Since used furniture is such a likely conduit, why, then, does the article tell us that “Health officials recommend getting rid of any infested furniture. . .”? Surely health officials that believe tossing infested furniture is always the best plan are not thinking about the neighbors who will inevitably pick up that furniture, move it in, and start a new infestation.

Yes, it is sometimes (maybe even often) necessary, as the University of Kentucky site tells us. But cities which tell people with bed bugs to toss out their stuff need to provide services for dealing with the refuse. They can’t have people tossing out stuff that isn’t properly wrapped and they can’t have the stuff picked up by neighbors or junk collectors who can “clean” or cover and resell mattresses, or give wooden furniture a new coat of paint.

Cincinnati does have dedicated trash pickup for bed bug-infested furniture, though we have not yet heard much about how well it’s working.

• Cincinnati Establishes Bed Bug Furniture Pick-Up Procedures and Hotline
• Why we need a massive public education campaign about bed bugs (reason #327)
• More bed bug stories from Cincinnati; also, pig spotted in sky over New York City
• Unlucky in Vegas

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A few of the roughly 200 residents in Bowling Green Towers at 1149 College St. have had restless nights due to a pesky problem. Several apartment-dwellers have reported an infestation of bedbugs - but health officials say trouble is being squashed before it spreads.

Barry Turner of the Barren River District Health Department said his office has gotten a few recent calls from Towers residents, so he called property manager Jennifer Mitchell, who gave him the impression that it wasn’t widespread. She told him managers were dealing with it and had contacted an exterminator, Turner said.

“We haven’t dispatched anybody over there, and probably don’t plan to,” he said.

(Well, as long as they said they were dealing with it.)

This is another situation of bed bugs spreading in housing for the elderly and disabled. Remember Halcyon House in Denver? The Hillrise Apartment Building in Cincinnati? Warren Towers in Moline, Illinois? The Phyllis Wheatley YWCA in Washington, DC?

Like Halcyon House, Bowling Green Towers is privately-owned and subsidized by HUD:

The towers are privately owned by Germantown, Tenn.-based TESCO Properties, but rents for the elderly and disabled residents are subsidized by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD exercises some oversight through that financial relationship.

Since the property manager has told the health department that the problem is not widespread, we might ask how this was determined.

A spokesperson for HUD’s Louisville office said the agency contacted the Towers’ management Friday after learning of the problem from media inquiries. Building managers said the infestation was limited to four units, the HUD spokesperson said. HUD was told that an exterminator had been called and that employees were inspecting all the apartments one at a time, looking for any more problems.

It is not clear to me whether this means that employees of the Towers, or employees of the exterminator hired by the Towers, were doing these inspections, but it does sound like the former. If this is true, it is worrisome. We’re told by pest control operators how difficult visual inspections of properties for bed bugs can be, even for experienced PCOs. Employees of the building are very unlikely to be trained to spot all but the most advanced infestations.

A bit of sleuthing would not go amiss. Are the infested units physically connected (next door, above one another)? If the four infested units are all attached, then perhaps they and other adjacent units could be treated, and that may be it.

If the four units are not attached, then further investigation is worthwhile. I would then investigate whether there were any connections between these that can be traced. Are the residents with infestations friends who visit one another? Does a particular staff member assist those residents? Do they go for weekly outings using a particular car service?

That may all seem like an exhausting process. What I would not do, however, is assume that four non-attached units just happened to become infested with bed bugs simultaneously (if this appears to be the case). Bed bugs spread, and it is likely such cases would be related.

In any case, it is likely others have bed bugs too, but do not notice. (If they do not react to bed bug bites, they can have bed bugs and not know it.) It would be worth trying to trace a trail of some kind between the infested units, and trying to figure out what other units may have been exposed.

Detecting bed bugs can be really tricky for anyone, and elderly and disabled people can be at a disadvantage in many cases, due to sight and mobility limitations. They need all the help they can get to avoid having to suffer from this problem.

Let’s hope the Bowling Green Towers and the Barren River District Health Department take this seriously–clearing it up quickly and avoiding further infestations.

• Bowling Green Towers: residents organize to demand proper bed bug treatment in low-income building
• Surrey, B.C. public housing infested with bed bugs
• Bed bugs invade Chicago’s Presidential Towers, and another Vancouver Island detox
• Bed bugs usually plague a city for a few weeks before being eradicated. Really, Waterbury Health Department?

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Bed bug cases “are increasing somewhat throughout the county,” reported Wayne Peace, Emergency Management Agency director, at the Jan. 8 Ripley County Health Department meeting. “I don’t know why there is an increase.”

Public health coordinator Pat Thomas stated after the meeting that Peace has referred people to a licensed pesticide exterminator to get rid of these pests.

Funny how less populous areas are tuned in to even “somewhat” of an increase.  Hmm, an increase, not a “sudden appearance.”  Is Peace saying that Batesville always had bed bugs?

Read the Batesville Herald Tribune piece here.

• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana hold tri-state “Emergency Meeting” about bed bugs
• Urgent: if you’re in Cincinnati…
• Bed bugs in casino and senior apartments in New Jersey, Binghamton University (again) and another dust mite photo in the news

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“Our inspectors are saying in recent months, even the last year, we’ve been seeing more complaints of bed bugs in our area,” said Dain Weister of the Orange County Health Department.

Even the most popular hotels are not immune.

WFTV channel 9 reports that one family was paid off to keep their bed bug story to themselves, after encountering the monsters in their Disney Resort.

One family said they were bitten by the bugs at the Disney All-Star Movie Resort. They backed out of an interview after they said Disney offered them $5,000 and a free trip to keep quiet.

The station also contacted Disney:

When asked about offering money to the family who found bed bugs in their room, Disney said they occasionally compensates guests who have a less than magical experience and the park does everything it can to makes guests comfortable [sic].

How is Disney dealing with bed bugs?

Disney said it has trained entomologists or “bug experts” on staff. Other hotels hire bug sniffing dogs. One of the animals is based in Tampa, but makes frequent trips to inspect hotels in the Orlando area.

I would indeed call bed bugs a “less than magical” experience. The spread of bed bugs can not be entirely contained and they will appear in hotels of every kind and quality. The best thing is to be proactive about doing a search for bed bugs in the room before settling in, and to take some basic precautions. (See our travel FAQs for more on how to avoid bed bugs while traveling.)

All hotels, meanwhile, need to educate employees about searching for and identifying bed bugs in the course of their normal work, and hotels need to employ professionals to help them develop a bed bug prevention and treatment protocol, and to identify and treat infestations as quickly as possible.

• Bed bug hotel claim in Isle of Wight; study/travel abroad and bed bugs
• Bed bugs in hotels: how to report (and check up on) bed bug infestations
• another bedbug lawsuit
• Rockford, IL: half of Red Roof Inn shut down due to bed bugs

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Article referencing 2255 Pandora Street in Vancouver, BC, where, the author claims, “Bedbugs are a given.”

• Bed bugs invade Chicago’s Presidential Towers, and another Vancouver Island detox
• 25 Grant Street in Denver, Colorado: bed bugs for two years
• bed bugs in Toronto; Vancouver; Billings, MT,
• Dumpster-diving tenant evicted after Winnipeg apartment seriously infested with bed bugs

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• bed bugs in Toronto; Vancouver; Billings, MT,
• bed bug news for 2007-11-11: Lexington, KY and Toronto, ON
• Allegations of bed bugs affect tourism, according to travel agent
• Bed bugs in casino and senior apartments in New Jersey, Binghamton University (again) and another dust mite photo in the news

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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.

• Forget black mattress stains, bed bugs, shells, and eggs: NMPA press release tells consumers to look for “blood spots”
• Queries from Bed Bug Helloise: hanging clothes storage?
• Tampa Bay and Southwest Florida residents: do not use the DE from your pool
• Bed bugs spreading in Finland too

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All in all, Clustermap is fun, but not too informative; smaller dots mean 1-9 readers, and larger dots signal lots of visitors. You can see larger dots even on the map with reduced size dots, and those must mean lots of readers indeed. You can see a big dot in London, one in Stockholm, so many in the NY area they are layered. Hawai’i is completely sunk under the weight of our readers. (I guess the Bedbugger on the island of Reunion off of Madagascar was afraid of coming back too often and causing the same effects there, hence one dot.)

Can someone tell us definitively what city is in the top of the central region of Canada (the highest dot in the center of North America)? Either there are quite a lot of bed bugs there, or perhaps you have a massive national ISP located there.

I hope to have more informative and more useful tools, including more maps and a forum, for easier ongoing discussions, when we roll out a new site. Watch for it!

• The Times (UK) on bed bug epidemic in the USA
• University Heights, the Bronx, January 2008
• Bed bugs in Sweden: Ikea, used mattresses, and the spread of vägglus
• Clustermap now gives more detail

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