A bedbug epidemic in her Astoria apartment building forced Ellie Maldonado, 42, to discard her mattress last year.

Now, her brother Marcos Maldonado is spearheading an effort to raise money to replace the infected mattresses of his neighbors living in the Astoria Houses. He has named the project Sweet Dreams.

“I named it this because I want the kids to have sweet dreams as they sleep,” said Maldonado, 43, who has lived in Astoria for 16 years and is the owner of M&D Decorators on Astoria Blvd.

As I said, it’s a lovely idea, and very generous. Mr. Maldonado’s heart is in the right place, and he clearly knows firsthand how much bed bugs can mess up someone’s life and home.

However, and I hate to be a wet blanket (no pun intended), but I am concerned this program may only provide a temporary respite from bed bugs. Discarding bed bug-infested mattresses does not usually eliminate bed bugs from the home. In most cases, the room itself is also infested, along with sofas and other items.

It can give people a false sense of security. Bed bug bites may be lessened or eliminated for a while. But the bed bugs may still be present in smaller numbers, and can quickly bounce back.

What’s more, tossing out infested mattresses isn’t recommended by bed bug experts in most cases. Sealed mattress encasements tested to keep bed bugs out (or in this case, in) allow the mattress to be used and prevent a discarded mattress from going on to infest someone else’s home.

It’s essential that the apartment and the neighboring apartments are all bed bug-free, or these new mattresses will quickly become infested too.

Maldonado is donating mattresses to residents of NYCHA apartments, and the city seems pleased:

Maldonado hopes to establish a permanent, registered nonprofit organization to provide mattresses to families in the Ravenswood and Queensbridge houses next, he said.

City Housing Authority officials lauded Maldonado’s work.

“NYCHA applauds community involvement where community members want to help each other improve the quality of life in their neighborhoods,” a spokeswoman said in a written statement.

What isn’t mentioned outright in this article is the fact that it’s the NYCHA’s responsibility to eliminate bed bug infestations from NYCHA apartments.

I hope that their procedures involve inspecting all adjoining units (top, bottom, and all sides) when a complaint is made. I am concerned this is not so, since the fact sheet linked above says nothing about neighbors being inspected.

To their credit, the NYCHA does tell tenants to destroy any items which must be discarded. But my experience is most people don’t research such instructions before discarding things.

And destroying alone is not enough: mattresses should also be sealed to prevent spreading bed bugs while they await collection by the sanitation dept. or by trash-pickers.

I hope the NYCHA is also educating tenants about the signs of bed bugs, which can be quite subtle.

And I hope Mr. Maldonado will donate good mattress encasements for use with the donated mattresses.

• Tracing the path of the epidemic
• Washington Post prints correction thanks to bed bug activist
• NYC schools closer to having bed bug legislation
• Today show recommends sharing used mattresses on Craigslist, Freecycle

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Kudos are now due to Renee of NewYorkvsBedbugs.org, who was surely the party responsible for convincing the Washington Post via this campaign to correct the erroneous information used by David Segal to dismiss the size of New York’s bed bug problem.

If you recall, Segal argued that the media was overstating the size of the bed bug problem in the US. To support this, Segal claimed that,

. . . there are so many bedbug false alarms that there’s reason to assume many perfectly sane people are ringing them. In New York, the city housing authority has fielded and checked out more than 2,500 bedbug complaints in the past three years; fewer than 500 turned out to be actual infestations.

That information was, of course, entirely incorrect, as well as misleading.

The correction now preceding the article on the Washington Post’s site reads,

Correction to This Article
The article about bedbugs said that 500 of the 2,500 bedbug complaints lodged with the New York City Housing Authority between 2005 and 2007 turned out to be actual infestations. After taking a closer look at its records, the authority now says it did not keep detailed reports on bedbugs until last year. Of the 1,720 bedbug complaints received in 2007, a spokesman says, 70 percent resulted in treatment by an exterminator.

Nevertheless, my main complaint about the article still holds: the information cited in the correction is still misleading.

Segal only chose to cite NYCHA data in his article. The NYCHA only deals with infestations in public housing. As this NYCHA website reminds us, only 5.1% of the NYC population lives in NYCHA housing. Most tenants renting NYC apartments would not be eligible to call NYCHA to report a housing problem.

The vast majority of tenants in NYC would call the Housing and Preservation Department (HPD) via the city’s 311 hotline, to report that a landlord was not dealing with a bed bug complaint. I stress that they would only call 311 if (a) they lived in housing for which the landlord is reponsible for eliminating bed bugs (buildings of less than 3 units are one example of those which are apparently exempt), (b) they had tried to get the landlord to remedy the bed bug problem and it had not been dealt with, and (c) they were not afraid of any repercussions for reporting the landlord in this way. (In fact, my anecdotal information suggests that most tenants with bed bugs in NYC don’t call 311; it’s also a given that zero homeowners would be included in this data, since HPD would not help them; so the HPD data is a very low estimate of how many tenants in NYC have bed bugs in a given year.)

Still, as the Daily News correctly reported last year, in the fiscal year ending June 2007, there were 6889 complaints of bed bugs reported to HPD and 2008 summonses handed out to landlords as a result. Including this statistic along with the NYCHA data would lead to a fuller estimate of how many rental tenants had bed bugs in FY 2006-2007. It would be woefully understated, but not as much as the data the Washington Post provides.

The Washington Post was right to correct the inaccuracy of the NYCHA data Segal offered up, but this correction does not fully correct the inaccuracy of the facts presented in support of Segal’s argument.

New Yorkers should visit NewYorkvsBedBugs.org and write a letter to their city councilpersons.
Do it, and things might get better.

• David Segal strikes again, telling WNYC radio bed bugs are getting “hyperbolic coverage”
• Nashua, N.H. laws may change in part based on recent bed bug cases there
• Columbia Spectator on bed bugs, again with the HPD statistic soup
• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities

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