• Allegations of bed bugs affect tourism, according to travel agent
• Bed bugs in homeless shelters, casinos, hotels, apartments: Waynesboro, Atlantic City, Greenpoint, Toronto
• bed bugs in Virginia Beach (again), Brown County, Ohio, and potential health risks
• bed bug news for 2007-11-15

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We’re familiar with bed bug dogs, here at Bedbugger, but it is interesting to read of the situation in NZ.

“She’s not big, she’s clean and she’s a clever dog,” Mr Morley said of the three-year-old. “She can get into little places and sniff inside mattresses.”

Well, I bet she’s less clean when she comes out of some of those mattresses.

Yesterday Joni worked through 20 rooms and even detected bedbugs that were behind a headboard fixed to the wall.

When she finds something, she will tap at it with her paw before Mr Morley asks her to check again with her nose. After bedbugs are found, each surface of the room can be treated with steam within a day whereas chemical treatments could see a room shut off for many days. Mr Morley says the combination of Joni and steam produces a 98 per cent success rate. Manual treatments have a 20 per cent success rate.

I found this interesting, and I’d like to hear more about companies working with a combination of dogs and steam. What it sounds like Morley is describing is a situation in which the dog pinpoints the exact location of bed bugs (or eggs, which the article tells us she can also detect), and then that area is carefully steamed (I assume with a dry steam machine). Steaming that pinpoints a specific area does seem both more reliable and easier than steaming the whole area, hoping to strike bed bug gold.

I’d also like to know what that 98% success rate represents: I assume it means 98% of cases need not be serviced twice. (Or does it mean most cases eliminate 98% of their bed bugs? Big difference, no?)

This does sound promising, though as a customer, I would not mind if they then employed a bit of residual or mechanical (dust) killer to seal the deal. When it comes to killing bed bugs, I don’t think there’s such a thing as overkill.

It sounds like Joni does a lot of sleuthing looking for bed bugs in hotels, and a regular run through with the bedbug dog and an industrial steamer would be greatly reassuring to me as a prospective hotel guest.

In Australia, similar dogs are used to sniff out termites, which mainly affect the coastal urban areas of the country. Joni was trained in Queensland, one of five dogs around the world trained to sniff out bedbugs.

I think this may be based on outdated statistics, since I know of at least five bed bug-sniffing dogs currently working in the United States! Nevertheless, it does sound like bedbuggers in New Zealand and at least some parts of Australia have or will soon have access to this service, which is spreading quickly, as is (unfortunately) the need for it.

• Bed bug dogs in the news
• Consumers, before you hire one, find out what that bed bug dog can do!
• University of Florida tests bed bug dogs
• Abbey the Bed Bug Dog: news report

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Although people often think this to be the case, this site was never intended to be for residents of the US, but rather, for everyone with bed bugs, everywhere. Although I (Nobugsonme) lived for many years abroad, I am in NYC, I am best able to provide information on fighting bed bugs here, and news on what’s going on.

However, I’d love to make the site more helpful for Bedbuggers everywhere, as I know you would too. This is where you come in. Tell us everything you can to make this site relevant to your country-people. Use the comment function and point us to useful information and useful stuff.

I get google alerts for all bed bug-related stories on the ‘net. But these are weighted towards US stories in particular. If you see bed bug news covered on a website (especially a newspaper or television website in your country), please drop me an email and let me know (nobugsonme at yahoo dot com).

If you see suggestions on the FAQs for treatment methods which you feel do not apply in your country, or suggestions of products not available to you, or if the product has a different name or is sold by a particular company, please post a comment directly on the relevant FAQ telling us. We’d be happy to give people information specific to the UK, Canada, Australia, or anywhere else, but first we need the information.

(This request comes with the usual disclaimer that people who are themselves selling things should advertise on the site rather than posting phony ads in the form of “happy customer testimonials”: you know who you are.)

A few of the FAQs may be closed to comments, usually because people were using them to post comments about other issues besides the information in the FAQs. If you find this to be the case, you can email me at nobugsonme at yahoo dot com, and I will re-open them. It’s best to post your corrections to the FAQs, rather than emailing them to me, since I get a lot of email every day and don’t have time to copy and paste lots of addenda to the FAQs. For the same reasons, it’s also best not to post information in the comments on this FAQ (below) which would be better placed on the FAQ about protecting your bed, travel, etc.

Thank you for making the site a better resource for Bedbuggers everywhere!

• updated FAQ
• Welcome Bedbuggers!
• Do not adjust your set
• bite photos

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