Want to move out of your bed bug-infested apartment and avoid the hassle of destroying and tossing out your infested furniture and other items, including a futon and a captain’s bed, and stuffed animals?

Want to expose lots of people and their neighbors, co-workers, relatives and friends to bed bugs?

Great!

Here’s what you do:

1. Place ad on Craigslist offering nearly all of your possessions for free.

I apologize if this is a duplicate. I thought I posted it but now I can’t find it, so I’m trying again

FREE STUFF!!!!!! I am moving Saturday morning, so everything needs to go ASAP. Please email me to arrange for pickup. This list is *NOT* inclusive. As I pack, more stuff is being added…

2. Include detailed list of items available and warnings that the items have been exposed to bed bugs in your infested home.

I have to start with the warning: the home these items come from have bedbugs. HOWEVER, many of these items were from rooms where I never saw any evidence of bugs or will be easily cleaned. I just don’t have the time to do it myself!

3. Wipe your hands clean and don’t think twice about the carnage which will most surely follow.

Yes, sure, you gave the warnings, so you’re ethically absolved of all responsibility. Have a nice day!

The truth is, everyday people take bed bug infested stuff off the curb which has warnings attached. People can be idiots.

So if you don’t destroy or debug your stuff, you are spreading bed bugs.

You’re spreading the itchiness and discomfort of bed bug bites, the cost of pest control and replacing possessions, the many hours of sleep, and hours and hours of work. You’ll likely cause others to have to move too, at great expense of time and money.

Don’t kid yourself that the warnings you gave will prevent others from suffering. If you have bed bugs in your home, people could pick them up and take them home just by coming over to get something of yours, let alone taking it in their car or into their home.

Thanks to Aly of A Little Aly-tude for the find, for warning her public, (and for the shout out!)

If ad has been removed, see screenshot here.

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In my experience, however, tenants are very likely to either (a) not notice, (b) not report, or (c) try to self-treat bed bug problems. The actual rate of infestations in WPHA buildings is likely much higher.

Tenants say the number may be higher because many of them exterminate their apartments themselves without reporting the problem, with mixed results.

“They come back because they’re in the walls,” [Winbrook housing complex tenant Louise] Clark said. “It comes and goes. When it gets hot - it’s hot now - they come out. I keep spraying.”

Bobbie Sherill, who lives in a WPHA complex on Lake Street, took her complaint to the mayor’s office:

“I got up at 1 a.m. They’re on my couch,” she said outside Mayor Joseph Delfino’s City Hall office, where she went looking for help. “Where am I going to go after that? You shouldn’t have to live like that. We’re not animals.”

Housing Authority officials claim they’re trying to treat Sherill’s unit:

“We’ve attempted to get into her unit several times,” [Housing Authority executive director Mack] Carter said about Sherrill. “She’s not available or we’re not allowed in.”

Sherrill said the authority offered to exterminate her apartment on the day before Thanksgiving last year, an offer she rejected because she was hosting for the holiday. Instead, she began spraying her mattress with bleach and hot water every morning, which proved ineffective.

The county Department of Health recently told Sherrill it doesn’t respond to bedbug complaints because they don’t carry diseases and so are considered a nuisance rather than a public health problem. The county referred her to the city, which led her to Delfino’s office this month, where an aide took her number and promised to get back to her.

In the meantime, Carter said he will meet with his staff to discuss whether to abandon a policy that requires tenants who can afford extermination, which typically costs $100, to pay for the work.

“We’re doing everything we possibly can,” Carter said. “At some point, the residents have to take some responsibility, too.”

Tenants do need to report bed bug infestations, and cooperate with and prepare for treatment.

They also need to be educated about bed bugs. It’s understandable that someone might resist treatment the day before Thanksgiving. It’s unclear, if this was the case, why the treatment was not offered in the days following the holiday.

The Housing Authority is not just responsible for keeping Sherill’s home bed bug-free, they also have a responsibility to protect other tenants. If someone truly does refuse bed bug treatment (which does not sound like the case here), then there must be additional steps taken.

I would strongly urge WPHA to abandon the pest control charges for tenants. Yes, $100 for a pest control treatment might not seem like much, but keep in mind that when bed bugs come back repeatedly, tenants may either feel they can’t afford to keep paying, or they may feel treatment is not working, so why bother?

And $100 is a lot when you’re on a budget and when the actual cost of preparations for treatment (including laundering and bagging clothing) can be much higher and be required again and again.

What is needed in a complex with multiple active bed bug infestations is aggressive inspections and treatments. It is not enough to wait for tenants to call and report problems; in many cases, where tenants are not allergic to bed bug bites, they will never know, until problems are very far gone.

Ultimately, housing authorities and other building managers need to be more proactive about bed bug infestations in some of their units. They need to consult experts, such as entomologists who specialize in bed bugs, and formulate better plans for dealing with this (preferably before it comes up, or in the early stages). In the long run, it will save the management and tenants a lot of time, money, and heartache.

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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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Virtually eradicated. DDT. International travel. Baseboards. Yadda, yadda.

No. Not at all. Not yadda yadda.

Let’s consider the bedbug resurgence in one developed country.

In October of 1999 the BBC reported the “return of the bed bug” in the UK:

The bed bug is making its way back into domestic life throughout the UK.

The blood-sucking pest - commonly thought to have been eradicated at about the same time as Dickensian slums - is now being reported in increasing numbers of homes around the country.

Then in April 2000, a letter in the BMJ by microbiologists John Paul and Janice Bates: Is infestation with the common bedbug increasing? Dr. Paul and Dr. Bates were concerned about that possibility and noted the lack of bedbug awareness among doctors and the possible association with international travel:

From February to October 1999 specimens from four separate infestations were referred to [Brighton Public Health Laboratory Service]; this suggests that bedbugs are becoming more common.

Interestingly, in all four examples there was circumstantial evidence to suggest the transfer of bugs in luggage or furnishings.

There was an interesting reply by a retired public health physician, Dr. JK Anand, suggesting that the doctors ask the Environmental Health Officers for their infestations data.

Infestations data? Environmental Health Officers? (Isn’t the internet wonderful?)

Bed bugs in Britain:

Bed bugs (Cimex lectularius L.) still abound in some areas of the UK. The annual report of the Institution of Environmental Health Officers states that in the year April 1985-April 1986, 7771 premises in England and Wales were treated, and in 1986-1987, 6179 premises were treated for bed bugs. The Royal Environmental Health Institute of Scotland reported 43 bed bug infestations in 1985 and 20 in 1986. In the tax year 1987-1988, Belfast EHOs conducted 188 bed bug treatments.

At first, and second, glance this is fairly bewildering information. 7,771 bedbug cases in England and Wales in 1985-1986? That number sounds high, doesn’t it? Fourteen years before the Paul and Bates letter. Remember, in 2000 they were worried by specimens submitted to a single lab from four separate infestations.

We need context in order to understand this information about bedbugs in the UK. How is this possible? A decade before the purported start of the resurgence — according to the BBC again, in April 2004, under the headline “Bedbugs bounce back from oblivion,” more or less marking a red dot on 1995:

Since 1995 there has been an unexpected increase in reports of infestation in Britain, the US and other developed countries.

Clearly the large incidence of infestations in 1986 was forgotten by the late nineties. Were the majority of those infestations controlled? If so, how? Like everything to do with bedbugs, a great deal of mystery must be tolerated.

But, and this is finally the reason for this post, we can now point you to an article that begins to suggest the missing context and how little we know about the bedbug resurgence in the UK and, by extension, in developed countries, an article from January 1990 published in New Scientist, a truly eye-opening piece written by Fiona King. (I’m not sure how we’ve missed this article; perhaps it has not been available online until very recently. In any case, I hope to interest you in its treasures.)

For one thing, a breakdown of the 1985-1986 statistics:

The Institute of Environmental Health Officers found that local authorities carried out 7771 treatments for bedbugs in [1985-6]. Just over a quarter of these were in the North West - Merseyside, Cheshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire and Cumbria - and 17 per cent were in Greater London. The Midlands and Northern Region - Cleveland, Durham and Northumbria - each accounted for one-tenth of the total, while the South West - Devon, Cornwall, Dorset - had the fewest treatments (0.3 per cent).

In Scotland the Royal Health Institute’s figures show that over half of the 41 treatments in 1987 were carried out in Edinburgh and Glasgow. This concentration of bedbugs in urban areas is also found in Northern Ireland, where in 1988 there were 186 treatments in Belfast compared with 7 in Londonderry and 2 in County Down.

About the data collection:

Hard facts about infestations are hard to come by. Information is usually based on the number of treatments carried out. In Britain, many companies dealing in pest control are unwilling to release statistics about which areas they have treated. The main source of information is the environmental health departments of local councils, but reporting is erratic and inspections irregular. Information about infestations is collected in different ways, and is often discontinuous because computerised databases were introduced at different times in different areas. It may also include data about other household pests such as cockroaches, ants or even mice, masking the problem of bedbugs.

And about the difficulties of inspections and the stigma of reporting an infestation:

Most environmental health departments are short of officers to carry out inspections. Usually a council becomes aware of an infestation only if someone complains - but people are often ashamed to admit that their homes are infested and they turn to the environmental health department only as a last resort when their own attempts to kill the bugs with household insecticides have failed. Many cases go undetected for years, until either the bites become unbearable or a relative or neighbour reports the problem.

There is much more. I highly recommend that you read it yourself.

The article is remarkable, among other reasons, for King’s writing about infestations in Africa and India and infestations in the UK virtually in the same breath, at one point comparing the number of bites that people living in “heavily infested premises” in North London and Natal could suffer. When she concludes that “we must find out what is the scale of the infestation” she is not writing about only one group of human beings on the earth.

But what about the United States you ask? Well, we should attempt to examine the history of infestations in the United States, a considerably more difficult project. No Environmental Health Officers tracking data, however imperfectly, here. Next time perhaps.

You may also be interested in the letters from New Scientist readers, here, here, and here. Also, don’t miss the interesting tidbit about Robert Usinger’s hemoglobin levels from feeding his bedbug colony from 1958 to 1964! Further recommended reading about bedbugs in the UK must, of course, include two articles by Clive Boase, both PDFs, which will load if you click here and here.

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…although bedbugs may not be quite so widespread a problem in Toronto yet, they actually bite us and “when you have little children or babies with bedbugs on them, it’s just plain gross.”

David Hayes needs to read Star columnist Joe Fiorito more often. From his stories, you’d gather Toronto’s bed bugs were spreading quickly and widely.

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