James and Natasha Hinchley were woken by the beasties sucking their blood.

Mr Hinchley said: “It was like something out of a horror movie.”

The couple, who live in Glencoe, had come to the Highland capital for a romantic night away.

But the creepy-crawlies put paid to their peaceful night’s sleep at Ardgowan guest house in Fairfield Road.

They got a partial refund and skipped breakfast.
I will spare you the rest of the gory details. You can read about them in the article.

But check this out:

According to Inverness pest control expert Keith Potts, bed bugs are a common problem in hotels and B&Bs.

He said: “This is a huge problem, big scale, and it has been for the past 10-12 years. People don’t talk about it, that’s why you don’t hear much about them. They’re very difficult to get rid of unless you have the proper chemicals.

“They can shut themselves down and they can lie dormant for up to one year. If a hotel shuts down for the winter they can live their quite happily and then become active once a warm body gets into the bed.”

There’s a PCO, from Inverness, declaring bed bugs have been a huge problem for the past 10-12 years.

And just to clarify things, this is not just a problem in hotels and B&Bs. They’re in homes, workplaces, even public transportation. They can come from these places to your home, or the other way round.

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The report focuses on the “amusing” nature of the situation:

Paula said: “I can laugh about it now but it was a dreadful experience at the time.

“Fawlty Towers hasn’t got a look-in compared to this place.”

Paula stayed at the hotel with friends Debbie Singh and Paula Murphy.

She said: “I went to bed and woke up being eaten alive by bed bugs.

“I was so shocked that I screamed and knocked on all the doors in panic. Another party were also complaining.”

Others in the party called the police and the group were refunded the money for the room. They fled in taxis and spent the night waiting for a train.

Unfortunately, this article does not recognize that the group’s problems may only just have begun. I know it is too much to ask for The Sun to provide helpful information, such as noting that bed bugs spread easily, and that the hotel guests could discover themselves living with bed bugs at home a few weeks or months from now.

And some of them may not react to bed bug bites, and so may not have a clue they brought them home until they are in a very advanced state of infestation and are seeing bed bugs on the walls in daylight.

The story concludes with hotel owner Saeed Akhtar describing the treatment the hotel ordered:

Mr Akhtar said: “There was a problem with bed bugs in Room 23. We have changed the bed, taken up the wooden floors, and everything has been sprayed.

One traditional spray in one room is unlikely to solve this problem.

I can see how comparing a bad night in a hotel to the John Cleese comedy “Fawlty Towers” is a funny story The Sun’s readers can enjoy. But lurking behind the tale is the possibility of a long, costly struggle with bed bugs in the home which may plague Paula Carr or her friends down the line.

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Workers on the Safe Bristolia flotel, which provides accommodation for the Conoco-Phillips-owned Brittania platform, complained to bosses about the parasites last week.

The flotel sits 170 miles north-east of Aberdeen, in the Britannia field, and is understood to have been brought in from Singapore last month.

Offshore oil work is notoriously grueling, and the people who stay out there for a month or more at a time have few creature comforts. Being stuck out there with bed bugs is an ugly scenario indeed.

Scottish workers who’d never encountered bed bugs and knew the flotel’s recent history might assume that the bed bugs were brought in when the flotel came from Singapore.

One worker, who wished to remain anonymous, said he was appalled by the discovery.

“The hygiene of the accommodation is disgusting,” he said. “If we are exposed to these bugs, then we could be taking them back to our homes, which in turn could see us passing them on to our families.

However, bed bugs could easily have come aboard with one of the local workers.

A ConocoPhillips spokes-woman said last night: “We can confirm that traces of bed bugs were identified in a very small number of cabins within the Safe Bristolia flotel last week. Bedding was immediately replaced and the area treated by the instructed specialist hygiene contractors as an additional precautionary measure.

I really hope those “specialist hygiene contractors” pulled out the big guns, since it takes much more than the usual cleaning routine to get rid of bed bugs for good. I also hope there will be follow-up treatments and inspections.

It’s fully plausible, if the bed bug infestation was as small as the spokesperson implied above, that the bed bugs were brought in from workers’ homes or from a train, bus, boat, plane, or helicopter they used to get from their homes to the rig.

And the map of Bedbugger readers tells us Scotland has a lot of bed bugs.

No matter how they got there, the infested flotel is a reminder that bed bugs really can be made at home anywhere, from a cave, to a boat, to a floating hotel, to a luxury mansion.

Thanks to hopelessnomo for the article!

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The article is a pretty standard “bed bugs are spreading in our area” story. However, the section entitled “The Facts” gives a hint of how far the news media has come as far as understanding bed bugs.

For example, this anticipates the “Oh, we all have bugs in our bed” response:

Although all of us will be living with dust mites, they are not a patch on ever-multiplying bed bugs.

And this gets people beyond the “bed bugs live in your mattress” fixation:

Their daytime home will be in the cracks of walls, the fibre of mattresses, behind pictures and in wallpaper and headboards.

And this gets people beyond just looking for visible itchy bites, which do not afflict all with bed bugs:

Tell-tale signs of infestation, apart from bites on the skin, include small blood spots on bed sheets and tiny black marks by mattress seams, caused by the bugs squeezing out excess blood to crawl back into their hiding spaces after they feed.

While the media are still making errors, and the comments to this article give a sense of how much the public still needs to be educated, I am glad that journalists are now giving much more information about bed bugs and their signs.

Remember when we were told to flip mattresses to look for bed bugs, as if it were always so easy? Or that tossing out mattresses was a solution to one’s bed bug problems? We have a way to go, but we are making progress.

The to those in Scotland: other areas of the country are also experiencing the same. Click to see a map of Bedbugger readers in Scotland and the rest of the UK and Ireland. (Hint: the incidence of Bedbugger readers appears to correspond to the population density of a given area.) Dundee, Glasgow and Clydeside, Aberdeen, Fife, and other regions also have bed bugs.

At this point, I think it’s safe to say that bed bugs are everywhere.

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First, the journalist Judith Woods says of some bed bug victims:

The lawyer got rid of her bed, both mattress and frame, which ideally anyone with an infestation should do.

Wrong! Tossing such items out is unnecessary, since a Pest Control Operator (PCO) can treat them. Moreover, throwing them away (even labeled and sealed) makes it very likely someone else will pick them up and use them. You’d be surprised how eager others are to bring them home, or sell them secondhand (beware the Car Boot Sales, my British friends). In so many cases, you cannot tell from looking at the items that they are infested. If you’re in a multi-unit building or an attached house, your neighbors may even take them, meaning they can later come back to you.

Similarly, Woods suggests,

Bed linen can be washed at the highest possible temperature – but [PCO Ben Knorton of Rentokil] advises throwing it out.
“I’ve seen sheets literally moving with the sheer number of bedbugs under them,” he says. “In that situation you really need to take drastic action.”

Well, if the bed is moving under the weight of bed bugs, perhaps that’s right. But washing on hot and drying on hot are a better idea in most cases. The above statement implies otherwise. I would only throw out sheets, or a bed and frame, if the PCO advised it. And then I would get them to help (with the mattress and frame) to ensure it was carefully done.

We’re also told of the same afflicted lawyer’s case,

Her room was then sealed and sprayed with insecticide three times over as many weeks.

Does this mean the room was sealed and left for three weeks, meaning no one was sleeping there? If so, the insecticide is not likely to work. Bed bugs need to be lured out to cross the poison and die.

Thanks to reader Fedupandparanoid, in the UK, who wrote me an email to alert me to this article and the issues mentioned above.

She also had this to say:

The article was nearly a full page on the Health on Monday page, and headlined ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ but I was very dissapointed at the tone of the article and take issue with some of the information contained in it. For some reason the journalist writing had called in Rentokil to check her house because she was so worried about the general rise in bedbugs. She didn’t appear to have any reason for suspecting bedbugs other than that there is a 500-fold increase in cases in London. Rentokil, who she called in, are at the very expensive end of the pest control market and they will be rubbing their hands in glee if they can charge good money to go in and inspect middle class people’s homes for no reason other than there is a general increase.

In fairness, the article did mention signs you can look for, like blood spots and fecal stains, bites in a row and did mention what a bedbug looks like, also the problems with hotels, but they seemed to miss an opportunity of really educating people. The journalist to her ‘great relief received a clean bill of health’ for her beds and although I wouldn’t wish bedbugs on anyone it would have carried more weight if she had actually had them or knew someone who had. There was nothing really about the terrible trauma and life disruption that people go through just a few jokey comments about what the neighbours would think.

Fedupandparanoid also said,

I just feel so annoyed that a paper like the Daily Telegraph - respected for it’s journalism - can make such a hash of a good opportunity. I realise journalists have to write articles that people want to read but there seemed no research and no substance to the article at all.

Yes. I agree with Fedup that we have come to expect more. At least the British press are covering the issue–getting people to talk about bed bugs is the first step.

In other news, in one of the few places that has gone beyond talking about bed bugs, Cincinnati emergency personnel are concerned about catching bed bugs when they go to help the city’s residents, ABC9 (WCPO.com) reports.

Firefighters, police, and health workers are encountering bed bugs in their work. And in the circumstances, where people are in danger, personnel don’t generally have time to worry about whether a place is infested before they go in.

Cincinnati Fire District Chief Ronald J. Texter says they’re working on a plan so crews won’t bring them back to the firehouse.

“The difficulty for us is that we can’t go into a house, survey it first, find out whether or not there’s bedbugs and then take precautions by putting on a Tyvex suit or something like that, like an exterminator would do.”

Texter said the department is concerned about the growing bedbug problem. The bugs are so small, sometimes you can’t see them.

“We’ve also had hospitals call and tell us that the patient, when they started treating them, they found bedbugs and they call us and let us know as a precaution that the patient had bedbugs,” Texter said.

This is good news: hospital staff are tuned in to the problem and the dangers of personnel exposed to it. The bad news is if patients are carrying bed bugs on their person, they must be suffering from very bad infestations.

If a firefighter walks into a home with bedbugs, they’re being encouraged to clean their equipment as soon as they return to the station.

Chief Texter admits that’s easier said than done.

“When you make 15 to 20 runs a day and you can’t stop everytime and take everything out, clean it, and put it all back and make sure there’s no bedbugs.”

The Cincinnati Fraternal Order of Police says officers have similar concerns.

Both departments are working on a plan to deal with the problem.

The fire department is educating personnel in addition to hiring an exterminator.

“If we do have a problem with bedbugs, we already have a pest control operator under contract to treat the infestation.”

Cincinnati emergency personnel, like the Cincinnati health department, are being very proactive about bed bugs. That the police and fire departments are talking to pest control operators in advance of detecting an infestation, is a very good thing. Lots can be done–not only in terms of educating personnel about signs of bed bugs and what to do if one is exposed, but also in terms of developing a protocol for searching the firehouse, for example, or where to store clothing that may be exposed.

And make no mistake: bed bugs are spreading via the same routes everywhere else. The difference is, people in Cincinnati are not afraid to talk about it. It’s the first step to making things better.

Click to read or watch the ABC9 video from Cincinnati.

Click here to read the Daily Telegraph article.

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Advice from private pest control experts, freely offered on the radio and in the national press, has included avoiding sitting down on public transport, and a suggestion that you strip naked in your entrance hall on return from work, before washing all your clothes at very high temperatures. The consequences of not calling in the experts are, of course, dire. “I’m often called out to people with more than 150 bites,” claimed one pest controller.

In your service we carried out a thorough investigation and have become suspicious. Have you been bitten? Do you know anyone who has? And isn’t it rather a coincidence that North America has just recently been enduring a similar epidemic? In New York, newspapers report the story of 21-year-old Michelle Hopkins, who says she was nearly eaten alive by bedbugs in her college dorm. And a popular children’s TV show, My Bedbugs, has gone nationwide across the US. Too uncanny for words.

My map says yes, they have them over there too. This confirms the experiences of our readers from across the pond.

I realize that David Cain’s and Rentokil’s Savvas Othon’s warnings in the recent British press sound alarmist. I realize also that News Of the World is may not be the source of the most balanced scientific journalism.

However, bed bugs really are back, and they really are bad. Not always that bad, and not yet everywhere, but you really do not want them spreading further.

So, my British friends, please do drop a comment over at the New Statesman, and let them know what’s up with bed bugs in the UK. The “My Bedbugs” reference in the article (read on) says they’re joking.

But let’s play along, shall we?

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(Photo by News of the World)

It is entitled, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers!”

NOTW journalist Sophy Ridge quotes David Cain (who has participated in our Forums) as saying that his calls for bed bugs are up 500% compared with last year’s calls.

Similarly,

Rentokil boss Savvas Othon said: “Outbreaks are on the rise. The number of people travelling and the current warm UK temperatures are helping the bugs to spread and thrive.

“You can easily pick them up on buses, in airport lounges and from other people’s dry cleaning. Even car boot sales make it worse as people buy furniture which may already be infested.”

Experts advise vacuuming mattresses and cleaning regularly to keep the bugs at bay. But if you’ve got them, there’s only one thing for it.

Who you gonna call? …pest busters.

(Car boot sales are “flea markets” in the US.)

This article is bound to reach even more people who have not heard of bed bugs. Unfortunately, NOTW is, as those not familiar with it can see, a fairly sensationalist tabloid. I hope that people in the UK will nevertheless seriously consider the facts contained in this story, and will consider being more cautious about used items, and also consider pressuring their government to take this issue seriously.

There is certainly no need to panic: I still use dry cleaners and sit on subway trains (gasp!) though the NYC epidemic is surely as bad as that in London. However, bed bugs are surely being spread in all these ways and more. Most people don’t consider this until they have them; those who do fear getting them over and over, since the rest of the world seems completely oblivious.

Articles in the popular press are a good way to spread the word. Hopefully this article will help start more conversations about bed bugs in the UK.

Yes, I said UK: despite the NOTW’s banner referencing “England,” the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish elsewhere in the UK (as well as their neighbors in the Republic of Ireland) are also battling bed bugs.

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This week, they’ve gone a step further, with Michele Kirsch’s three-page story on how Britain is “Infested” (not just with bed bugs, mind you). The author herself is added to the illustrious roster of journalists who have had bed bugs.

And while, yes, it does appear so that women are more apt to be allergic to bed bugs than men are (and I admit my evidence is purely anecdotal and based on our site’s hundreds of thousands of visitors), I balked after reading the story (which was otherwise pretty good) to discover it was in the “Women” section, which is a subset of the “Life & Style” section.

Hmmm. Still more work to be done, Times editors.

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