As if falling and not being found for nearly a week was not enough of a horror story,
this news article in the Sun focuses on the bed bug-infested state of her room.

EMS paramedics who responded were required to wear full-body suits to prevent contamination when they removed her from her room in the Baxter Hotel, a single-room occupancy hotel at 160 Beach 116th St.

It is highly likely that other units in the building are also infested.

[Building Superintendent Shawn] Reeder said he had not heard complaints of other infestations in the building. The owner of the building did not immediately return a call requesting comment.

I hope that Ms. Kenny is feeling better soon.

And I hope the Baxter Hotel gets a careful inspection–room by room. And careful treatment where needed. Bed bugs can happen anywhere, to anyone, of any age, but no one should have to live with them.

• 80% of Single Room Occupancy units in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside are infested with bed bugs; also Rensselaer Polytechnic’s dorms
• Virginia Beach hotel sued over alleged bed bug attack
• 25% of hotel rooms have bed bugs? I don’t think so.
• Nashua, NH Health Officers on prowl for bed bugs

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The Daily News reports that New York City is going to get a bed bug education campaign.

The article reports that there will be town hall meetings about bed bugs in Washington Heights (1/28), Astoria (2/5) and Bushwick (3/12).

Housing officials will roll out the campaign with a town hall meeting Jan. 28 in Washington Heights, where the creatures have rampaged through tenements, churches, bodegas, taxi garages and upscale co-ops overlooking the Hudson River.

Residents there have been under siege: The number of complaints has skyrocketed from 62 in 2005 to 366 last year, when 119 landlords were hit with violations.

More community forums will follow in two other neighborhoods with recent bedbug outbreaks: Astoria on Feb. 5, and Bushwick, Brooklyn, on March 12.

Tenants, homeowners and community leaders will be taught in English and Spanish how to identify bedbugs, exterminate them in a safe and low-cost manner and guard against future contaminations.

Just as important, they’ll be told what not to do, like spray an apartment, which can scatter the pests, or pour gasoline on mattresses, which poses a fire hazard.

This is all good, but I hope it will be just the start of a wider campaign to raise awareness. Television, billboard, newspaper, and bus shelter advertisements should be implemented to raise awareness, though there has been no suggestion this will happen. If the city wants to fight bed bugs, it is going to cost money, but not nearly as much as continuing to ignore the problem would have cost us in lost tourist income.

Awareness is just the start; as we’ve been saying for a long time, we need local government to track infestations. Someone needs to know where the bed bugs are and how widespread infestations are. Calls to 311 are just the tip of the iceberg. The city is still in denial about the true scope of the problem.

Another goal of the campaign: Alerting immigrants with limited English to watch out for unscrupulous merchants.

“Selling refurnished mattresses to Dominican immigrants who think they’re brand new - without telling them they’ve been reserviced - is a big business in my district,” said City Councilman Miguel Martinez (D-Washington Heights). “Unfortunately, many of those mattresses are crawling with bedbugs.”

This is important. The resale of mattresses should be banned. It should be illegal to pick up and resell any items marked as infested with bed bugs. And people need to learn to mark them as such.
Ultimately, though, the city is going to need to take a tougher line with landlords and tenants. Tenants must report bed bugs, landlords must treat them properly, PCOs must be contracted to come back until bed bugs are gone.

City inspectors should consider employing bed bug dogs to help them detect bed bugs, since visual inspections are time consuming and quick inspections often miss bed bugs.

Finally, financial assistance will be needed on several levels: homeowners and landlords may need assistance with proper treatment. And elderly, disabled, and other people will need physical and financial assistance with doing proper preparation for treatment.

I hope the city will institute a bed bug task force and staff it with entomologists who are true experts on bed bugs–and I hope these experts will be listened to and their suggestions followed. And soon.

This is no hero on a white horse, folks, but it is a start.

Check out the Daily News story here.

Update later in the day on 1/15:

Here’s a video from ABC7 Eyewitness News at 5 pm today.  (Click on the number “2″ next to the bed bug photo, to see the video.)

It is not clear what the city is going to do, besides hold these meetings and work on the mattress resale issue. I guess we will know more tomorrow when the plan is officially unveiled.

The ABC7 video features Jeffery Eisenberg of Pest Away, and a Pest Away tech reporting that they use two chemicals in fighting bed bugs (Suspend and Gentrol).

The newscasters quipped to one another at the end,

“You said you’d get a new bed, right?”

“And you said you’d get a new house!”

Sorry ladies. It’s not that easy.

• bed bugs, news at 11
• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• Last week’s Town Hall Meeting in Cincinnati
• The first “bed bug seminar” hit New York City last night

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This course is ideal for pest control personnel, facility managers, building managers, tenant associations, social workers, or anyone concerned about bed bugs. Taught by industry professional and consultant Gil Bloom.

Bloom is well-known in bed bug circles, and his name comes up in a lot of the local news about the little vampires.

Bed Bugs: the New Vampires

With the turn of the century, bed bugs have emerged as an ever-incrasing pest. This course will cover identification, basic biology, ramifications, and control measures to deal with this loathsome creature of the night.

BUX - 511 Weds. Nov. 14, 2007 7:00 - 8:30 pm

Professionals can earn 1.5 NTSDEC credits in 7A and 8 (I am sure if you need these credits, you will know what that means!) The price is probably low, because it is at CUNY and is only a 1.5 hour course. Queensborough Community College is accessible by subway and bus from other parts of NYC, and I believe it is also close to the LIRR.

If you’re interested, there’s a form to sign up. You can call Queensborough Community College (CUNY) at 718-631-6343 for information, costs, and to sign up.

• Bed bugs under discussion at university housing officers’ conference
• Vikane Fumigation Successful in New Jersey
• Forget black mattress stains, bed bugs, shells, and eggs: NMPA press release tells consumers to look for “blood spots”
• Welcome Bedbuggers!

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This article in the Quad-Cities Online reported yesterday on bed bug infestations in a public housing complex in East Moline, Illinois. The reporter quotes one resident who has been battling bed bugs since fall.

“I work too. My tax dollars are going to support places like this (government run low-income housing). If people knew how disgusting this is, I’m sure they’d be upset,” said a resident of the Joseph Fulton Homes. The woman asked to remain anonymous.

Interestingly, a number of comments to the article also note that low-income folks should not have to live like that. At least one commenter (going by the name “some anonymous person”) mentions that “only the poor have to live like this.”

Well, not exactly. While it’s true that in this case, it’s a low-income residence, sadly, people of every social class and walk of life are having to deal with bed bugs. Many, many people we hear from at bedbugger.com — low-income, moderate-income and middle-class– have a problem getting their landlords to treat the problem promptly and effectively. The rich are perhaps in the best situation, since they have more possibility of moving, but this problem is not easy for anyone, and everyone who suffers from bed bugs suffers and takes a hit. And it can afflict anyone at any time.

We need better government support for fighting bed bugs, because nobody should have to suffer this problem for long (and a week is too long).

A second local public housing complex, a senior apartment building called Warren Towers, also has units with bed bug infestations, a story which was covered by the Quad-Cities Online on May 30th.

In other news, even though I have a google alert which tells me when people mention bed bugs in the news or in their blogs, I don’t usually mention non-bed-bug-blogs in our news round-ups. There are just too many people blogging their infestations on a daily basis to keep up.

But today, one caught my eye: this professional blog at LibraryJournal.com, suggests that folks are starting to talk about their bed bug infestations not just amongst their nearest and dearest, or in the workplace, but amongst colleagues they may not know well. That’s good news: talking about bed bugs means more people learn about the problem, how to spot it, and its likelihood of appearing in their lives, too.

Bravo to Heather McCormack at Library Journal, and Heather–we hope your Brooklyn bed bugs are on their way out!

Meanwhile, Lisa Hoffman’s Scripps News article on bed bugs (the one also published in the Knoxville News) continues to make the rounds of syndication, now in the Albuquerque Tribune.

Next, for anyone in Boston who does not have to work next Wednesday, the Allston Brighton Community Development Corporation is having a Bed Bug Conference.

2nd Greater Boston Bed Bug Conference: Extermination and Legislation
Wednesday, June 13, 2007, 8:30AM - 3:00PM

There is still time to register! Registraton is $25.00 and includes lunch and refreshments. (Click the link above to get to the ABCDC site and download the registration form.)

Sponsored by the Greater Boston Bedbug Task Force, this event will provide updated information about the bed bug outbreak to more than 200 exterminators, inspectors, health providers, property managers/landlords, tenants and housing advocates, as well as members of the general public.

There’s also information at the same link for local residents to apply for a grant from the ABCDC to fight bed bugs in your home. Allston Brighton residents take note! We’re big fans of the ABCDC’s bed bug-fighting attempts (some of which are mentioned here), and we’d be glad to hear about other community organizations that are trying to help people with bed bugs, or help people avoid getting bed bugs in the first place.

And finally, today some tenants in a Jamaica, Queens apartment set off a roach bomb which exploded, harming them and damaging their apartment and belongings.

Authorities say the explosion shattered the windows of Apartment 4E at 164-30 Hillside Avenue just after 12:30 p.m. Thursday.

Some residents inside the apartment were overcome, and at least two were taken to the hospital.

The force of the explosion reportedly blew pieces of the fourth-floor window onto a construction shed and the street.

Fire officials said the roach bomb explosion may have been sparked by a pilot light or a refrigerator compressor.

In case the fact that bug bombs do not work to rid your apartment of bed bugs did not dissuade you from using one, they’re also apparently potentially dangerous.
ABC 7’s photo shows what looks to be much of the apartment’s contents pushed up against the (blown-out) window.

I realize the news reports this as a roach bomb, but since there are (for good reason) no over-the-counter bed bug bombs, since we know people attempt to use bombs made for other pests to eradicate bed bugs, and since Queens is experiencing a lot of bed bug infestations, I do have to wonder if that might have been the case here.

Don’t try that at home, kids!

• craigslist: An Open Letter to my Bedbugs
• Toronto Star: Within five years, bedbugs “will be more common than mice, roaches, carpenter ants”
• Surrey, B.C. public housing infested with bed bugs
• More bad news about Denver’s bed bug-infested Halcyon House

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But what caught my eye was this:

The insect, which dwells in mattresses, under carpets, on furniture and in walls, is generally active at night, reproduces rapidly and can be transferred from one person to another.

I think the press is starting to really catch on. Only a few short months ago, we regularly saw news outlets telling people to dust some flea powder and throw out your mattresses.

Nice work Nathan Duke!

• Vancouver public education forum on bed bugs is a start, but probably not enough
• 48th Street between 3rd and Lex, last night
• Good news, Chicagoland: you might have itch mites
• NYC schools closer to having bed bug legislation

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Legislation requiring notice of bedbug infestations to all parents at an affected school passed in the New York State Assembly today by a vote of 134 to O. The Gianaris proposal would require the City’s Department of Education to institute a mandatory policy notifying all parents whose children attend a bedbug-infested school of the infestation and providing them with information.

“Today, we are one step closer to restoring some sanity to this school health policy,” said Assemblyman Gianaris. “Knowledge is our best weapon to keep the bedbug problem in our schools from spreading further. I am glad my colleages in the Assembly supported this legislation so overwhelmingly and recognized that we must deal with the hazard posed by bedbugs.”

• NYC schools closer to having bed bug legislation
• Excerpt from article re NYC Department of Ed policy
• Update on New York State bed bug legislation (parental notification re: bed bugs in school)
• Gianaris- a champion for change

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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. Hveragerði, 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. Kecskemét, 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. São 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. Montréal, 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.

• California fights bed bugs: good news from the golden state
• Portsmouth NH’s Health Officer proactive about bed bugs
• Comedian moves into NJ Ikea store
• Tracing the path of the epidemic

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I guess the NYCDoE doesn’t read Bedbugger. Because we keep telling them that if you see bed bugs on a person or their stuff, it does not mean the bedbugs rode in off the street (at that exact moment) on the person or their stuff. Bed bugs crawl onto and off of people. They want food– but they don’t want to hang out and live on a kid. They are not like lice and do not infest people, or crawl on them and ride around all day.

That’s why the sighting of a bed bug on a student or visitor or on their stuff is a good sign the school is infested. People with good-sized bed bug infestations at home can go months and months and months being bitten by bed bugs without seeing one single live bug. If 43 schools citywide have seen 95 live bed bugs inside the schools, there’s a good chance many or most of those schools are infested.

But NYCDoE officials do not read this blog. I know this because they keep saying things like this:

Schools officials emphasized that all of the incidents had been limited to one or two bugs brought in on kids or visitors or their clothing. “We’re not talking about an infestation,” said spokeswoman Margie Feinberg.

The bugs were known to have been brought in on kids or visitors?

Really, Margie Feinberg? Do you have small tracking devices on the bed bugs so that you can trace that they came from particular people or their bags?

Or is it simply easier to blame as the source the unfortunate person a bed bug is found on or near, rather than considering that your schools may be harboring infestations and causing more homes to be infested as teachers, other students, staff, and visitors unwittingly take bed bugs home.

Bed bugs do hitchhike, but there’s no logical reason to assume they would come from homes, but not also go to other homes. And when some of the city’s nicest buildings are infested, there’s also no reason to assume the source of bed bugs is a public school student or visitor. It could be one of the more highly paid principals, or even (gasp!) really well paid Board of Education officials who drop by.

I know everyone is all hung up on this “bed” thing: “our school does not have bed bugs because there are no beds.” My landlord told me I did not have bed bugs because my mattress looked clean. They can live in buildings just fine, especially in wood, baseboards, floors, and the like. They will feed in the daytime, biting people who are awake, especially if they live somewhere where people leave at night, like a school.

Middle and elementary schools in Astoria’s district 30 alone have had 11 bed bug cases. I was pleased to see that the lobbying by parents’ groups led to District 30 sending a flyer home with students for parents, to alert people about how to identify and get rid of bed bugs. But assuming the problem is at home is not clever. Once bugs are brought into school, the school needs treatment–and treatment means repeated treatments.

According to Ellie Engler of the United Federation of Teachers, in a comment left on this blog recently, the NYC Department of Health protocol requires teachers to catch and bag a bed bug, send it in to be identified by the DoH, and only then does the Board of Ed. address the problem.

Most of these schools caught one or two bed bugs. To put that in perspective, many bed bug sufferers who write to our blog will see one or two bugs in their home. They may catch one or none, as a sample. And they have a serious bed bug problem that may require four or more treatments.

Let’s consider what happens in a school: once or twice a teacher pulls a bed bug off a kid. How many more times do kids see bugs or (more likely) have bugs on them that they do not notice? Bed bugs are good at not being seen. They sneak up and you do not feel their bite. There are likely to be many bed bugs for every one caught in the act of walking in plain sight.

It isn’t clear how the schools are addressing the problem, once found. According to the article,

[Bed bugs] are also mobile and hard to exterminate, as frustrated staff members at Public School 234 in Astoria have found. The school has reported several bedbug incidents since last year; the Department of Education sent a team to spray a classroom last weekend after the most recent sighting.

I hope they know they need to follow up in two weeks with another spraying.

And schools still aren’t being proactive about educating parents:

State Assemblyman Michael Gianaris (D-Astoria) has called on the DOE to institute a policy of notifying all parents at schools where bedbugs are spotted. Currently, that decision is made on a case-by-case basis.

Presumably this depends on how educated those overseeing each case are about bed bugs. We need to work on that: how about “No public school officials left behind”?

• The UFT (NYC teachers’ union): how do we get the city to be proactive about bed bugs?
• NYC Bedbuggers: time to have some local politicians over for a bite or two
• New York City public schools continue to be treated for bed bugs
• Schools in Bracken County, KY shut down due to bed bugs

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