WLOX.com reports that a bed bug education session was held in Gulfport, Mississippi yesterday:

GULFPORT, MS (WLOX) – Don’t let the bed bugs bite! That’s what local pest control employees, state health officials, and people in the tourism industry learned Tuesday.

About 70 people took part in a training session in Gulfport to learn more about the tiny insects that can inflict very painful bites.

In a video which accompanies the article, an unnamed member of the pest control industry explains that the focus of the event was on preventing bed bug infestations and learning to identify them and detect them.

That’s really exciting, because the best time to learn how to prevent, identify and control bed bugs is before your facility ever gets infested.

Being prepared isn’t just for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. It’s the best way to fight the spread of bed bugs, everywhere.

Similar Posts:

• Baltimore’s new Bed Bug Response Plan
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The Washington City Paper has a cover story today on bed bugs! In it, Audrey Dutton reports on the status of bed bugs in that city, and on the city’s plans to fight the problem.

We have known there were lots of bed bugs in D.C. for a long time. The Norwood Apartments tenants we mentioned back in 2007 have been battling them for years, with 10 units still infested, according to Dutton.

We haven’t heard from the ladies of D.C.’s Phillis Wheatley YWCA in a while, but I fear they may still be infested too.

And so this is very good to hear:  the city’s Department of Health is taking a keen (and hands-on) interest in bed bugs.  The article notes:

Gerard Brown, who heads the department’s rodent-control division, first spotted an issue with bedbugs in June. Ever since, these tiny pests have eaten up a sizable chunk of his anti-vermin portfolio.

Brown’s people operate under a different set of rules from the [D.C. Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs, which enforces the city's housing code] —instead of monitoring the infestations, the Department of Health can actually treat them and does so regularly in homeless shelters. It tries various methods to educate the public, including working with neighborhood groups to get the word out. It’s also been tracking reports since June.

“When we realized that it was a beginning to be a problem, then with the support of the mayor’s office and our director’s office, I started doing research,” says Brown.

So far Brown has taken calls on more than 50 properties. Almost one-fifth of those are hotels. The rest are single-family homes, apartment buildings, a school, and a dialysis center where a patient was infested. When Brown goes out to deliver presentations on bedbugs to community groups, senior housing centers, halfway houses, or property managers, he hears even more reports, he says. He was approached by a government worker whose own apartment building was “totally infested.”

Since the Department of Health is involved in dealing with bed bugs, they are developing a keen understanding of the reasons bed bugs are spreading and why they’re so tenacious, especially in multi-unit dwellings.  Dutton reports,

One of the reasons for the bugs’ ubiquity in multi-unit dwellings is that that property owners don’t want to pay to treat multiple units. So bugs in the unit that exterminators are paid to treat just pick up and move next door, or upstairs or downstairs. Two weeks later, a fresh crop of baby bugs hatches and settles into its new home.

Brown counters with a view of landlords not widely shared in the world of D.C. affordable housing. He says that landlords aren’t reluctant—they’re desperate to clear the infestations. “They will ask, ‘What can I do? Help me. I did this, I did this.’ They fax me invoices for the pest control and say, ‘What else can I do? If there’s something I can do I will do it,’” Brown says.

The city hopes to head off some of those questions via a public awareness campaign sponsored by the Health Department along with the Office of the Tenant Advocate and various tenants associations. The department just wrapped up filming on its first bedbug public service announcement. It was shot in a Norwood apartment whose residents agreed to cooperate in exchange for having the department treat a bedbug outbreak.

Besides those mentioned in the article, another reason bed bugs are thriving may be the District of Columbia’s housing code, which, as we understand from this 2007 article in the local press, requires landlords to treat for bed bugs only if there is more than one infested unit in a building.

This is a very bad policy where bed bugs are concerned, because it encourages tenants to ignore their infestations until they find out the bed bugs have spread to others (a situation I explain in more detail in this comment over on New York vs. Bed Bugs).

It’s exactly the sort of policy I would choose if I wanted bed bugs to spread around buildings.  It hurts tenants, and it means landlords end up shelling out much more than they would have if they had dealt with the infestation when it was first detected.

And if that isn’t bad enough, we can assume bed bugs probably just got a boost in DC by the huge influx of visitors who came to visit the city, stayed in its hotels, and in too many cases (because of an acute hotel room shortage), rented rooms in DC residents’ homes.  And, of course, plenty of DC bugs surely also migrated to other cities with Obama fans on their way home from the festivities.

Bed bugs spread when they walk (from one home to another) or hitch a ride.  They can “hitchhike” by getting into your car, into your bag or other stuff, or even into your clothing.  People often get bed bugs from hotels, but they just are surely take them there.

And the same goes for private homes.  Whether you’re hosting a long-lost friend, or renting out a room to a tourist, you can get bed bugs from those people.  Either party may have bed bugs and not realize it.  Or they may think bed bugs don’t spread easily, and that they aren’t putting you at risk.

So that brings us back to DC’s educational campaign about bed bugs.  A lack of knowledge of bed bugs is behind many different problems: people bringing bed bugs to other places, landlords not treating properly, tenants thinking they are bed bug-free because they have no bites, people picking up discarded furniture:  a little information could go a long, long way in making the bed bug problem not-as-bad.

We’ve been calling for PSAs about bed bugs in NYC since this website started in 2006, but the only time we see bed bugs on the subways posters or in television commercial breaks, they’re in ads: for Protect-a-Bed encasements on the subways, Bell Environmental bed bug treatments on NY1.

Of course, education alone won’t solve the bed bug problem.

But education makes solving bed bug problems (whether in one room, in a building, or city-wide) possible.

So bring it on, Washington, D.C.!Similar Posts:

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• Mark Sheperdigian on the limits of bed bug inspections

Channel 5 in Kansas City, Missouri reports that a woman says she found bed bugs in her room at the Value Place Hotel after noticing bed bug bites on her child. Instead of moving the woman to another room and dealing with the problem, the hotel simply evicted her:

After she alerted the front desk, [hotel customer Jackie] Trotter said she thought they were going to move her to another room. But when she insisted the hotel also clean all of their clothes she said they kicked them out.

“First I was stunned and just looked and asked, ‘Wait, my child got bed bugs from your hotel and you are putting me out?’ and she said that’s procedure,” Trotter said.

Trotter said she and her daughters just moved to town. She said they paid the motel for two weeks in advance and now they have no money to move elsewhere.

So the hotel actually had a bed bug protocol and this is it? Kick out the person who shows you there are bed bugs in the room?

A spokesman for Value Place responded in writing to KCTV5 News, saying, “Bedbugs are the single biggest issue the lodging industry faces today. These situations are brought into hotels by people.”

He added, “The best way that a property can deal with that matter is to isolate and eradicate that source from the property to protect the entire property. We followed the appropriate protocol.”

Well, this statement shows a lack of understanding about the “source” of bed bugs.

The hotel spokesperson is correct that “people” bring bed bugs into hotels. However, they are wrong in (apparently) assuming that the person to first notice and complain about bed bugs in a room is likely to be the source.

In fact, bed bugs can be in a room, unnoticed, for years, biting hotel guests. If a hotel wants to completely avoid the “source” of bed bugs, they need to close their doors right now. Or search every person coming through the door with a bed bug sniffing dog.

It might be better for business if they instead learn more about bed bugs and how to prevent them. They might also implement a program of regular bed bug inspections (human or canine or — preferably — both). Housekeeping staff need to be educated on the signs of bed bugs.

But kicking out customers who point out a room’s bed bugs amounts to throwing the baby out with the bathwater.Similar Posts:

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New York Magazine has a new bed bug story dated November 12th (print edition of 11/19), by Melissa Kirsch.

It contains lots of solid advice about not picking up curbside furniture, being wary of Craigslist finds, and searching for fecal spots and blood stains. But it also contains some advice we don’t normally see. Especially pertinent, this comment from our friend Lou Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. (Hear him talk about bed bugs and other pests today–Tuesday–at 10:40 on 99.5 WBAI in NYC, or listen to the streaming live audio here.)

The telltale signs of their presence are itchy welts on your body, frequently in clusters of three or more. You might see tiny red or brown marks on your sheets where you’ve crushed bugs in the night. If you suspect infestation, check under carpets and in moldings, and survey mattresses, box springs, and bed frames. Look for feces and shed skins. And look for nymphs: “Ninety-nine percent of papers written on bedbugs neglect to mention that a bedbug starts as a tiny egg and hatches from it to become a [1- to 1.6-mm.] nymph that’s translucent white,” says Louis Sorkin, entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. “If people knew to look for nymphs, they could head off the problem much sooner.” The bugs pass through six stages of development and feed at least once during each, which means you can get bites before there are full-grown adults visible. If you think you have a problem but can’t find anything, press packing tape or a lint roller underneath carpet and in the corners of beds. Nymphs and eggs will stick to it.

Lou is bringing up a really important point here: many people first see a bed bug that is a fed or unfed nymph. And neither bed bug will look much like the image of an adult bed bug typically pictured in a media story. The first five photos in our page with photos of bed bugs and signs of bed bugs convey the enormous visual difference between fed vs. unfed first instar nymphs, and between nymphs vs. adults. Since people who have not yet had bed bugs often hear of them via the two-minute segment on Fox, or an article in their local paper, it would be best if more news outlets would feature a visual comparison giving people some awareness of this range when and if they do encounter a bed bug.

The article warns people against self-treating with Raid or foggers / bombs, and talks about the importance of dealing with clothing properly, notifying neighbors, and getting a professional in.

What I found most interesting was the final paragraph, which was centered around the need for action on the part of the city:

SEE SOMETHING (DISGUSTING), SAY SOMETHING

Last week, bedbugged tenants mounted a Craigslist-based attack on their Greenpoint building, and protesters in front of the Department of Health demanded action on asthma-exacerbating roaches and rats. They’re not the only ones who think the city could do more to crush creeping menaces. “Bedbugs are a major mental-health issue. I get tired of the Department of Health saying, ‘It’s not a physical issue, so we’re not going to focus on it,’” says Upper West Side council member Gale Brewer. She (and many exterminators) advocate a campaign along the lines of the subway-safety ads to spread word about bug-suppressing preventive steps. Other strategies: certification of bedbug-specialist exterminators and bans on mattress resales. To fight other pests, exterminators would like the DOH to enforce pre-demolition extermination laws more aggressively and hire more pest-control experts to manage parks and public spaces. For its part, the DOH says it has retrained staff after the KFC/Taco Bell rat debacle and is working on plans to combat residential bedbug and rodent problems.

I am really glad that Gale Brewer, who originally proposed the ban on reselling used mattresses in NYC, is still speaking out against bed bugs and their very real negative effects on health. I hope we will get an update on the NY City Council Bed Bug Task Force that was begun over a year ago, but is yet to take action (to our knowledge).

The recommendations here–enforcement of pre-demolition extermination laws, the mattress re-sale ban, and the certification of bed bug specialist PCOs are all good ones. We’ve been talking about the need for a public education campaign (subway ads, TV ads, and so on) since Bedbugger.com started.

Finally, Kirsch said, when describing what to do when you determine you do have bed bugs,

Don’t terrify yourself with horror stories on the Internet; check informative sites like Bedbugger.com.

Informative is good: thanks, Melissa Kirsch! We’re doing our best to get information out there and help people with bed bugs stay as calm as possible, so they can fight bed bugs in an effective way.

I hope we can also have something to do with getting people involved–maybe not so calmly–in fighting for change in public policies, like the ones suggested in this article. It’s always a good time to call your city council representative, or to write to the mayor, about bed bugs. Wherever you live, whether it’s New York, Halifax, Melbourne, or Lexington, Kentucky, take a moment to tell a local politician that bed bugs had a serious impact on your life–whether it was on your family, your finances, your job, and your health.

New Yorkers:
Click here to email Mayor Bloomberg.
Click here to look up and email your city council representative.
Click here to email Gale Brewer about the Bed Bug Task Force even if you’re not in her district.

And here’s a few words from the Rolling Stones–way back in 1978–that still ring true:

Don’t you know the crime rate is going up, up, up, up, up
To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough, tough!
You got rats on the west side,
Bed bugs uptown!
What a mess– this town’s in tatters
I’ve been shattered
My brain’s been battered, splattered all over Manhattan

Pop this mp3 on your iPod and muse on how little things have changed. And don’t forget: email your city council representative and remind them there are, once more, “bed bugs uptown.”Similar Posts:

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We’ve been following the bed bug situation in Cincinnati for a while.

Yesterday, Joe Wessels of the Cincinnati Post reported that city officials were forming a commission to fight the problem:

The Bedbug Remediation Commission, a five-member panel of local health, social service and elected leaders, is in the process of forming and will try to find ways to better educate the public about how to combat and prevent bedbug infestations.

“It’s just crazy that we have that in our city in the 21st century,” said City Council Member Chris Monzel, who is working with West End state Rep. Dale Mallory to establish the panel. “We need to do whatever we (the city) can to eliminate this.”

That’s exactly what we think too–something must be done. Surely something can be done? And yet local, state, and federal governments have been so slow to take action.

What made Cincy’s politicians take note? According to Wessels,

Workers for the Council of Aging have refused to make home visits to some seniors’ residences because they are infested. The workers complained they were being bitten and unwittingly carrying the parasites back to their own homes.

Residents of a Race Street building plagued with bedbugs have taken to sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the structure to keep from being bitten while they rest. The pests are so thick in the building that Tuesday they were seen during the day, extremely rare for the nocturnal creatures.

“Bedbugs do not typically live outside,” said Erich Hardebeck, vice president of Covington-based Permakil Pest Control, who was called in by rehabbers of a neighboring building to see if the bugs had spread to it.

Cincinnati’s bed bug problem sounds bad, but the things that are happening there are happening everywhere that bed bugs are taking over.

What exactly are the city’s statistics on bed bugs?

Cincinnati Health Department officials said they had received 179 bedbug calls through July 20, including 28 from West Price Hill, 21 from East Price Hill, 21 from Westwood and 10 from South Fairmount. Calls have picked up recently from Over-the-Rhine and the West End.

There is plenty of evidence that NYC’s problem is every bit as bad, per capita, and possibly much, much worse. NYC says only around 1190 actual cases were identified by the housing department based on complaints to 311 in the period from Summer 2005-Summer 2006. It’s striking that no one has cited any statistics for the period from Summer 2006-2007; one can only imagine they are much worse. At the same time, as I’ve written many times before, Mara Altman, in her odious Village Voice story last December, cited the head of one local PCO who claimed to get 85 actual bed bug calls per day (at the end of 2006). Clearly, 311’s statistics are just the tip of the iceberg, as Cincinnati’s probably are too.

Cincinnati’s government officials are smart: they see things are bad, they see them getting progressively worse, and they’re going to get some folks together and work on it.

New York City’s City Council also has a “Bed Bug Task Force.” However, except for a hearing about the issue of reselling used mattresses, we have not seen any public discussion on this issue yet. Except for a fact sheet on the health department’s website, which tells people to clean and that they may need a PCO, NYC has not admitted that bed bugs are a problem, let alone a serious one. They certainly won’t admit it’s a public health problem.

Let’s compare with their counterparts in the Cincinnati-Hamilton County area:

“We believe strongly that the insect should not be allowed to crawl over children while they are sleeping,” said Chris Eddy, Hamilton County’s environmental health director. “We took the position two years ago that (bedbugs) are a public health crisis. We believe that we need to be able to use the nuisance complaint code to get rid of these.”

Bed bugs are a public health crisis? Darn right they are. But sadly, few other public health departments are making a statement like this. And they should be–talking about bed bugs, and taking action on bed bugs.

How did this happen in Cincinnati? Last month, there was a Town Hall Meeting. The Enquirer reports in another article that, in a very effective move, one woman apparently turned up carrying a bag of dead bed bugs from her apartment:

City Councilman Chris Monzel and State Rep. Dale Mallory, D-West End, are working on the issue after hearing at council’s Health Committee on Tuesday what Monzel called “heartbreaking” stories.

One woman, he said, brought a plastic bag of dead bugs to a town hall meeting last month about the problem.

After talking to an exterminator, representatives from area apartment associations and the Council on Aging of Southwest Ohio, Monzel said he decided to try to improve enforcement of city regulations or beef up ordinances to stress that the bugs have become a public health problem.

I am absolutely in love with Cincinnati City Council right now. They actually heard heartbreaking stories three weeks ago and they are doing something? Break out the vikane and the UHauls, kids, and let’s move over there: Cincinnati is a good town.

Hey, I love New York too, but it’s been a year since Caitlin Heller, Bugsinthehood, and several others spoke at a NYC City Council Hearing related to the bed bug issue (which was, sadly, officially only about the resale of mattresses issue). You bet your patootie they had some heartbreaking stories. Where’s my Bed Bug Remediation Commission? Where’s my admission that our city has a serious problem?

Could it be that NYC fears that to admit their problem publicly would mean a loss in tourism revenue? Is this really the only reason we aren’t seeing any action around here?

What is being done in Cincinnati? The Post makes it clear that public education is part of the plan. The Enquirer says the plans also include a hotline residents can call so that infested furniture is picked up quickly. The Bed Bug Remediation Commission also plans to “plan to work with second-hand stores to make sure they’re not reselling infested mattresses and furniture.” Above all else, improving enforcement of existing regulations, and “beefing up” ordinances where necessary, is exactly what is needed to help curb this problem. Bravo, Cincinnati!

Bed bugs are not going to go away overnight, but for goodness’ sake, do something.

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When we first heard part of New Haven’s Crawford Manor public housing was infested with bed bugs, housing officials were taking the infestations seriously (good) but also moving tenants from infested home to local hotels and then other apartments (not good), and also rushing to blame a woman who carries her belongings around and has five cats (also not good, and probably not accurate). Fifteen of 109 units were known to be infested, and officials thought that anyone else with bed bugs would surely know it.

Housing Authority director Jimmy Miller quipped,

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

Well, actually, Jimmy, if your PCO knew his stuff, he’d tell you that many, many people (some professionals even claim it’s most) are not allergic, and so do not react to bed bug bites. I would bet actual cash that more than 15 of your units are infested– for in addition to the non-allergic, there are always also the non-reporters. And who’d blame them, after all, since your office rushed to blame the poor cat lady, with no explanation of how you can prove which unit was ground zero?

Angela Carter of the New Haven Register updated readers on the saga on Friday. residents of 13 of the infested 15 units are back home, after their hotel stay. The other two units’ occupants have been moved to new units and still have bed bugs.

The housing authority has provided Witherspoon and the other affected tenants with new beds and bed linens, pillows and lamps. “They’re supposed to give us sofas, too,” she said.

Housing Authority Executive Director Jimmy Miller said about $15,000 has been spend fighting off the stubborn pests. “These little critters are hiding in the chases,” he said. “We did a second application this week of a pesticide. There will be one more application later on.”

I am glad treatment is persisting and that Miller knows the bed bugs may be hidden in the building itself. However, people fighting bed bugs should not say things like “there will be one more treatment.” Those who know bed bugs know that you must treat every two weeks until all bed bugs and signs of bed bugs are gone. That means never assuming how many treatments will be required, and never letting residents off their guard. Those not highly allergic might not notice a bed bug or two remaining, and then in time, they will have a full-blown infestation again.

I hope the new mattresses and pillows were encased with bed bug-proof coverings, so that bed bugs would not easily hide in them.

Meanwhile, Carter updated us on the other New Haven public housing bed bugs case at the Essex Houses.

The housing authority also had to exterminate two units at Essex Townhouses off Quinnipiac Avenue in Fair Haven three times.

Officials were unsure why the infestations were occurring repeatedly at Essex Townhouses but Chief Operations Officer Karen DuBois-Walton said units would be treated until the problem clears.

DuBois-Walton has exactly the right idea about persistent treatment. (Every two weeks, mind you!)

But why are bed bug infestations occurring repeatedly? It’s likely that:

a) Some tenants have bed bugs and either are not allergic and so do not notice bed bugs, or (in rare cases) notice but do not care or fear the consequences of reporting them. If some units harbor bed bugs, the problem will continue; and / or

b) The bed bugs are hiding out in walls or pipe chases or other parts of the building, and coming back; and / or

c) Wherever your tenants or employees got bed bugs, and tracked them in, they are still getting them and bringing them in. This is a real problem for all kinds of people. You need to really examine your life and the patterns of when bed bugs are (re)introduced. It’s hard to pinpoint.

Does anyone in your life have a bed bug problem? (They –and you– may have no idea. You can still catch them.)

Could they be at work? Exclusive designers’ offices, law firms, hospitals, social service agencies, homeless shelters, have all been infested. No line of work is “above” this. Again, you may have no idea if you are not highly allergic. If you are allergic, and now have them at home, you may not realize work is the source.

Are local stores now infested? (When people purchase and return things, this is possible.)

The questions are frightening, and the answers lead us back to the need for a larger approach than each building trying to stamp out bed bugs that tenants report.

Instead, we need to think big. That means we need public education, we need standards of treatment to be established, we need government to track locations and duration of infestations, and we need financial assistance to individuals and to landlords to help get rid of bed bugs.
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First, don’t panic. What you do after discovering you and your luggage may have been exposed to bed bugs can make a big difference as to whether you take them home. It’s worth proceeding carefully and cautiously since avoiding an infestation can save you thousands of dollars and months of trouble and discomfort.

First, learn a little bit about the enemy. Read the Bed Bugs 101 FAQs on this site, and use the links to bed bug photos to learn what bed bugs look like at different life stages.

Click to download this PDF of this comprehensive article by entomologists Steven Kells and Jeff Hahn of the University of Minnesota, which describes the steps you should take if you’ve been exposed to bed bugs. Remember you have the most chance of avoiding bringing bed bugs home if you take the necessary steps before getting in your car or going to your home or anyone else’s home. It is possible to spread bed bugs to your car as well as to other locations. Following the steps in the PDF carefully as soon as you realize the exposure to bed bugs means you probably won’t bring any with you.

If you already are home before you realize the problem, do follow the same steps listed in the PDF regarding inspecting luggage (do it over the bathtub so you can see the bugs and kill them easily) and cleaning luggage, clothing, and other items. If you are home before you realize the problem, and you brought possibly infested items in (including the clothing you’re wearing as well as any luggage), then you should quickly do some major cleaning where the luggage has been brought in and where you sleep (vacuuming, steaming, etc). If you brought home a bed bug or two and have not found them, it is sometimes possible to get rid of them before they take root. Even if you don’t find any bed bugs, and you’ve done all the cleaning and followed all the other steps in the PDF, you might consider taking some time to declutter, so that if you do have any bed bugs, the signs will be more visible. You should be on the alert for several months.

Once home, if you do find bed bugs or signs of bed bugs in your luggage, clothing or in any rooms, call a PCO right away (we have a FAQ on choosing a good one who knows bed bugs). Save any samples to show them.

Finally, if you got your bed bugs in a hotel, hostel, or other accommodations, please do leave a review on Tripadvisor.com, to warn others of your experience.

A note about using freezing temperatures to kill bed bugs: Kells and Hahn and Michael Potter have slightly different ideas about the temperatures and length of time needed to kill bed bugs. According to Michael Potter’s article from the January 2007 PCTOnline, Steven Kells is apparently researching the method of “leaving things out in cold weather,” with the inevitable fluctuations in temperature. For now, until we have definitive data, I’d err on the side of caution and go for colder temperatures and longer time frames wherever possible.Similar Posts:

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More on the New Haven case described here on Friday.

A more recent article from News 8 in New Haven suggests that the

The infestation started in one unit and moved to 14 other apartments. The city paid for hotel rooms so the professionals could come in and steam clean room by room, bed by bed.

“We’re steaming it, the steam will kill the eggs and a lot of the bugs it contacts,” said Jim Miller of Yale Pest Elimination Corporation.

The bugs are not just in the beds, they could be in clothes.

Steaming, especially dry steaming (which avoids problems with mold and mildew) is a good way of killing bed bugs and eggs. But as PCO Miller’s words imply, it will only kill bed bugs that are steamed directly. The same is true of eggs (though the quotation implies otherwise). Although I am glad to see PCOs using this method, I do think it needs to be used in concert with pesticides and/or dusts. Killing “a lot of the bugs,” after all, is not the goal here. Steaming needs to be followed-up by other methods. If it is, I don’t doubt more bed bugs can be killed more swiftly than without the steaming step.

I do note, however, that this article is misleading. If the PCO is using other methods, this isn’t mentioned. The article therefore might give readers the idea that steaming alone is a good way to beat bed bugs. While professional steaming equipment will probably do a better job than home steamers, it is not a comprehensive plan to eradicate bed bugs, which hide well, and are likely to be hiding in places the steam cannot reach.

“They steamed my mattress and my box spring yesterday and removed all my clothes out of my clothes closet,” said Witherspoon.

“We provided them with new clothing because obviously we are concerned about them taking their own clothing with them because the clothing may be contaminated,” said Jimmy Miller, Director of the New Haven Housing Authority.

“They’re making sure all the clothes get washed they’re doing what they have to do, they stepped up to the plate,” said Maria Ayala, resident.

The housing authority is promising prevention at all its complexes.

“We’re going be increasing our house keeping efforts,” said Jimmy Miller.

It’s great that they’re aware of the clothing issue, though laundry would have been sufficient and probably saved them a lot of money as well as making tenants happy.
I note that my prior concern–expressed in the previous post about New Haven– has not been addressed: that is the question of whether precautions were taking to prevent bed bugs being spread to the hotel.

In addition, authorities need to realize, prevention is not simply a matter of housekeeping (as housing official Miller suggests; I am, by the way, fascinated that the PCO’s name is Jim Miller and the Housing Authority official’s name is Jimmy Miller, and I wonder if they’re related).

Prevention requires education–for all tenants and employees–about where bed bugs come from and how to avoid getting them. (Note: they don’t come from women who carry bags and have cats.)

Prevention requires supplies (such as good mattress and pillow encasements that may help keep bed bugs from infesting beds) and services (regular inspections–either manual, or by a good bed bug dog) will help new infestations be caught earlier so they can be treated quickly.

The bottom line is that New Haven housing officials — like all landlords in multi-unit dwellings — need to accept the inevitability of more bed bugs being brought into the building. It’s a matter not of if, but when. And knowing that, they need to have wide awareness among tenants and employees of how to recognize the signs. Preventive treatments, such as food grade diatomaceous earth (DE) might be a way the city can help the building stay bed bug-free longer.Similar Posts:

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Well, I know what your answer is, of course!

But I am glad to see Maxwell at Apartmenttherapy.com covering this question as a poll. I think it’s great AT is taking bed bugs seriously. After all, it’s a home and design blog. Nothing, nothing screws up a home (or design scheme) like bed bugs.

Check it out.Similar Posts:

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