Bugs!

Originally uploaded by Generik11

Was the warning painted by the person who discarded this mattress and box spring in San Francisco, or by the person who appears to have removed the plastic covering?

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Rightfully Pissed Off

Originally uploaded by Social Interloper

The sign reads,

“No THANKS to Shi**y Apartments City Apartments AKA Prime Apartment Properties I, LLC This Couch HAS BED BUGS.”

Another find from San Francisco’s amazing Social Interloper.Similar Posts:

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Caution Bed Bugs Ahead

Originally uploaded by Social Interloper

Another shot from San Francisco’s Tenderloin:

Flickr photographer Social Interloper says in the caption,

Bed, Duct Tape, plastic cover, and a freaking caution cone, this picture says it all.

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A new article by C.W. Nevius in the San Francisco Chronicle considers the difficulty of eradicating bed bugs from local apartments and hotel rooms, and then need for alternative, more effective methods in the city’s never-ending battle against bed bugs.

[Dr. Johnson Ojo of the San Francisco Department of Public Health] has put together a citywide policy that covers all the basic steps: Hotel managers who learn of an infestation must immediately set up a pest-control spraying, and residents are encouraged to follow specific instruction on washing clothing and showering with hot water.

Yet many who deal with the problem regularly think that current methods are no more than stopgap measures. Faced with a growing epidemic, the city needs to start thinking beyond the idea of squirting insect spray and hoping for the best.

“I feel like there has not been enough research on alternative methods,” said Jeff Buckley, director of the Central City Single Room Occupancy Collaborative, which works with 5,000 to 7,000 people each year who live in supportive housing. “I know for a fact that one hotel in the Tenderloin has had 14 sprays in the last two months.”

That’s not necessarily because the hotel is doing a poor job of attacking the pests. Bedbugs are everywhere, particularly in supportive housing. But it is an example of the scale of the problem and how hard it is to solve. Consider, each of those 14 treatments is actually three consecutive sprayings per room, two weeks apart.

And the bedbugs keep coming back.

“In terms of nonroutine maintenance, bedbugs are at the top of our list,” said Richard Heasley, executive director of Conard House, which provides supportive housing in 525 units for clients with chronic mental illness. “It is the single most frustrating problem we have to deal with.”

The article suggests that thermal treatment offers one possibility for effective, one-shot treatments, but it is expensive, and would be hard to implement city-wide.  I’d love to see San Francisco take a stab at that.

See S.F.’s bedbug battle a war without end.Similar Posts:

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Apartment Therapy/San Francisco has a new post mentioning AT blogger Sarahh’s encounter with Mr. Cimex Lectularius in a Santa Cruz motel (yikes!) and alerting readers to the existence of bed bug sniffing dogs.

For those of you who are wondering, we were lucky not to have brought any bedbugs back with us to our home from our unfortunate, and very unromantic, trip to Santa Cruz. We shook out all of our clothes and luggage and immediately drove back to the Bay Area where we laundered our clothing in very hot water and crossed our fingers for a few weeks that we hadn’t towed a few of those famous hitchhiking critters with us. We were lucky!

Lucky, indeed!

Sarahh also asks readers for input, if they’ve used bed bug k9s:

We love this [bed bug sniffing dog] idea because you can actually pinpoint the areas in a home where these tiny bloodsuckers are hiding, without having to spray dangerous chemicals throughout your whole apartment or house. We’ve heard that one company in the Bay Area, Pestec, uses a bedbug sniffing dog detective. Has anyone had an experience with this company or any other one that uses dogs for bedbug patrol? Let’s hear your story.

Luis Agurto (president of Pestec) and his beagle Lady Bug were featured in this San Francisco Gate article from April 2007 (one of my favorite articles, but I am biased for obvious reasons!)

Although ideally, bed bug dogs can detect locations of bed bug harborages, I would not say that their use necessarily obviates the need to spray pesticides throughout the home. First, bed bug dogs are not 100% effective. They may not find all harborages. Second, residual pesticides and dusts require bed bugs to make contact with them before they will be killed. Having the stuff in places bed bugs are moving around makes killing them more likely.

Still, bed bug sniffing k9s can be a valuable asset, especially in cases where bed bugs may have been recently introduced, such as immediately following a hotel visit involving bed bug bites, or (as poor Sarahh experienced) face-to-face bed bug encounters (yes, plural). Ugh.

Apartmenttherapy.com has not covered bed bugs in any way, shape or form (that we can see) since July of 2007, when they posted part 7 of Amanda’s bed bug saga.

We love Apartment Therapy and we hope that, despite the ick factor, they will cover bed bug issues a bit more often. Because nothing messes up your cool design scheme or puts the damper on your recent nifty flea market find than an apartment full of full, green garbage bags, bursting with all your clothes, or the lingering smell of pesticides.

Thanks also to Sarahh for pointing AT readers our way!Similar Posts:

• Bed bug sniffing dogs abound
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SFist reports (based on a City Star report) that

… a woman who received more than 400 bedbug bites during her stay at San Francisco’s Ramada Plaza Hotel has received $71,000 to settle her claim against the downtown hotel. The out-of court settlement is the largest ever paid to victims in similar bedbug-attack cases.

That’s four hundred bites in 3 days.

And she claims that the bites eventually caused two ongoing skin conditions: dermatographic urticaria, and steroid acne, which DermNet NZ claims can be caused by taking steroids.Similar Posts:

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Larkin and Sutter

Originally uploaded by Interloper at Large
Here:

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Pillow Fight New York City 2008

Photo uploaded to flickr.com by urbanblitz

In the age of bed bugs, it does not seem that wise for people around the world, in cities like Vancover and New York (pictured here) to have large group pillow fights.

Dave, a participant, is one who realized this after the fact. He writes,

For the last couple years New York City has been gripped in a panic over bedbugs. I mean you would think it’s the second coming of the 1932 Cholera epidemic the way people talk about them. Yet here were hundreds if not a thousand people wildly intermingling old dirty pillows, ripping them apart and then traipsing through their innards. You’d think this would be the bedbug equivalent of a 1000 person orgy without a single prophylactic. No one seemed concerned, but mark my words if the bedbug thing explodes in the next few months you can be damn sure it’ll be traced back to this.

We don’t need to wait. You can be sure that a pillow fight in Union Square would surely have included people who had bed bugs in their pillows and not a clue.

Numbers won’t spike significantly due to this, since they’re already very high. But people will be bringing bed bugs to these parties. Some will doubtless bring them home– after all that fun, I am sure taking steps to avoid bed bugs is the last thing on their minds.

This guy may have had some idea:

All Suited Up

Originally uploaded by urbanblitz

I am sure anyone who’d consider participating in this would just think I was being paranoid or curmudgeonly, but I really don’t think this event is a good idea.

Nevertheless, it goes on: according to the World Pillow Fight Day website, the 2008 pillow fights in Toronto and Montreal are set to be held when the weather is warmer. San Francisco had theirs on Valentine’s Day: way to spread the bed bug love.

IMG_1645

Originally uploaded by wheredaveis

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Originally uploaded by Interloper at Large

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