NBC reports that there are bed bugs in a senior apartment building in San Diego:

It’s happening at the Westminster Manor, which is home to low-income seniors. Resident Rose Chapin, 76, told NBC 7/39 she first noticed the problem in June.

“I saw little black spots on my bedspread,” Chapin said.

Soon after, she noticed bloodstains, bites on her chest and legs, plus larvae found in the couch. Chapin said that about 50 of the 150 apartments in the high-rise wound up with them and are being sprayed for bedbugs.

“They’ve sprayed two times in my place already, but I still have to keep all of my clothes in bags out on the balcony for the rest of the month. And I have to do about 50 loads of laundry when that’s done, just to make sure they’re gone,” Chapin said.

Fifty out of 150 units are being treated. This is a serious infestation. I would not be surprised if other units as well as common areas (and maybe even walls / pipe areas) were also infested.

The management says they treat units when complaints are made:

“The residents spread them when they visit each other. There’s no way to prevent it, so we treat the apartment as soon as we discover a problem,” said Bill Keys, the buildings superintendent said. “At any time, we could be dealing with four or five rooms.”

Treating units like this individually, a few at a time, when 1/3 or more of the building is infested and are being treated at different times, may not be the best way to eliminate the problem.

Would coordinating treatment so that it occurs all at once not be a more efficient and promising plan?

Perhaps some of our professionals could enlighten me on that.

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• Miranda’s story: a visit from the PCO for bed bugs, part 2

Cincinnati held a meeting yesterday about bed bugs. Channel 9 (ABC) said yesterday:

The Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority will show the Health, Environment and Education Committee a presentation on the pests.

Officials said bed bugs are a big problem in the city’s public housing, which is overseen by the Housing Authority.

According to Channel 12, Cincinnati politicians are claiming some success against bed bugs:

The health department says it received 737 bedbug complaints last year, more than 300 in September and October alone. Since then, the numbers have gone down.

Dale Grigsby, Cincinnati Health Department: “It appears as though at least what we’ve been doing for the last 6 months has been effective, but I don’t want to say conclusively until we’ve seen some more data.”

The message not to re-use discarded mattresses and couches may be sinking in. But housing advocates say the bedbug problem is here to stay for at least a while longer.

Surely the work Cincinnati is doing is having an effect.

However, I would not use statistics based on complaints during the last two months as a barometer. It’s my sense that people taking action on their bed bug issues goes down between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. My sense is that people are celebrating and preparing to celebrate. Money and time are going to other things, and they do not want to deal with problems–especially one they may think they can deal with a bit later. I don’t think that –based on fewer calls to the city about bed bugs in November and December–one can declare any improvement just yet. It really is premature.

And a few months isn’t really long enough to assume those treated homes are really bed bug-free. Bed bugs are notoriously tenacious. Even though Cincinnati was helping people discard furniture carefully, and providing information, there is no reason to think existing bed bug cases have been abated and that they have not spread further. It can take months for people who were treated to realize their bed bugs are not actually gone, yet. Rick Cooper helpfully suggests that people wait 55 days after last seeing a bed bug or suffering a bite to declare themselves bed bug free. My own sense is that in a multi-unit building with multiple infestations–and especially possibly undiagnosed and untreated ones–you aren’t really sure the problem is gone for some time after that.

The article also contained a strange estimate of how many would suffer bed bugs:

Charles Tassell, Greater Cincinnati Northern Kentucky Apartment Association: “It’s going to be one in seven houses by the year 2008 that will be infected. We’re at 2008 and we’re not at that number yet, but we’re going to see it continue to grow.”

On the video, Tassell attributes his estimate that 1 in 7 houses would have bed bugs by 2008 to unnamed “professionals”. I do not recall hearing this statistic before, and I don’t know if it refers to Cincinnati alone or some larger region. I Also assume Tassell means “homes” in particular, and “homes,” not houses. Perhaps a reader will know the source of this statistic.

The Local 12 article did not give any real basis for thinking things were either that bad, or that improved. We can consider the one actual case mentioned in the article:

Joyce Jones has the bites to prove it. When bedbugs showed up in her apartment last fall she asked for help.

Joyce Jones, Stanley Rowe Apartments: “I did everything…I called in a work order. They come in and I tell you what they do. They do this here and say we don’t see nothing.”

Joyce is one of many residents of Stanley Rowe Apartments that are fighting bedbugs. Because of complaints, city council demanded answers from the Metropolitan Housing Authority and health department. CMHA says it’s doing the best it can. The health department says bedbug education programs seem to making headway.

Reading this tells you little. Watch the video. It’s hard to tell exactly what Joyce Jones’s housing inspector did, but her implication is that the inspection was cursory and this is a familiar story to our readers. Some readers tell us they have PCOs, and in some cases housing inspectors, who do very limited “inspections.” While we know bed bugs can live in the baseboards or other places in the room, and in furniture besides beds, some inspections still don’t go beyond looking under the sheets and mattress, and if they do not find a live bed bug, the inspection is over. (Some PCOs and inspectors, readers tell us, don’t inspect at all.) There have been isolated reports from people in NYC of HPD inspectors unwilling to come into apartments after people filed bed bug complaints. Of course, that is clearly not HPD policy and any person making this accusation simply must pursue the matter further with HPD.

Local 12 says Jones is simply using extra bleach in the laundry until someone comes to help. Since Jones lives in the same bed bug-beleaguered high-rise senior apartment building as Samuel Blackmon, the man shown in this harrowing video, where his “apartment that was treated a month ago” was not surprisingly still literally crawling with bed bugs. (The full story was not clear, but that video implied Blackmon’s apartment may have been treated just once, as of October, and that a month had elapsed with nothing more being done.) I would hope inspections in every unit of the building would be very extensive indeed, and that treatments are much more aggressive and regular.

I appreciate the steps Cincinnati has taken, but I would guess they still have a long way to go in fighting bed bugs.  We have not heard anything about monetary assistance for tenants, landlords, and homeowners who need help both preparing for treatment and for covering costs of treatments themselves. 

I hope they will add such assistance to current programs of public education and refuse removal, and make sure everyone is getting proper, thorough inspections and treatment–until their bed bugs are truly gone.

View the brief Channel 9 article by Alyssa Bunn here.

View Local 12’s article here.Similar Posts:

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Now we’re getting somewhere.

For years, when they mentioned bed bugs at all, which was rarely, the press was talking about people with bed bug infestations needing to do some laundry, throw out a mattress, maybe move. (All insufficient and/or not helpful, as we know.)

Some news outlets are still at this level. Their refrain: it’s a nuisance: spray the college dorm once, send the kids to do laundry, no problem. (Wrong!) Be glad you don’t live in a shelter, where this is such a problem. The tone of these recent articles is not much of an improvement over 2003’s example: “Those silly hipsters in Greenpoint: it looks like trash-picking mattresses can lead to pesky problems.”

Just weeks ago, we started seeing reports that took it to the next level: admitting things are getting out of hand in isolated places (like residential apartments for seniors in Boston, Single Room Occupancy apartments in NYC, low-income housing, and so on). Those media outlets that have made it to this level are pointing out that it’s more than a nuisance. That tossing furniture is spreading the problem, and that the poor and moderate income citizens can’t afford this experience (who can?)

And now, the Toronto Star has taken it to another level:

Pest control experts predict bedbugs are their new cash cow, and that within five years, they will be more common than mice, roaches and carpenter ants.

You have to read on, though, and read between the lines to see that eradicating bed bugs is nowhere near as easy as eradicating roaches, mice, and rats.

The Star does note that the poorest are the hardest hit (as they are when any force of nature or man-made disaster hits). But the words above are astounding: what person has not once had roaches, mice or ants invade a dwelling? (Many, of course, have had more than one of these, or had one again and again.) House-holder, rich, famous?

Not immune.

The article spells this out: In 2003 1/2 of Toronto bed bug victims were householders; only 1/4 were in apartments.

It goes on,

To rid a home costs between $300 and $650 for the first treatment, with $65 a month for re-treatments until the pests have been eradicated. Apartments are less expensive, costing between $200 and $300 but treating them there is more difficult.

One suite in an building can spray their space diligently, vacuum their mattress daily, cover belongings in plastic, steam-clean the upholstery, dryclean clothes and replace bedding. But if the suite next door has neither the time nor the finances to do so, the space will be re-infested within days. It’s a problem Dancyger knows too well. In April his apartment was sprayed. He was free of the bugs for only two days before they came creeping back.

The Star also does a nice job of outlining the lack of government response, one we’re seeing elsewhere too:

Toronto Public Health won’t say there’s a problem.

Except for City Assemblywoman Gale Brewer, New York City officials are not taking on board their responsibilities. This will be a huge problem and is growing daily. And yet at a recent City Council Hearing on bed bugs in NYC, another city official from the Dept. of Consumer Affairs argued that poor people needed the right to buy reconditioned (=used) mattresses (to save a whopping $50).

That’s ignorance of what this pest can do to the child sleeping on that mattress, and her family, her neighbors, landlord, and so on. This can spread from one bed to a whole neighborhood: from bed to subway station bench to workplace to school, and then home with anyone who uses any of those. These sound like paranoid thoughts, but at the Bedbugger yahoo group, we’ve heard multiple stories of people who moved from their homes with the utmost care, taking every precaution, going so far as to ditch virtually all their belongings, and nevertheless, somehow, “moved” their problem with them. They spread easily.

Would a public official who knew the threat he was dealing with say such a thing? No. And there are plenty of entomologists and pest control operators who can tell us how bad this is, let alone the sufferers. We know. Listen to us.

Nice work, Toronto Star: you raised the bar on bed bug stories in the news. I hope we see more reports that are designed to wake people up.

And I want to hear more about the middle class and upper-middle class sufferers. We know they’re out there, but they’re ashamed (just like the poor people). I know this is especially bad in SROs, shelters, low-income housing, but until we’re seeing rich people on Fox news talking about how they had to throw away their prized posessions and live like monks, sitting on metal chairs and sleeping on air mattresses– until we see rich people crying because they unwittingly spread bedbugs to a sick elderly parent, who is really suffering– until then, some people are going to be stuck on the “it’s just a problem for the poor” idea. And they are so wrong.Similar Posts:

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