In yesterday’s Village Voice Music Blog, Chris Weingarten asked members of the band Pop. 1280 about their new song, “Bedbugs.”  It was written by Ivan Lip who is a social worker working in housing.

What is “Bedbugs” about?

Ivan Lip, guitarist: I think it’s just about bedbugs.

Chris Bug, vocalist: The I-man wrote the lyrics for this one, but when I sing the song I always imagine a desperate person, sitting by themselves in some Blade Runner-esque urban wasteland.

What inspired the song?

Lip: I work as a social worker doing housing for low-income/disabled adults. One problem that you have when people live in large buildings packed closely together, when a building is run by a slumlord, or when people in the building don’t have enough money to deal with bugs properly, is infestations spread fast and are hard to get rid of. Throughout New York right now there’s a bedbug epidemic, and it’s something that I deal with regularly in my day-to-day work. During the period we were writing this song I had a bunch of clients who had bedbugs, so I would spend hours a day in a protective suit throwing people’s furniture out, doing their laundry, etc. Eventually, it got too hot to wear the suit, so I just went into the apartments in my street clothes. Some of these apartments were so infested that you would see the bedbugs crawling on the wall during the day, which is weird because they’re normally nocturnal. I would work and then go home and wonder if I was infesting my apartment. I think that had a lot to do with the song. Laying in bed, not able to sleep, imaging a crawling sensation coming up my legs.

Bug: Yawn.

Have you or a loved one ever personally experienced bedbugs?

Lip: Thankfully, I haven’t had them. I got all sorts of gross stories though. I had one client who lived in Flushing. She had her brother and mother living with her. The brother seemed to have some mental illness of some sort. I would be talking to him to try to get him to bag up his laundry and stuff, and there was a language barrier that we had to get through on top of whatever mentally illness he might have had. He would just smash the bugs with his hand and smear blood on the wall while I was talking to him. It was pretty weird.

Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs invade New York City Department of Health offices
• Surrey, B.C. public housing infested with bed bugs
• Bed bugs or rats: Gothamist asks which you’d rather have
• Brooklyn woman suing, apparently because of half-a$$ed treatment for bed bugs
• Bed bugs 40, humans 33: 185 Smith Street in Winnipeg.

We look forward to hearing more about what happened in Arlington, Virginia these last two days, at the EPA National Bed Bug Summit.

This video from the Associated Press has some nice snippets from Dini Miller, Harold Harlan, and others, speaking at the conference.

Pete Grasso of the PMP blog liveblogged the bed bug summit.

Here are some tidbits from Grasso’s blog:

Tom Neltner, from the National Center for Healthy Housing said (4th update, 10 am):

“People who are the least able to afford extermination are at the highest risk for poor health outcomes as a result,” Neltner said. “This is a good time for Federal agencies to take a leadership role on this issue.”

Of Michael Potter, University of Kentucky entomologist (6th update, 10:37 am), Grasso says:

He questioned why bed bugs are not considered a public health concern, because they once were.

You know a few years back, I started the first unofficial Dr. Michael Potter fan club, don’t you?

I know you’ll want to read the rest of Pete Grasso’s account, which begins here. He also talks about the breakout brainstorming sessions here. Perhaps most exciting, the list of recommendations the brainstorming produced, which is in part three, here.

Many thanks to Pete Grasso of PMP for blogging the summit!

The popular media was going crazy the last few days, but most articles were just reprints of one from the Associated Press. Here’s the Today Show, which showed footage of Connor’s Pest in Virginia doing a thermal treatment and searching with a bed bug sniffing dog.

I am so glad this event happened, and I so wish I could have been there. (My job kept me away.)

Were you there? Tell us all about it, please!Similar Posts:

• WNYC on the EPA National Bed Bug Summit, which starts tomorrow
• 18-story Dayton apartment building infested with bed bugs to be treated with Vikane gas
• Bed bugs bite in Edmonton sleep disorder clinic
• EPA makes available National Bed Bug Summit recommendations
• More on the National Bed Bug Summit