Interestingly,

The bed bug infestation came to light last week after the Pinellas County Health Department received an anonymous call about the problem.

So do call those health departments to report bed bugs in public spaces, or your workplace, people.

Even more interestingly,

Unlike roaches, which can be spotted easily, bed bugs hide, so “we don’t even bother looking for them,” said Charles Minor, a supervisor with the health department’s environmental division. “If we get a complaint, we assume that they’re there. We focus on getting rid of them.”

We’ve heard some pest control operators treat bed bugs the same way, even though in many places, it’s illegal to treat without evidence. Yes, bites are a form of evidence, but they can come from other sources, and so don’t definitively indicate bed bugs.

Still, I appreciate the Pinellas County Health Department’s enthusiasm for treating bed bugs.

PEMHS stopped taking new patients, moved those in the facility elsewhere and tented the building for fumigation, said Erin Gillespie, a spokeswoman for the Department of Children and Families, which oversees PEMHS. The building remained closed until Monday when employees and residents began moving back in.

It sounds like the building was treated with vikane gas fumigation. The facility may wish to educate employees and clients about bed bugs, since we can assume the bed bugs may have both been brought into the center from someone’s home, and may have been taken home by others, infesting their homes.

If employees or clients have bed bugs at home and do not get proper treatment, the facility can easily become reinfested.

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This is a shout out to our PCOs, entomologists, and other bed bug specialists: we’re told, over and over, that bug bombs (aerosol foggers) do not work on bed bugs. They can spread them deep into your walls or to your neighbors (not the intended effect in a multi-unit building).

Today we have a Bedbugger forums participant asking for a reference on this topic. Her landlord’s PCO uses bombs (aerosol foggers) to treat bed bugs. She learned from Bedbuggers that they do not work and he wants to know where she got that information. She doesn’t want to say she read it on Bedbugger.

I looked in six of the university fact sheets linked from this page, and none of them warned against bombs. We need something to hand to this landlord and PCO. Has anyone got a “source” to send us to, besides the Bedbugger yahoo group, where I learned bombs were bad from hymenoptera (aka PCO incognito), louento (aka Lou Sorkin) and ch (aka Caitlin Heller)? There’s some urgency to getting this information, and your help would be much appreciated.

(It’s important to clarify that full-structure Vikane fumigation, which requires an evacuation of the entire building, and treatment of the entire building, is something entirely different, and does work well for bed bugs.)

• a bed bug story from Hawai’i; Fagerlund on aerosol bombs and pesticides
• New York City: Who’s responsible for paying for bed bug treatment? Complicated, in some cases.
• craigslist: An Open Letter to my Bedbugs
• Toronto tenants camping outside to avoid bed bugs: update

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