Parakeets helpfully recommends this upcoming bed bug educational event being run by Mass Housing on 11/17 in the Boston area. She tells us it costs $40, and directs you to the full information (and registration details) in this PDF.

Bed Bugs: A Team Response

An infestation of bed bugs can be very costly in terms of treatment and the impact on your housing community. Find out what you should know about bed bugs and how the Property Manager, Maintenance Supervisor and Resident Services Coordinator can work together as a team immediately and effectively. Learn the steps to take when an infestation of bed bugs is suspected, how to engage a pest management company and prepare for extermination. Gain an understanding of the roles of manager, maintenance staff and residents when addressing the issues.

Instructors: Jonathan Boyar, Watch All Pest Management and Thomas A. Stokes, Beacon Communities

Date: Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Time: 8:45am-1:00pm
Location: The Pines, 469 Pine Grove Drive, Brockton
Parking: Street parking or in visitor spots in lot.

Similar Posts:

None Found

Drew University recently alerted its students that bed bugs were found in a student’s room.  The student was moved temporarily while the room was treated and furniture and mattresses were replaced.

A campus-wide e-mail was sent out on Oct. 15 letting students know that two bed bugs had been found. Student response to the e-mail was mixed.

“It’s disgusting! Bugs and I get along just fine as long as they aren’t in my bed,” Whitney McClees (’12) said.

“They’re bugs. Unless they’re going to kill me in my sleep I don’t care,” Dana Sumner-Pritchard (’12) said.

“It made me really glad I don’t live on campus,” commuter student Alexandra Kiely (’12) said.

“It was kind of gross but I wasn’t really worried. That was the first I heard of it,” Arielle Sorenson (’12) said.

“Our interest is in making sure the population [of bed bugs] doesn’t spread. We’re being overly cautious,” [Drew Chief Communications Officer Dave Muha] said about the University’s goal in dealing with the bed bugs and the reason for the campus-wide e-mail.

[Emphasis mine.]

A prompt response to a single bed bug case is a good thing.

Bed bugs did not just magically appear in this room. They were either brought in by the student, other students, or employees, or they were delivered in some manner (the old “bed bug Trojan horse”), or they walked over from another space which has a bed bug issue that is as yet undetected.

Since students are vocalizing that bed bugs are not a big deal (”Unless they’re going to kill me in my sleep I don’t care”), I hope Drew will follow up by educating students, staff, and faculty about bed bugs, how they spread, how to detect them, and why they everyone needs to be concerned about and alert for them. Similar Posts:

None Found

There’s a nice recap of Tuesday’s National Pest Management Association 2009 Bed Bug Symposium in Newark, NJ on the M&M Buzz, PCO M&M Environmental’s blog.

Another NPMA Bed Bug Symposium today (8/27) in Seattle.  Anyone attending?

We welcome your comments on the Newark or Seattle NPMA Bed Bug Symposiums below!

The bed bug war?  It’s all about education, you know.Similar Posts:

None Found

Today’s Room for Debate, entitled Bedbugs (Itch, Itch, Scratch, Scratch)! (hosted by the New York Times) has an excellent virtual roundtable, including posts by fabulous entomologists Lou Sorkin, Michael Potter, and Susan C. Jones.

Although Bonnie Friedman’s contribution waxes nostalgically for DDT (which isn’t going to happen, for all kinds of good reasons), we did also appreciate the presence of a former bed bug sufferer among the respondents.

As Renee said on New York vs. Bed Bugs today, the posts by Sorkin, Potter and Jones in particular would be a great resource for people anywhere trying to educate others about bed bugs.

Bookmark and share them with your skeptical, under-responsive or unresponsive landlord, health department, or legislator!Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs in the media: David Cain on British radio, Dr. Susan Jones in the Plain Dealer
• Towels under the door: when cities abandon tenants with bed bugs
• Baltimore’s new Bed Bug Response Plan
• Bed Bug Lessons from the Past
• RainCity Housing’s “bed bug sauna” now active in new Vancouver building

Bed bug specialists David Cain (of Bed-bugs.co.uk and active in our Bedbugger Forums) and Dr. Susan C. Jones (of Ohio State University) have been in the press this week, spreading good information about bed bugs.

David Cain was interviewed by BBC Derby’s Aleena Naylor on her morning show today. The approximately ten-minute interview starts at 1:42:35, so you can scroll through to it once the player loads.

It’s basically “bed bugs for beginners,” covering the basics, including these facts:

• bed bugs are not spread by lack of hygiene,
• they’re visible but you might not see them,
• they bite, but you may not react to bed bug bites,
• bed bug problems “can and should be controlled,” and
• people need to learn to inspect for bed bugs and their signs.

Have a listen before it disappears!

Also, last week, entomologist Dr. Susan C. Jones warned readers of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer about the spread of bed bugs.

Jones’s article focuses on the spread of bed bugs via people traveling and college students returning home.  It gives extensive advice about avoiding bed bugs while traveling, how to search a hotel room for bed bugs, what to do if you spot them in a hotel room, and key treatment advice:

If you suspect an infestation in your home, immediately contact a pest control company with experience in dealing with bed bugs. Don’t wait, because the problem will just get worse. And don’t use bug bombs. They rarely kill bed bugs but instead cause the bugs to scatter into areas you wouldn’t usually find them, such as your bathroom or kitchen.

Dr. Jones also recommends against boric acid, which we know does not work against bed bugs, and stresses that people should have their pest professional inspect a sample to ensure it is a bed bug (bat bugs and other creatures need different or additional kinds of treatment and action).  Dr. Jones also gives this excellent advice:

Always report bed bugs, although it may be difficult to know where to report such infestations. Start with your local health department, and if that’s not the right agency, ask who is responsible.

Not knowing who to report to is confusing and exhausting, readers tell me, but we have seen many instances reported in the media where health departments or other authorities took action and monitored situations, improving and speeding treatment to heavily infested properties.  It certainly cannot hurt, and it can definitely help.

Making these phone calls also reminds health department officials (and others they may pass you on to) that bed bugs are a problem where you live.  Your local officials need to understand this.

Thanks to David and to Dr. Jones for their tireless and valuable work in educating the public about bed bugs, their behavior, and how to spot and react to their presence.  The first battle in the fight against bed bugs is the battle against ignorance.Similar Posts:

• More bed bug treatments in Lexington’s Ballard Griffith senior apartments
• Room for Debate on bed bugs: a must-read!
• Towels under the door: when cities abandon tenants with bed bugs
• Bed bugs at Spring Valley, NY apartment complex
• Bed bug education event on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Tuesday focused on prevention and IPM

We are happy that Renee of New York vs Bed Bugs alerted us to the news that Baltimore is now implementing a bed bug control strategy, which includes

• bed bug inspections,
• training for Baltimore City Health Department Healthy Homes Division staff in detection and control of bed bugs,
• development of English- and Spanish-language educational materials, as well as several Spanish-language outreach campaigns, and (as Renee writes)

training Baltimore City public housing maintenance and management staff and, apparently, impressing upon them “the need to immediately respond to bed bug complaints.”

For more, see Baltimore’s Bed Bug Response Plan.

Baltimore City Health Department has a bed bug page, which lets readers know what to do in case they suspect bed bugs.  Unfortunately, at this time it only mentions what “homeowners” should do.

It is crucial, in my mind, that local fact sheets direct renters as to what they should do when they suspect bed bugs.

Also, the fact sheet advises:

Avoid “insecticide bombs” and “foggers” in your home. These products can spread hazardous chemicals throughout your home.

It is correct that people with bed bugs should avoid “bombs” and “foggers” when treating bed bugs.  But the reasons are not just related to the spread of chemicals.  In some cases, they are a fire hazard.

But as important is the fact that entomologists tell us bombs and foggers can disperse bed bugs and drive them deeper into our homes.  They’re specifically a bad idea with bed bugs for this reason.

Still, we are very glad Baltimore has a bed bug page and that they’re taking coordinated action to reduce the spread of bed bugs, and help citizens learn how to identify and get rid of the problem.

The bed bug page also provides links at the top to download PDFs of the press release, Baltimore’s bed bug plan, the EPA bed bug fact sheet in English and Spanish.

Update (4/27): and now the Baltimore Sun catches up with New York vs. Bed Bugs, reporting about the new Baltimore bed bug plan and website.Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs in the media: David Cain on British radio, Dr. Susan Jones in the Plain Dealer
• Towels under the door: when cities abandon tenants with bed bugs
• Bed bug education event on Mississippi’s Gulf Coast Tuesday focused on prevention and IPM
• Room for Debate on bed bugs: a must-read!
• Interview with Sam Bryks on Integrated Pest Management; also, we learn about the origins of Bug n’ Scrub

The Yale Daily News reports bed bugs have recently been found (and apparently successfully treated) in an Old Campus student room.

Around Valentine’s Day weekend, a student in Lanman-Wright Hall had a visitor in her bed.

The freshman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said she initially thought she was having an allergic reaction. The red blotches on her body — on every surface of her skin that was not covered by pajamas — were a reaction to another culprit: bedbugs.

“I found a friend on my pillow,” she said of the bedbug, which, she recalled, was the size of her pinky nail.

Although the L-Dub bedbug was a seemingly isolated incident, in the month after it was discovered a group of administrators gathered to discuss the problem of bedbugs, Dean of Administrative Affairs John Meeske ’74 said. Old Campus residents were informed of the incident at the beginning of March.

The University decided to re-inspect the affected suite and its neighboring room during spring break, even though the rooms were treated for bedbugs within two days of finding the pest in February. No other bedbugs were subsequently found.

One of the students in a neighboring suite said she was surprised to hear about the microscopic guest across the hall.

“I thought it was something that only existed in nursery rhymes,” she said.

via Yale Daily News – Bedbugs make an unwelcome appearance in Lanman-Wright.

Every student in every college should be educated about bed bugs — no one should think that bed bugs only exist in nursery rhymes.

Some colleges have used educational campaigns to help students learn about this problem, a good preventive measure.  Stanford has a PDF about bed bugs on their website, though it is not easy to find by searching.Similar Posts:

None Found

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

Renee of New York vs. Bed Bugs uncovered a surprise on the New York City Council website: a new bed bug bill, Int. no. 873, calls for the Department of Health to get involved in the bed bug fight in New York City, by

• training PCOs in proper bed bug treatment,
• providing a list of those PCOs to the public,
• training property owners in how to eliminate bed bugs, prevent their spread,
• providing information on the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene website, and
• providing information about bed bugs to 311 callers, and taking reports of bed bug infestations via 311.

The bill does not go into a lot of detail on these steps, for example, I’d love to know more how these training programs will be carried out.  It’s essential that the best advice and bed bug expertise will be sought in creating and implementing them.

And what will be done with the reports of bed bug infestations?  I hope they’ll be used to track where bed bug infestations occur.  Right now, someone in New York City knows which tenants have called 311 to complain about bed bugs.  If violations are found, we have a limited degree of access to this information.  We have no idea how many tenants in NYC have bed bugs, nor how many homeowners do.

However, despite these questions in my mind, there’s a lot to be hopeful about here.  Education of property owners and the general public is crucial to eliminating specific infestations and to reducing the spread of bed bugs in the city.  The Department of Health is a very appropriate agency to get involved in this issue.  And we’d love to see the city tracking bed bug infestations via 311.

For that reason, I think we all need to get behind this bill.  If you’re in New York City, please click over to New York vs. Bed Bugs for more information on what to do, and to join our campaign.

——————————————————————-

The full text of Intro. 873 follows:

Section 1. Chapter 1 of title 17 of the administrative code of the city of New York is amended by adding a new section 17-194 to read as follows:

§17-194 Bed bug techniques training program. a. The department shall establish a program to train exterminators in the proper techniques to eliminate bed bugs. Upon successful completion of this program, the exterminator shall be considered trained pursuant to this provision, in the proper techniques of bed bug extermination.

b. The department shall establish a program to train property owners in the proper techniques to eliminate bed bugs and to prevent the transfer and spread of any bed bug infestation. Upon successful completion of this program, such owner shall be considered trained pursuant to this provision in the proper techniques of bed bug extermination.

c. Any training programs developed pursuant to this section shall include, but not be limited to, identification of bed bugs and understanding their life cycle, inspection procedures to identify infested areas and furnishings, techniques to prepare infested sites for containment and extermination, encasement techniques, and proper techniques for the moving and disposal of infested furnishings and materials. Any training program should also provide instruction on which techniques and pesticides are inappropriate for bed bug elimination.

d. The department shall make available on its website general information on bed bug awareness, infestation and control.

e. The department shall ensure that a toll-free hotline number, such as the 311 citizen service center, shall be made available to the public for any person seeking to report an incidence of bed bug infestation or to request information on bed bugs.

f. A list of exterminators trained pursuant to this section shall be made available to the public on the department’s website, upon request by calling the 311 citizen service center, and upon request in person at department offices to be located in each of the five boroughs, as determined by the department.

§2. This local law shall take effect ninety days after its enactment, provided, however, that the department of health and mental hygiene shall take any necessary actions to implement this law, including the promulgation of rules, prior to such effective date.

Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs invade New York City Department of Health offices

Bed bugs bite year round, but they breed more quickly in warmer weather.

Bed bug expert entomologist Dr. Stephen Doggett of Westmead Hospital spoke to Australia’s Daily Telegraph about the problem, which appears to be as bad down under as anywhere.

Calls about the problem increased 4500% from 2000-2006, and “Westmead’s entomology unit had calculated the bugs cost $100 million in lost hotel revenue and eradication costs in Australia” during the same six-year period.

$100 million in lost revenue and eradication costs.

We can only assume the same is happening in other places with bed bug problems, like New York, Toronto, Boston, San Francisco, Halifax, London, and, well, everywhere else.

You’d think that the hotel industry would be falling over itself to sponsor research and development into better solutions, and lobbying for legislation to help curb the problem.

But I suspect that everywhere, just as Doggett told the Daily Telegraph about the local situation, “The accommodation industry does not want to admit the scale of the problem.”

And we all know what the first step is, right folks?

Admitting you have a big problem.

Well, okay. Perhaps the 12-steppers have it wrong.

Perhaps the first step is education.

The Daily Telegraph tells us, “Westmead Hospital will, for the first time, run courses on how to detect and control the blood suckers next year.”

And if anyone knows, they do. Doggett, and Westmead, are behind this amazing publication.Similar Posts:

None Found