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Hotel housekeeping staff offered $25 bounty per head on bed bugs

nobugsonme — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:24:37 +0000

The Las Vegas Sun reports that the Tropicana has offered staff $25 for each live bed bug they find and capture.

The owners of the embattled Tropicana hotel have placed a bounty on bedbugs, offering housekeepers $25 a pop for each one brought in alive.

The offer was posted in the hotel’s housekeeping offices, raising eyebrows among workers wondering whether they should pull out magnifying glasses while changing sheets.

“Don’t forget to check for bedbugs!” one flier exclaims in English and Spanish. “Check every room — every day.” The posting features enlarged images of the minuscule bloodsucking menaces.

The union suggests staff need training in how to find bed bugs, but the management say their pest control firm Ecolab already provides such training to housekeeping staff. The hotel denied there was a bed bug “problem:”

The Sun’s inquiries to Tropicana parent company Columbia Sussex drew a stiff rebuke, including the implied threat of a lawsuit.

“There isn’t a problem. Period,” spokesman Hud Englehart said in a statement.

The incentive program is part of what the Tropicana calls its “Five Star Awards” program, he said, and is intended simply to keep housekeepers on the lookout for potential problems.

“No hotel is immune from (bedbugs) and every hotel takes precautions to ensure that incidents are detected so that infestations are prevented,” Englehart said. “We are no different.”

It is true that bed bugs are a possibility in any hotel, anywhere.

So far, no Tropicana housekeepers have cashed in on a bed bug:

Despite the incentive program, no live bedbugs have been brought in for cash redemption, Englehart noted. (Nor, apparently, has anyone brought in bedbugs from outside sources to see whether they could game the system.)

Gregg Wears, supervisor for the Las Vegas Strip office of the Southern Nevada Health District, said the Tropicana gets an average number of bedbug complaints, but wouldn’t elaborate. The health agency receives two or three such complaints districtwide a week, and complaints are more frequent in residential properties, he said.

I am glad hotels are training housekeeping staff to look for bed bugs, and glad they are getting some kind of incentive to look.

However, staff need careful training and I hope they are getting it. It needs to go beyond photos of bed bugs; they need to know how to look.

And they also need more time to do such inspections, and cannot be expected to get through as many rooms as they did in the past when they were only charged with cleaning tasks.

Finally, hotels should find ways to combine this incentive program with other detection methods: bed bug dog walk-throughs and careful PCO inspections should be considered.

Housekeepers eyeballing the bed can help but bed bugs are designed and programmed to hide by daylight, and so staff are unlikely to detect bed bugs with a cursory inspection unless cases are quite serious.

Reno; and New Haven: bed bugs cause unsuspecting officials to run around like confused flour beetles

nobugsonme — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 07:07:33 +0000

In Reno, they have so few bed bug cases, that the health department called three residents of an apartment complex to tell them their building is infested. (New Yorkers, are you laughing?!)

Unfortunately, as Geralda Miller of the Reno Gazette Journal reports, the advice being given to tenants is not great:

“They’re an indoor critter,” [Jeff Knight, Nevada State Entomologist] said. “Get rid of the mattress. Get rid of the infested bed frame and thoroughly treat everything else. Bedding has to get a hot wash and dry.”

Those were the instructions [Building Manager Rhonda] Mathews said she gave her tenants.

“Get rid of them or they’re not living here,” she said.

Mathews said she has spent more than $100 to treat each infested unit and the 10 surrounding ones.

Knight said it is important that pest control companies do a thorough job to get rid of the bugs.

The Washoe County Health Department gets “one or two” valid complaints of bed bugs a month. PCO treatment for bed bugs cost the building manager $100 per unit. I know the cost of living in Reno is lower than in NYC, Boston, or San Francisco, but this seems very low. I hope the PCO is trained to treat bed bugs specifically, which may not be the case in a place with very few cases.

If the state entomologist is really telling folks to simply throw away mattresses and frames, and wash bedding (what about all the other clothing and linens in the home?) then they may be seeing a lot more cases soon. Because others will pick up those discarded items. And because clothing and other items can harbor bed bugs, allowing them to continue breeding and spread further.

Across the country, in New Haven, Channel 3 reports that residents of 15 Housing Authority apartments have been relocated to a hotel while their apartments are “fumigated” and “decontaminated.” The terminology there may well relate more to common ideas about pest control practices (killing bugs = “fumigation”) rather than the actual techniques used.

I was very excited to read the following words:

[Channel 3 Eyewitness News Reporter Erika] Arias reported that the Housing Authority is taking the outbreak seriously. [Resident Alberta] Silverspoon said that as soon as she alerted the authority, immediate action was taken.

Quick and drastic action on the HA’s part seems good. But they need to be cautious now: there’s significant danger residents will have moved the bed bugs to the hotel, and they can certainly reinfest their homes when they move back in, so I hope the Housing Authority knows what it’s doing and takes some time to educate and provide necessary supplies (XL ziplocs, mattress and pillow covers, even laundry services for evacuated items) to make sure this doesn’t happen.

It makes me wonder, are hotels going to start asking if prospective customers are bed bug refugees?

The New Haven Register also covered this story. Here, we learn the building is called Crawford Manor, is on Park Avenue, and has 109 units (only 15 identified as infested).

However, this second article was more disturbing. It suggested housing officials were rushing to blame the infestation on one tenant:

Housing Authority Executive Director Jimmy Miller said Wednesday the problem began in a unit of a female tenant who is known to carry her belongings around in bags and owns a few cats. He did not identify the tenant. The city’s anti-blight Livable City Initiative Bureau is being asked to condemn the unit, he said.

“It’s a very serious thing and it’s quite an undertaking,” Miller said.

Miller, who has been running the agency for about 18 months, said this is the first occurrence during his tenure. He did not know of any others in recent history.

“It’s not something that would go unnoticed. You do get bites from them,” he said.

Actually, some claim that most people are not allergic and so do not react (in other words, they neither see bite marks nor experience any itching). Even if “most” is inaccurate, it’s certainly true of “many.” There’s a wide range of reactions from serious allergic reactions that land people in hospital, to dime-sized welts and severe itching, to what looks like mosquito bites, to tiny red dots, to nothing.

So if HA officials are basing their ideas of how bed bugs spread from one unit to another, or which units are infested, on whether people experience bites, their data is liable to be inaccurate. There will doubtless be bed bugs in other units, not reported, maybe not even noticed.

The housing authority was alerted when tenants from another unit detected the bugs and reported the problem.

Miller said the authority has not identified the cause of the outbreak, but officials believe the infestation spread as the female tenant moved bags around common areas or as visitors entered and left.

“They don’t usually travel person-to-person and they don’t normally travel more than 100 feet,” he said.

The housing authority first had to have the female tenant’s unit cleaned and her furniture will be destroyed.

Thirteen other tenants were housed temporarily in area hotels Tuesday night and about half were able to return to Crawford Manor Wednesday. Authority staff gave them meals and made sure everyone on medication stayed on their regimens.

Crawford Manor is a mixed-population development. Miller said it is going to cost the authority approximately $80 per unit to decontaminate the entire building. It was unclear Wednesday how much alternate lodging, meals and staff overtime would cost.

The tenant in the unit that set off the infestation was relocated from Brookside, one of several housing complexes on West Rock targeted for revitalization.

Miller said the authority will be implementing a policy for sterilizing tenant belongings before relocations occur.

“We’re on top of it,” he said.

Good to know they’re on top of it. (I’m impressed by the $80 per unit cost. But the city probably has a contract of some kind.)

I hope they also educate themselves and tenants about how bed bugs are picked up and spread. Because although bed bugs may not walk more than 100 feet, they will hitchhike on anyone: any tenant, visitor, or employee could have brought them in.

I am troubled by the way in which New Haven housing authorities want to pin the blame on an easy target: a woman who has cats and carries her stuff around in bags.

First, the fact the woman has “a few cats” is irrelevant: we can get bed bugs from the abandoned nests of bats, birds, and even rats, but they do not come from cats. If a human is present, they don’t even want to bite the cats. So I am not sure why people are obsessed with the woman’s cats, as if they were a factor. Presumably the cats living in a high-rise do not go out, so they did not pick up hitchhiking bed bugs and bring them in.

Second, it is clear that if someone did have bed bugs and carried their stuff around in bags, they’d have more chance of carrying bed bugs to more locations than a person who, for example, traveled light. But it really does not matter whether the “bags” are laptop cases, Prada bags, messenger bags, or shopping bags.

It is true that clutter allows bed bugs to easily hide and breed. But it does not cause them to appear.

This sounds to me like a witch hunt: “15 units are infested, one is the home of a woman who has a few cats and carries stuff around, therefore, let’s blame her.” It’s easy, but it’s not necessarily scientific. Even if her unit now has more bugs than any other unit, I am not sure it could be proven she brought bed bugs in, or that she was “bed bug ground zero.”

She may be the source in this building, she may not. But the real problem with pinning the blame on someone is that it makes others feel they’re off the hook. The truth is, whoever brought them into the building, caught them somewhere. It’s an epidemic. Maybe they caught them in New Haven, maybe they brought them in from a vacation, school, workplace, or hospital. The person who brings them into the building is not the cause. Moving them out does not prevent reinfestation. And they also implied that “tenant zero” was relocated there from another (presumably infested) HA building.

More to the point, did 15 people from this building just infest a local hotel? I’d like to know what precautions were taken to avoid that situation. This is the problem with the blame game: everyone who has bed bugs got them from someone else (unless they got them from a bat, a bird, or a rat). Who are you gonna blame?

We need public education, assistance for people in low-income housing (with supplies and treatment costs–besides the PCO), and prompt PCO treatment.
We need government awareness, better policies, funding, and willingness to act (New Haven got a lot of that right).
We need bed bug aggregate pheromone traps, more and better pesticides and other treatment methods (thermal, cryonite, etc.).
But we don’t need the pointless and inaccurate blame game.

Snapshot: a few hours of Bedbugger.com visitors tells us something about the spread

nobugsonme — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 03:25:05 +0000

You can click here to see a map of the last 90 or so visitors to the site. It will look different from what I describe below, because I am writing about what I saw there about 4-5 hours ago. Now it’s almost midnight in New York, and the Aussies are starting to surf in.

For those of you who don’t know, webpages can tell where you’re coming from (though not very specifically). They know the location of your ISP. For most people, this comes up as somewhere near where they live, though it’s not always precise and sometimes it’s just the country. It also tells the webmaster what internet browser you use (Go Firefox!) and whether you like Macs or Windows machines. No, I do not know your name, or where you live, don’t worry!

This may all seem very “meta,” so far, but we know that our readership consists of four kinds of people:

a) People who have, or think they have, or recently had, bed bugs.
b) People whose work makes them concerned about bed bugs (pest control professionals, entomologists, politicians, landlords, hotel managers, social service agencies, government officials, are just some sectors that I have heard from).
c) People who have heard about bed bugs and are concerned, and want to know more.

I think that group (a) is in the majority, and although most people don’t comment, most commenters fit in group a. In any case, the Bedbugger.com readership is a map of bed bug concern, and you’d be pretty safe betting its a map of where bed bugs are popping up–with the caveat, of course, that our site pops up more in US search engines than those abroad, and also that our readers are overwhelmingly English-speakers, though we have dreams of breaking down those linguistic barriers!

This is where the last 89 readers were reading the blog (circa 6:30 this evening):

1. San Diego, California, United States
2. Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
3. Walden, New York, United States
4. Long Island City, New York, United States
5. New York, New York, United States
6. Plattekill, New York, United States
7. Hull, Quebec, Canada
8. Durant, Iowa, United States
9. Miamiville, Ohio, United States
10. Gibraltar
11. Calgary, Alberta, Canada
12. Boston, Massachusetts, United States
13. Humble, Texas, United States
14. Germantown, Maryland, United States
15. Rowland Heights, California, United States
16. New York, New York, United States
17. New York, New York, United States
18. Hadley, Kentucky, United States
19. Buffalo, New York, United States
20. HveragerÃƒÂ°i, Arnessysla, Iceland
21. Pine Falls, Manitoba, Canada
22. Livonia, Michigan, United States
23. Bayside, New York, United States
24. Woodhaven, New York, United States
25. Denver, Colorado, United States
26. New York, New York, United States
27. United States
28. Waterloo, Quebec, Canada
29. Los Angeles, California, United States
30. Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
31. Santa Maria, California, United States
32. Beamsville, Ontario, Canada
33. Kansas City, Missouri, United States
34. Corona, New York, United States
35. Barker, Texas, United States
36. Readville, Massachusetts, United States
37. Palo Alto, California, United States
38. Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
39. Mill Valley, California, United States
40. Ridgewood, New York, United States
41. Mehama, Oregon, United States
42. San Francisco, California, United States
43. Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, United States
44. Swedesburg, Iowa, United States
45. Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
46. West New York, New Jersey, United States
47. Lancaster, Blackpool, United Kingdom
48. New York, New York, United States
49. Miami, Florida, United States
50. Anaheim, California, United States
51. Harrow, Harrow, United Kingdom
52. Wilsonville, Oregon, United States
53. Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
54. Forest Hill, Ontario, Canada
55. Wayne, New Jersey, United States
56. KecskemÃƒÂ©t, Bacs-Kiskun, Hungary
57. Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada
58. Short Hills, New Jersey, United States
59. Seattle, Washington, United States
60. Jackson, Mississippi, United States
61. Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
62. Secaucus, New Jersey, United States
63. Long Island City, New York, United States
64. United States
65. Tranbjerg, Arhus, Denmark
66. Naples, Florida, United States
67. San Francisco, California, United States
68. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
69. Gainesville, Florida, United States
70. Edmond, Oklahoma, United States
71. Hempstead, New York, United States
72. Everett, Massachusetts, United States
73. United States
74. United States
75. SÃƒÂ£o Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil
76. Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
77. Bismarck, North Dakota, United States
78. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
79. Downers Grove, Illinois, United States
80. United States
81. Bend, Oregon, United States
82. Henderson, Nevada, United States
83. MontrÃƒÂ©al, Quebec, Canada
84. Sunnyvale, California, United States
85. Arlington, Texas, United States
86. United States
87. New York, New York, United States
88. Fairfax, Virginia, United States
89. Rochester, New York, United States

You might expect that most of these people came from the bed bug hot spots. We get lots of readers from Chicago, Boston, NYC, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto. So it’s surprising that 89 people came from such a wide variety of places:

68 from at least 33 states (only 12 of these from NYC, San Francisco or Boston);
11 from 5 provinces in Canada;
4 from 4 cities in the UK (none of them London);
1 person each from: Hungary, Ireland, Denmark, Brazil, Iceland, and Gilbraltar.

In New York state, 10 of the 17 visitors were from NYC. And of the 10 in NYC, 60% were in Queens, where, unlike Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan, each neighborhood has its own name used for the purposes of the postal service: Ridgewood, Corona, Long Island City, Woodhaven, Bayside, New York, are all in Queens, and part of NYC. Remember the Queens Gazette speculating that Queens was the “ground zero for NYC’s bed bugs? Well, I am still not sure it’s true, but it seems plausible: we certainly have a lot of Bedbuggers in Queens.

I peeked at the traffic report for the site because I have a geeky side and I find it interesting to know where you’re coming from. However, looking at it can tell us something about the bed bug problem. This is not a scientific study, but just a snapshot of our site’s traffic does tell you who’s worried about bed bugs (and, we can assume, many are worried because they have bed bugs).

Most of those cities were not capitals or the biggest cities in their regions or countries. A small percentage are from those places you think are hot spots. It should serve as a warning sign that bed bugs, like Bedbuggers, are everywhere, and way more spread out than you thought.