The New York City DOE is hiring someone to identify and kill bed bugs in NYC schools:

From today’s New York Post:

The Department of Education is advertising for a killer — soliciting bids for the “identification and extermination of bedbugs within the schools citywide.”

A listing in yesterday’s City Record said a contract with a pest-control professional would last up to three years and cost the department less than $100,000.

A department spokeswoman said the listing was a contingency measure, not a response to an increase in bugs.

Though, to be honest, as bed bugs increase outside the schools, we can only assume they’re increasing inside schools as well.

And that City Record listing?  (You can search here, for keywords “bed bugs):

BEDBUG IDENTIFICATION AND EXTERMINATION - Competitive Sealed Bids – PIN# Z1325040 – Due 12-7-2009 AT 5:00 PM

This is An Open Market Agreement and is intended to cover, during the period of the contract, the requirements for Identification and Extermination of bed bugs within the schools citywide under the jurisdiction of the Department of Education of the City of New York City as outlined in the OMA Document. The contract resulting from this OMA will be for the period commencing with the execution of the contract by the Department of Education and will expire on December 31, 2012 or with the expenditures of $99,999.99, whichever comes first. Provided that $99,999.99 has not been expended prior to June 30, 2011, the Department of Education, at its sole option may further extend this agreement for a final period of up to one hundred eighty (180) days.
Bid Opening: Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 11:00 AM.

And as every New York City pest pro will know, and this post discusses in more detail, there are limits on the kinds of pesticides which can be used in city-owned buildings, under Local Law 37 (PDF), including pyrethrins.

Yes, pyrethrins are no miracle cure for bed bugs, but they are often still an integral part of bed bug treatment plans.

Is $33K a year really going to get this job done?Similar Posts:

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Wicked Local Cambridge (Massachusetts) reports the following in a brief recap of  last night’s Cambridge City Council meeting:

Councilors voted to look further into bedbug extermination protocol and ways make the associated costs for residents more affordable.

I had some trouble with this video of the meeting, but the relevant part is item five and begins about 2:16.

(This is a paraphrased account of what I heard): the Cambridge City Council asks the Public Health Department to work with Cambridge Housing Authority and other agencies to address the bed bug problem.

Councillor Craig Kelley speaks briefly but eloquently, suggesting the city needs a one-stop place to go to find out about bed bugs, and an education program so people will learn (for example) not to pick up discarded furniture. According to Kelley, the problem is partly one of various agencies not knowing what to do, what best practices are.

(Again, that’s a rough paraphrase of what I could catch. My computer did not like the video format.)

These are problems that sound very familiar to me and will probably sound familiar to others in New York and elsewhere.

We look forward to hearing more about Cambridge’s attempts to do more about bed bugs.

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More on the multi-unit building in Brattleboro, Vermont where landlord Ron Gaida took out a $3000 loan from the town to help pay for bed bug treatment.

The Brattleboro Reformer cites Daniel Dente, owner of Vernon, Vermont PCO firm Abatem as saying 125 Canal Street has now been “treated with chemicals approved by the Environmental Protection Agency to kill bed bugs.”

Tenants have returned home.

It is not clear from the article whether there will be any follow-up treatments or inspections. I hope there will be — of course, the chemicals are approved by the EPA for use on bed bugs, but it does not mean they normally kill all the bed bugs in one application.

Dealing with bed bugs living in furniture may help speed the process of treatment. In addition to chemical treatment of the building, The Reformer also reports that the tenants had sofas, beds, and easy chairs treated in Abatem’s heat truck:

Those items were put into a specially designed truck where they were heat treated at 140 degrees for about an hour, said Assistant Fire Chief Peter Lynch, who is also the town’s health officer. The heat treatment killed the bed bugs, he said.

Clothes and linens were laundered in hot water and dried at temperatures around 160 degrees to guarantee they were free of the pests, said Lynch, who insisted every precaution was taken to insure the bed bugs didn’t survive the treatment.

“We were confident all the laundry was clean when it came back,” he said.

The way things are going elsewhere, Peter Lynch may yet have to deal with bed bugs in both his capacity as Fire Chief and as health officer. Let’s hope not!

Though thermal trucks are not a novel idea (Adams Pest in MN has a thermal trailer pictured here), Abatem’s truck was retrofitted by the company:

The heated truck used to be an old moving truck, said Dente, which he and his team retrofitted for just this purpose. This was the fourth time it had been used to eliminate pests, he said.

Until every home has a bed bug sauna, thermal trucks are something we’d like to see a lot more of.

Good luck to Ron Gaida, his tenants, and the team that did their treatment. I truly hope the problem there is solved — or at least close to being solved.Similar Posts:

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Thank goodness the building is under the care of a community organization and landlord that is not willing to put up with this building being only 85% bed bug-free.

Remember this campaign to free a 20-unit Manchester, New Hampshire building (Langdon Mill Apartments) of bed bugs?

A group called NH Bed Bugs, spearheaded by members of the American Friends Service Committee and the Granite State Organizing Project, went to great lengths to try and solve the bed bug problem at Langdon Mill.

As the Concord Monitor reported Sunday,

They moved the families out of the building. They washed and dried all of their clothes and bedding on high heat. They threw out almost all of the furniture they owned – not just mattresses and couches, but tables and desks, too – and solicited donated replacements. After exterminators had sprayed everything, the families came back.

Unfortunately, when new mattresses were being brought back in on Wednesday, three units still showed signs of a bed bug infestation.

Though vastly improved, the building will continue to be treated.

Make no mistake, it is a vast improvement: the building has had bed bugs since 2005, and when NH Bed Bugs stepped in, every unit was infested.

NH Bed Bugs threw itself into the project, and learned on a large scale what individual bedbuggers learn: how difficult and expensive it is to get rid of bed bugs.

Maggie Fogarty, of the American Friends Service Committee told the Concord Monitor,

“. . . we couldn’t ask these refugee tenants to run every piece of clothing they had through a high heat cycle in the dryer. It cost us thousands of dollars to do it for them,” Fogarty said. “They certainly couldn’t afford to go out and buy all new stuff, even secondhand stuff.

“One of the problems we have not figured out is, how do you do this if you’re of limited means? How do you do this effectively?” she said. “It’s a very expensive problem.”

And Fogarty is mindful too of the difficulty of helping people get rid of this problem:

“We cannot convene hundreds of volunteers, and tens of thousands of dollars, for every building in New Hampshire,” Fogarty said. “We have to step back and look, systemically, how we can prevent this problem from spreading.”

[Emphasis mine.]

There are two important points here:

1. Bed bug preparations and treatment are time consuming and costly.  If people cannot afford the costs of bed bug preparations and treatment, or cannot manage the physical labor, then bed bugs will continue to thrive and spread.
2. Bed bugs are a fact of life and cannot be completely avoided.

Some steps may help curtail their spread and/or help stop them in their tracks when they are brought in:

• Everyone needs to be educated about how to avoid bringing bed bugs home;
• Residential buildings, schools, office buildings, public transportation, and other locations need regular professional inspections to detect bed bugs;
• Cracks and wall voids may need to be dusted and sealed, and other preventive measures taken to foil the odd bed bugs which may be brought in.

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Check out the new “Bed Bug Supplement” in August’s PCT: Bed Bugs: A Market Opportunity, Pest Control Technology Magazine – August 2009.

I know: the title grates on us.

It’s hard to think of your itchy, costly nightmare with a blood-sucking parasite as someone else’s “market opportunity,” but it is to our advantage as bed bug sufferers if pest control companies take their work seriously, and become as educated as they can about bed bugs.

Inside the supplement, “Bed Bugs: Vectors of Human Disease?” by Jerome Goddard, “Bed Bug Business Concerns,” (an excerpt from the Bed Bug Handbook by Lawrence Pinto, Richard Cooper, and Sandra Kraft), and some new product information under “Bed Bug BYTES” (including a free “Bed Bugs: a Public Health Pest” poster by Bayer, in Spanish and English).

By far the most interesting item to our readers (and the most helpful to PCOs, in my opinion) will be Jerome Goddard’s article, with its tables showing bed bug bite reactions, the potential for disease transmission, and treatments for bed bug bites, all as noted by various researchers.

The section entitled “Bite Reactions” (54) is particularly important for pest professionals to read; you’d be surprised how many PCOs still think that everyone reacts to bed bug bites.  And yet, as Goddard notes,

It seems that the usual response to a bed bug bite appears to be no reaction with a barely visible punctum at the location of the bite.

(Emphasis mine.)

Many pest control techs assume only the room in which a person complaining of bed bug bites sleeps is infested.  These under-informed types probably also don’t read PCT, but hopefully their employers do.

Keeping in mind that this is all aimed at the PCO market, it is good to see well-researched information being conveyed about bed bugs, reactions to bed bug bites, and the potential of bed bugs as a disease vector.Similar Posts:

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Well, almost. Bed bugs feature in a trio of New York Times Real Estate articles this weekend.

The first, Buying and Selling in Bedbug City attempts to navigate the complicated and murky waters of shopping for a co-op or condo in a multi-unit building, in what New York Magazine’s Intelligencer referred to Friday as “The Age of Bedbugs.”

Teri Karush Rogers reports in “Buying and Selling in Bedbug City” that

According to the law, sellers and their brokers must acknowledge a [bed bug] problem if asked. But conflicts of interest aside, neither can be expected to know whether an infestation exists elsewhere in the building.

The problem is so pervasive that some lawyers have begun incorporating sellers’ representations about bedbugs into sales contracts, adding to now-standard ones about leaks, mold and noise issues. And buyers are having to determine if the pests are a deal-breaker or just one more headache on the road to a new home.

The article also tells stories of buyers who walk away once they find out a building has a bed bug issue, and those who don’t.

Perhaps the most distressing point made:

“Most residential buildings in New York City have had bedbugs,” said Aaron Shmulewitz, a real estate lawyer at Belkin Burden Wenig & Goldman who represents 300 Manhattan co-op and condo boards. (Among his most frequently asked questions: Who must pay for extermination?)

(Emphasis mine.)

The message here is that it’s apparently no longer about whether your prospective building in New York City has ever had bed bugs, it’s now about whether your unit or a proximate unit has them, and about how well and proactively the building deals with bed bugs or has dealt with them in the past.

The second article, “Disgusting, Yes. But a Deal Breaker?” suggests buyers should consider the location and proximity of an infestation to the unit for sale, how long the infestation has been going on, how widespread it is, and the ability and willingness of owners/occupants to cooperate with and participate with treatment and prep (and, it is not mentioned but goes without saying: prevention of future infestations). Of course, it is often very difficult or impossible to determine the answers to those questions.

The third article, “Debugging a New Home: Of Surrogate Sleepers and Pest Sensors and Special Dust,” suggests techniques for making sure a new home is bed bug free: bed bug sniffing dogs are an option, but not perfect; hiring someone (presumably someone known to react to bed bug bites) to sleep in your new home is an option; pest control professionals Gil Bloom (of Standard Pest) and John Furman (Boot-a-Pest) are quoted as suggesting Nightwatch bed bug monitors; Jodi Gangloff-Kaufmann (of the New York State Integrated Pest Management program) suggests having the insides of walls dusted.

Rogers notes,

Dessicant dust can be placed in the spaces behind outlets, for example. In addition, floors can be sealed with a thick coat of polyurethane, and sealant caulk can be applied to moldings. Some pest control companies have started marketing these as “exclusion services.”

Of course, we have heard of people fleeing bed bugs, or who were trying to avoid ever getting them again, going to such lengths when moving to a new home, or when trying to keep their old home free of bed bugs after treatment. However, this is the first time I have heard these “exclusion services” suggested as preventive measures in the mainstream press to people who may have never had bed bugs before.

It’s a sign of the times — a scary one, but a healthy one nonetheless.

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BrickUnderground reports that the July/August 2009 issue of Habitat magazine (not yet available on their website) reports that a three-tower, 217-unit Theater District co-op building paid $250,000 to get rid of its bed bug problem.

BrickUnderground writes,

The co-op in the Habitat article found bed bugs in several neighboring apartments, two stairwells and some of the basement storage lockers.

Working with one exterminator and several subcontractors, it treated infested apartments with powders for the walls and heat and chemicals for cracks and crevices.

In addition, everything in the basement storage lockers was packed in impermeable containers and shipped to an off-site exterminator, while the storage rooms were treated.

The plan includes new rules for sealing items before putting them into storage, and regular visits from a bed bug sniffing canine.

BrickUnderground reports the cost “was paid from the building’s reserve funds.”

This is a good lesson for other multi-unit buildings (whether rentals, condos or co-ops): take bed bugs seriously whenever they appear.

Better yet, develop a preventive strategy before you have any bed bug reports.  And educate your staff and tenants or unit owners about bed bugs and how to spot them.

Education of management (including co-op boards/owner associations) is key: too often, we hear in the Bedbugger Forums from harried co-op or condo residents who suspect neighbors are infested, but can’t get through to them or the co-op board or condo association about the need for a cooperative effort.

See Co-op hair-raiser: $250,000 bed bug bill to read more from BrickUnderground.

We found out about this story via New York vs. Bed Bugs. Thanks, Renee!Similar Posts:

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The Social Q’s etiquette column in the New York Times covered a bed bug issue Thursday.  The anonymous letter writer said,

My brother has bedbugs. He told our mother and made her promise not to tell me. But she called me immediately. Apparently, he hasn’t told his landlady or called an exterminator, or done anything to contain their spread.

We are all going on a family trip soon. The bedbugs will surely be among his belongings and will set up camp in the home of the relative we’re staying with, and perhaps find their way back to my place.

Although the answer from columnist Philip Galanes was more about the issue of mom spilling the beans on the brother’s secret than anything else, the answer was clear: brother’s refusal to deal with bed bugs (and therefore the possibility he would infest everyone on the upcoming trip) was not acceptable, and the letter writing sister needs to step in and help him grab the bed bug bull by the horns.

See: Social Q’s – A Secret, Itching to Be Told – NYTimes.com.

Bed bugs also appeared in in the Business column On the Road on Monday ,  and in the Patient Money column last Friday.

Given how concerned the New York Times seems to be with bed bugs right now (bed bugs in hotels, bed bugs and etiquette, bed bugs and health/finance), why won’t someone in the “official” media mention the tiny issue of the still-unfilled NYC Bed Bug Advisory Board?Similar Posts:

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WFTV in Florida helped some low-income tenants with bed bugs to get help.

The owner of Oakwood apartments in Mount Dora tried to charge seven families almost $3,000 each for extermination fees.

The South Florida based company, Miami Mar Incorporated, told the residents they would be kicked out if they didn’t pay.

Whether this is fair, or legal, is one question.

Whether asking low-income tenants to come up with that kind of money for treatment is practical is an easy “no.”

But HUD had other ideas:

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] helps pay the rent at the complex for people who can’t afford it. After Eyewitness News contacted HUD, the agency told the landlord extermination is an operating expense that the tenants don’t have to pay for.

Watch WFTV’s video at Residents Told To Pay For Bed Bug Infestation – News Story – WFTV Orlando.Similar Posts:

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For the last eight years, the city of Fort Collins, Colorado has invited residents to dump their old sofas and chairs in a parking lot, and invited Colorado State University students to come and find a “new” sofa.  It seemed like a nice bit of matchmaking.

However, the event is being cancelled this year due to concerns about the potential spread of bed bugs.

Coloradoan.com reports,

The event started in 2001 when the city noticed a number of used couches dumped in alleyways or disposed of improperly. The ritual usually happened right around August when leases, especially for college students, turned over.

The two-day event has seen thousands of used couches come and go, with more than 80 percent of them recycled in 2008, Emerson said. About 600 couches pass through during the two days.

“We want to know: Do we still have this problem of sofas being dumped, or have we done enough education?” she said.

With a bad economy, however, the need for a free sofa is likely still there, if not increased.

“I think, with the economy, you may still find that need there, but I also know that to mitigate your house from bedbug issues is extremely expensive,” [Melissa Emerson, community liaison for CSU and the city of Fort Collins] said. “I would hate to see low-income people and students who want a used sofa to have the burden of trying to clear their home of bedbugs.”

The city will offer a free pick-up service on July 31 to those who have unusable couches that need to go to the landfill.

Bravo to Fort Collins and CSU for making this change preventively, before the city and college had a big bed bug problem.Similar Posts:

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