He also discusses the upcoming PCT bed bug seminars where he will talk about the history of bed bug management (did you know that in the 1600s, people were talking about bed bug prevention?), new research about bed bugs, and innovations in bed bug management.

Gabcast! PCT Podcasts #53 - An Update on Bed Bugs from Dr. Mike Potter
Click the play button below to listen.

• New Yorkers: Lou Sorkin on the radio Tuesday at 10:40 am
• entomologists podcasting; bed bugs and disease; another bedbugged motel closed; Singapore, Hawai’i
• PCTOnline on its bed bug seminar last week
• Bed bugs being raised at Virginia Tech urban pest management labs

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Author Paul Bello interviewed PCOs in various cities about their current bed bug-fighting tactics, including Austin Frishman of AMF Pest Management Services in Boca Raton, Fla., who did many bed bug jobs forty or so years ago, and said of those times, “When I was a technician, we used cyanide egg gas pellets.” Do not try this at home, please.

“Bed bugs are not a simple problem to get rid of,” stresses Frishman. “They require knowledge and a willingness to work hard. As an industry, we are needed more now than ever.”

Ain’t that the truth.

The article offers these recommendations to professionals dealing with Sneaky Simes:

Bed Bug Management: Steps to Success

* Properly train your service technicians.
* Provide customers with written pre-treatment preparation instructions.
* Provide customers with a clearly written description of the scope of your services and reasonable expectations.
* Ensure your service agreement states what you intended.
* Provide your customers with viable prevention recommendations.
* Be thorough.
* Use all viable control means available.
* Use non-traditional control techniques, combined with insecticide treatments.
* Use suitable vacuums.
* Use suitable steamers.
* Use the best-available products at the appropriate label rates.
* Use mattress encasements.
* Follow up in a timely and adequate fashion.
* Consider getting additional help for problem bed bug accounts.

Part 2 is said to be “coming in April” but doesn’t seem to be available online yet.

Thanks to hopelessnomo for the tip!

• FAQ: advice on getting treatment to eliminate your bed bugs
• Consumers, before you hire one, find out what that bed bug dog can do!
• how stealthy bed bugs can be
• new mattress protectors available

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CHARGES to get rid of bed bugs and vermin are to rocket as part of a hike of council fees and charges in Southampton.

Residents with a five-bedroom house in need of council assistance over the bugs will be charged £135 a visit - up £64.

Previously residents were charged between £50 and £60 depending on the size of their home.

£135 is about US$269 today. Most PCOs here in New York don’t seem to charge by the visit, so it’s hard to make a comparison, but I’d be interested in know what good private treatment goes for in Southampton (compared with London, a city more likely to be comparable to NYC).

Yanks have previously expressed jealousy that Brits can get Council treatment for bed bugs, but perhaps it’s not that much of a savings on private treatment after all.

Interestingly, the article states that rats and mice are treated for £10 upfront and £15 for follow-ups (I wonder why follow-ups cost more?), and it costs £83 to have someone spray for fleas or carpet beetles.

Not only do bed bugs cost the most to treat (and I don’t doubt this is related to the care required to properly inspect and treat), but they typically require 3 or more treatments.  And that sure takes a bite out of your wallet.

• Toronto tenants camping in parking lot rather than sleep in bed bug-infested unit
• bed bugs: incidence studies needed in NYC and elsewhere
• New Jersey’s laws designed to spread bed bugs in rental housing
• New bed bug legislation: House Bill 565 from Ohio on bed bug treatment

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Hard evidence for a long human association turned up fairly recently, when British archaeologists excavating an ancient Egyptian village found the oldest bedbug on record: The fossilized fellow dated back about 3,500 years, to before the time of King Tut.

Bedbugs first turned up in print in ancient Greece and Rome. The Roman philosopher Pliny described the bugs in a book on natural history; Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote the pests into several plays.

Greek doctor Dioscorides found more practical uses for the critters. To heal a wound, he suggested mixing crushed bedbugs with tortoise blood. Whether or not such cures worked, they stuck around. More than 1,000 years later, some Chinese medical practitioners advised mixing crushed bedbugs with rice or lime and sesame oil to treat injuries.

This story doesn’t go much beyond mentioning how long people suffered from bed bugs before DDT was invented.

And then mentioning how we’re suffering again.

The bugs have surfaced in a new world in which they’ve spawned panic — and lawsuits. Parents have sued camps and schools, tenants have sued landlords, guests have sued hoteliers.

But there’s one group that hasn’t been complaining: exterminators, who, to an extent, owe their livelihood to the critters in the first place.

And that’s how it ends. That’s it.

Good luck, everyone!

Seriously, nothing really new here–we knew the ancients were getting their blood dined on nightly.

Actually, to their credit, many pest control industry folks don’t seem to be thrilled by the resurgence of bed bugs.

Many companies don’t want to deal with them (having plenty of other nasty creatures to deal with which are easily treated, and for which they can actually comfortably give warranties).

• ancient Bed bug tale, from the Fables of Bidpai
• Cincinnati: “best weapon against bed bugs is … education”
• How accurate are human bed bug inspectors, k9s?
• Bed bug infestations on the increase in Australia, says The Age

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Creepy crawly creatures have always been a predictable, if dreaded, part of multi-housing life because of the ease with which they move from unit to unit along shared pipes, wires and cable lines.

Landlords and buildings managers typically address these concerns with monthly inspections and treatments while urging tenants to adopt neater lifestyles and garbage disposal methods.

Now, say area pest control companies, bedbugs have replaced cockroaches and mice at the top of the creature list, and none of these treatments help.

“In New Jersey we’re seeing bedbugs in epidemic proportions,” says Tony Yochum, commercial sales manager for Viking Pest Control with offices in Saddle Brook and throughout northern New Jersey. “They are the cockroach of the new millennium.”

It seems obvious to us Bedbuggers that the problem is spreading rapidly and also that it can be difficult to get rid of bed bugs. But sometimes news articles are more reserved about saying so outright. Sometimes they even seem to state the opposite.

They also often do not mention how easily bed bugs can be transported from place to place:

“You can pick them up at college, a movie theater, in furniture,” [Abarb Pest Service’s George] Forst said. “They spread like wildfire.”

For the general public, it is helpful to consider that bed bugs can come from a wide variety of sources, and travel in all directions.

That kind of talk can make some people paranoid, of course. It is not true that you will encounter bed bugs everywhere you go, nor is it true–having had bed bugs–that you will likely reinfest yourself again and again from random locations once your bed bugs are gone.

It is worth taking precautions against spreading them if you have them, and it’s worth being alert wherever you go, since picking up bed bugs is always a possibility.

Jim McCale, owner of J.P. McCale Pest Management in Boonton is quoted as saying

We also recommend inspecting the units above, below and diagonal to the infected unit, but this can be hard. Residents don’t want other tenants to know.

What I hear from Bedbugger readers is most often that the landlord does not want to inspect all adjacent units (because, after all, they may then have to pay to treat them). Another common complaint is that the landlord will inspect, but some tenants will refuse either inspection or treatment.

We almost never hear of tenants who themselves do not want the landlord to have neighbors’ units inspected. (And anyway, if all adjacent units are being inspected, why would the other tenants need to know which tenant made the original complaint, if the landlord is the one calling for inspections?)

It is true, however, that our readers are self-selecting–they’re the information-seekers and proactive ones. Often this comes of necessity–when people have a bad allergic response to bed bugs, they not only come looking for solutions, they also are willing to do almost anything to get rid of the problem. So I guess many of us Bedbuggers might not be typical clients.

• Bed bugs in Hamilton, Ontario: lessons for landlords and local governments
• Nashua, NH Health Officers on prowl for bed bugs
• Bed bugs in Ventura County (Thousand Oaks, California)
• FAQ: My landlord hired a PCO who comes twice a month, and we still have bed bugs

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But this article in Friday’s Toronto Sun has some interesting statistics. On the one hand,

According to Reg Ayre, the city’s Healthy Environments manager, Toronto Public Health received 194 calls for bed bug inquiries in 2004, 147 calls in 2005 and 160 in the first nine months of 2006.

That’s just calls to the public health department, though.

The little insects are spreading their non-existent wings and once again showing up in beds, and homes, across Canada, making them a significant issue of public concern.

“We started receiving anecdotal reports that bed bugs were on the rise,” Ayre said. “Prior to 2003-04 it was a non-issue for us.”

Four years later, Ayre says they are constantly sending investigators out to bed bug calls around the city.

From surveys of pest control companies, Ayre said it’s clear all communities are seeing an increase in bed bugs this year.

Disturbingly, individual Toronto PCOs record much higher figures, with one PCO seeing as many as four times TPH’s yearly figure per month.

One company said it performs 1,200 bed bug treatments per year while another said it’s spraying 400-500 homes per month.

Readers will recall a similar discrepancy between official complaints and PCOs’ reports in New York City: six months after the HPD tallied around 4600 calls and 1190 actual bed bug cases reported to 311 in twelve months (summer 2005-summer 2006), one well-known PCO claimed to be getting 85 actual bed bug calls a day (and presumably another 15 false alarms). That’s 22,100 cases per year for one PCO alone, if numbers held steady. (And that was a year ago.)

Clearly someone needs to get data on the full number of homes–public and private rentals, owned homes, as well as institutions– treated every year. Data on bed bugs in hotels and other businesses needs to be collected too. Even if bed bugs have not been proven to transmit disease, they definitely cause stress and much loss of property and income. They hurt individuals and business owners.

I’ve long said we need actual data on bed bug cases in New York City, where the only official data on bed bug cases comes from renters’ calls to 311 (the city’s information line). How people are supposed to know to call 311 with a pest complaint, which everyone knows is something you call your landlord about, is a mystery.

However, why most people don’t call 311 in such circumstances is not a mystery: want to stay in your apartment and not piss off the landlord? Give him/her a chance to solve your pest problem before reporting the building to the housing department.

And that, my friends, means most cases are under the government’s radar, and NYC does not have any reliable data about how many people here have bed bugs. We need a bed bug study done in New York, and so does Toronto.

Read about the 2003 Toronto data here on the CDC website.

• bed bugs: incidence studies needed in NYC and elsewhere
• Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington in NYC: latest bed bug lawsuit
• Toronto Public Health now has a Bed Bug Action Committee. Action, people.
• Reg Ayre of Toronto Public Health: bed bugs a “health concern,” not a “health hazard”

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Rene Laraine of Thousand Oaks, California, has bed bugs.

Laraine said that after nine treatments performed by two pest control companies, the bedbugs are still there.

A representative for Essex Properties, the company that manages the complex, said the company is doing what it can to try to treat the problem in Laraine’s apartment.

What?

No. I am sorry.

If you have had nine treatments and still have bed bugs, I would seriously question whether someone–landlord, pest control operator, tenant, or neighboring tenant– is not doing what they should to eliminate those bed bugs.

Let’s just go through some things that might be going wrong:

1. The landlord has not had a qualified and knowledgeable pest control operator inspect every adjacent unit (top, bottom, and all sides) and treat them properly if necessary.
2. Treatment is not being repeated by the PCO at appropriate intervals (hint: PCOs who know bed bugs tell us they treat every 10-14 days; at least one in Denver treats at 3-week intervals instead, due to low humidity). Treatment must continue without a gap, until all bed bugs and signs of bed bugs are completely gone.
3. The residents in every infested unit are not getting the same treatment, at the same times.
4. The residents in every infested unit are not cooperating 100% with treatment, and following preparations as instructed by a PCO (who has such guidelines)– these often include washing and drying all clothes and linens on hot, and keeping them in sealed bags, and encasing the mattress. They may be much more extensive.
5. Tenants or building employees are unknowingly re-infesting the unit. (This can happen if you got bed bugs from somewhere and you are getting them again, and again.)

Some of these things can happen due to simple ignorance about how bed bugs operate. For example, a landlord might ask neighbors if they had itchy bites or saw bed bugs. If they say no, it might be assumed they are not being bitten. (Not necessarily true!) PCOs may have treated bed bugs a number of times and may still not understand that fact.

Likewise, PCOs might have difficulty finding visual evidence, or may only count actual bed bugs as visual evidence. (But not seeing these, or not seeing them easily, does not mean a tenant is bed bug-free.)

Landlords may suspect or know neighbors are infested but may be allowing them to refuse treatment (based on anything from religious to medical objections to pesticides). While people may be concerned about the actions of pesticides on children, people with illnesses, and pets, bed bugs must nevertheless be remedied somehow. Neighbors who refuse traditional pesticides must be treated somehow. There are other options.

PCOs may refuse to treat infested units that are not properly prepped. Or may treat un-prepped units without success.  Landlords might simply ignore those tenants’ units. This is a big mistake. Even if Rene is prepped, if his neighbor isn’t, the bed bugs can keep coming.

Other issues may be happening to make bed bugs hard to eradicate: pesticide resistance is real. However, good PCOs are aware of it and have options in their arsenal like dusts which have a mechanical action, and steam: neither of these can be resisted if the bed bug is in contact with them. Combined with pesticides, PCOs should be able to eliminate even pyrethroid-resistant strains of bed bugs, which do exist.

Some of these factors may be the tenant’s fault, make no mistake. Or they may be another tenant’s fault. Many of these factors mean landlords are mismanaging treatment, or hiring PCOs who mismanage treatment. I would put my money on adjacent units being infested and either overlooked or not treated properly.

Whatever the cause, landlords and tenants should be trying to avoid the above situations.

And if you have bed bugs after even four treatments, let alone nine, something is terribly wrong.

• Bed bugs at Berkeley will be treated with… say what?
• Bed bugs & tenant organizing: don’t take this lying down
• Bed bugs in North Jersey
• 25 Grant Street in Denver, Colorado: bed bugs for two years

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Liberty Pest Control, one of the larger local firms — with sales of $4 million and a full-time staff of 56 – gets 25% of its revenues from battling bedbugs. That is up from literally nothing three years ago.

Those gains are not driven just by fate. Liberty has aggressively seized its opportunity. In March, Liberty launched an online ad campaign. The company is currently spending $16,000 a month on bedbug ads, up from no expenditures as recently as a year ago.

Other exterminators are starting to follow suit. Brooklyn’s Absolute Death, a two-man firm with only $100,000 in revenues, is spending $5,000 a month on advertising. Bedbugs now account for 20% of its revenues.

Think about that: Absolute Death makes $100K in revenues, and they’re committing $60K a year to advertising. They’re expecting huge growth. It’s frightening, but not surprising to us Bedbuggers.

Many PCOs in NYC are seeing so much business from bed bugs, in fact, that they can’t always keep up:

Standard pest management in Queens, for example, has had to turn away some desperate bedbug customers as it struggles to keep up with the burgeoning demand from longtime clients. Broadway Exterminating in Manhattan temporarily yanked some of its online advertising this summer after seeing a 50% increase in calls between July and August.

Those are two large PCOs, from what I understand. I applaud these companies for knowing what volume of business they could handle. I have heard a few stories about poor service from PCOs with good reputations, and I have to think that sometimes steep growth in a short period of time (which, let’s face it, all PCOs who treat bed bugs must be facing no matter their size) can lead to quality control problems. Think about it: new hires may not be as carefully chosen or carefully trained in periods of booming business. I expect most reputable firms take care of their reputations, but some mistakes will be made. So when I hear the above firms decided to halt their growth, I am glad to hear it. PCOs who do a good job of fighting bed bugs should grow and those who don’t should not treat them! But good service providers know their limits.

The article states that the profit margin on bed bug extermination is 50%, that treating a 1-BR apt. costs on average $275 to $800, and that companies are starting to insure themselves against lawsuits, because they’re often guaranteeing work that is hard to guarantee.

I would venture that the profit margin on a thorough bed bug treatment is probably 50%; PCOs who do a cursory job, and we have heard of some, are the ones who are really making a killing, and probably killing too few bed bugs in the process.

The article said that due to the tenacity of the bed bugs, which usually do not respond to one treatment,

. . . some companies are changing their [guarantee] policies to adapt to the bugs. Standard Pest Management, for example, recently decided to treat all bedbug-infested apartments twice. Other companies now insist on three treatments.

I am glad that PCOs are learning that “once is enough” doesn’t necessarily work for bed bugs, and I hope they’re also learning how long to leave between those two visits (I’d venture 10-14 days). When PCOs have such an automatic policy on second visits, customers have a better idea what to expect.

When they don’t have such a policy, we often hear from Bedbuggers who think their PCO did a bad job, because they’re being bitten within 10 days of the first treatment. But you will be bitten– some bugs take a little time to die. Depending on the methods used, the bed bugs may have to be attracted to you (the bait) in order to walk through the poison; some may well bite during this time, but they will die. Eggs will hatch within 10-14 days, hence the need for a follow-up. In any case, you should be bitten less after treatment. And you should call your PCO to ask questions if you aren’t sure.

Crain’s bottom line:

“Most bugs don’t stand a chance against exterminators,” says Gene Miller, operating officer at Broadway Exterminating. “Bedbugs stand a chance.”

Now I am waiting for Crain’s to report on how hotels are taking the threat of bed bugs and lost revenue seriously, and what they’re going to do.

Note: If you’re new, read the FAQs — especially the one about how to choose a PCO, and the one that asks “Should I do my own pest control?”

• Another top NYC lawfirm gets bed bugs
• How bad are bed bugs in Toronto? Nobody knows for sure.
• How accurate are human bed bug inspectors, k9s?
• Covington, Kentucky IRS building infested with bed bugs

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