demand proper bed bug treatment in low-income building
• Surrey, B.C. public housing infested with bed bugs
• Bed bugs invade Chicago’s Presidential Towers, and another Vancouver Island detox
• Indianapolis Housing Authority vs. Bed Bugs

ShareThis

Creepy crawly creatures have always been a predictable, if dreaded, part of multi-housing life because of the ease with which they move from unit to unit along shared pipes, wires and cable lines.

Landlords and buildings managers typically address these concerns with monthly inspections and treatments while urging tenants to adopt neater lifestyles and garbage disposal methods.

Now, say area pest control companies, bedbugs have replaced cockroaches and mice at the top of the creature list, and none of these treatments help.

“In New Jersey we’re seeing bedbugs in epidemic proportions,” says Tony Yochum, commercial sales manager for Viking Pest Control with offices in Saddle Brook and throughout northern New Jersey. “They are the cockroach of the new millennium.”

It seems obvious to us Bedbuggers that the problem is spreading rapidly and also that it can be difficult to get rid of bed bugs. But sometimes news articles are more reserved about saying so outright. Sometimes they even seem to state the opposite.

They also often do not mention how easily bed bugs can be transported from place to place:

“You can pick them up at college, a movie theater, in furniture,” [Abarb Pest Service's George] Forst said. “They spread like wildfire.”

For the general public, it is helpful to consider that bed bugs can come from a wide variety of sources, and travel in all directions.

That kind of talk can make some people paranoid, of course. It is not true that you will encounter bed bugs everywhere you go, nor is it true–having had bed bugs–that you will likely reinfest yourself again and again from random locations once your bed bugs are gone.

It is worth taking precautions against spreading them if you have them, and it’s worth being alert wherever you go, since picking up bed bugs is always a possibility.

Jim McCale, owner of J.P. McCale Pest Management in Boonton is quoted as saying

We also recommend inspecting the units above, below and diagonal to the infected unit, but this can be hard. Residents don’t want other tenants to know.

What I hear from Bedbugger readers is most often that the landlord does not want to inspect all adjacent units (because, after all, they may then have to pay to treat them). Another common complaint is that the landlord will inspect, but some tenants will refuse either inspection or treatment.

We almost never hear of tenants who themselves do not want the landlord to have neighbors’ units inspected. (And anyway, if all adjacent units are being inspected, why would the other tenants need to know which tenant made the original complaint, if the landlord is the one calling for inspections?)

It is true, however, that our readers are self-selecting–they’re the information-seekers and proactive ones. Often this comes of necessity–when people have a bad allergic response to bed bugs, they not only come looking for solutions, they also are willing to do almost anything to get rid of the problem. So I guess many of us Bedbuggers might not be typical clients.

• Residents at the Bella Vista apartments learn their building has bed bugs by watching the news
• Bed bugs in Hamilton, Ontario: lessons for landlords and local governments
• Nashua, NH Health Officers on prowl for bed bugs
• Piecemeal inspections and treatment: no way to rid an apartment building of bed bugs

ShareThis