Florida’s WCTV.com recently ran a story about the wonderful methods used at the University of Florida to bake bed bugs in furniture (they set up an ad hoc oven in the center of the room).

That’s not news to us.

However, this report also contained a curious sidenote:

The environmental protection agency has prohibited the use of pesticides to kill bed bugs.

Huh?!?

I think not.

See the original article here: Bed Bug Heater.Similar Posts:

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The Daily Aztec (an independent student paper) reported yesterday on the bed bug situation at San Diego State University. Officials there say there are currently no known bed bug cases, though the article notes there have been bed bugs found on campus in recent months.

One place bed bugs were discovered: the “egg chairs” in the Counseling and Psychological Services office. (This makes sense: people with bed bugs are under a lot of stress, and liable to seek help!) Director of the center, Dr. Sandy Jorgensen-Funk:

“We immediately shut down the chairs,” Jorgensen-Funk said, “so that they weren’t used by students, as soon as we found this out.”

Jorgensen-Funk added that the chairs were then treated for a second time in November and again last month.

“We didn’t know what they were,” she said. “We just wanted to make sure that we weren’t exposing students to a problem.”

Whether any students were exposed to the problem before the treatments were conducted is not known at this time.

The existence of bed bugs in the egg chairs strongly suggests the existence of bed bugs elsewhere on campus.

Here’s why: the bed bugs did not spontaneously arise in the egg chairs. Someone who had been exposed to bed bugs sat in the chairs, and the bed bugs stayed there. They could have climbed off a person, or walked directly out of a person’s bag.

They may have come from a dorm. Or a student’s off-campus home. But either way, we have to consider that if the bed bugs hitchhiked to one location, they can (and probably did) go to others as well.

We do not know how many bed bugs were seen in the chair, but it is also possible that the bed bugs were not harboring in the chair but climbed up into it to bite the person. Rooms, structures, can be infested as easily as pieces of furniture. The actual harborage could have been a nearby desk, a crack in the wall, another chair.

It is highly likely that anyone who sat in the chairs was exposed to bed bugs, and may possibly have taken them to other places — classrooms, library, cafeterias, dorm rooms, off-campus housing, etc. Bed bugs are hitch-hikers.

However, although the presence of bed bugs in the egg chairs suggests bed bugs are somewhere else on campus, The Daily Aztec reports having heard several bed bug reports from various residences which were found to be “unsubstantiated after discussions with the Office of Housing Administration and Student Health Services.”

Benita Mann, manager of custodial and maintenance services for the OHA, said there hasn’t been any known bed bug problem in campus housing for some time.

“Several years ago we had a problem,” Mann said, “but those buildings have since been torn down.”

Yet those bed bugs did not spontaneously appear in the egg chairs. Whoever responded to the egg chair bed bug infestation must sure have been asking himself or herself “who brought those bed bugs in, and where else did bed bugs from the chairs end up?”

If students come to the on-campus health service suspecting bed bugs, the health service wants to see an actual insect sample before they take a bed bug complaint seriously:

Dr. Gregg Lichtenstein, medical director at SHS, said complaints of bed bug bites isn’t something SHS sees very often.

“It’s not anything regular,” Lichtenstein said. “We see people who come in with bites of various sorts on an occasional basis – and most of them are, frankly, flea bites.”

Lichtenstein said that student inquiries about bed bug bites are rare, and no one can actually recall seeing a bed bug being brought in to confirm a diagnosis.

While it is absolutely true that one cannot diagnose bed bugs based on skin reactions, it is also absolutely true that it is difficult — except in heavy infestations — to catch a bed bug.

Students simply cannot be expected to find, catch, and bring in a bed bug sample.

Instead, when bed bugs are suspected, the room should be inspected, either by a trained pest professional willing to spend a lot of time doing so, or perhaps by a bed bug sniffing dog.

Lichtenstein also misunderstands the health problems posed by bed bugs:

“Bed bugs are not vectors of disease. They may be annoying, but that’s about it.”

Yes, bed bugs are not known vectors of disease. But bed bugs are more than annoying. They can trouble students (who may have difficulty getting help, especially if evidence is not obvious). They can make people lose sleep and create stress. This in addition to skin reactions from bed bug bites which vary from nothing to severe. And in very, very few cases, people have had life-threatening allergic reactions to bed bug bites.

Not only do colleges need to react well to suspected bed bug infestations. Colleges also need to be proactive against bed bugs.

Here’s why: we are told that as many as 70% of the population may not react to bed bug bites (per Dr. Jerome Goddard the state medical entomologist with the Mississippi Department of Health in Jackson, Mississippi); this means many people may not suspect they have a bed bug problem until it is very far advanced — so far advanced as to be visually obvious, even in daytime.

And if your bed bug infestation has gotten to that point, bed bugs may have already spread beyond that particular room.

College officials need to understand that it is hard to see a bed bug or catch it in the act, since they generally feed in the wee small hours, and are designed to hide between meals in tight cracks, undetected.

They also need to understand that bed bugs are a problem no one should have to put up with — even if they are not yet known to spread disease.

Finally — and the article does not engage with this issue at all — college officials need to realize that bed bugs travel off-campus too.

Students exposed to bed bugs may bring bed bugs home from campus, causing their parents expensive problems of bed bug detection and treatment. And other students will just as surely bring bed bugs onto campus, from hotels or from home. Faculty and staff will likely do so too.  Bed bugs are a pest of exposure, and no one is immune.

Since bed bugs have come back with such a vengeance in society at large, having bed bugs enter a college campus is inevitable. Being reactive is not enough, given the problems of quickly detecting bed bugs before they spread around. And college administrators who realize this, and are proactive, have a better chance of getting bed bugs under control.

Ultimately, I have a hunch that a good proactive and reactive bed bug program may seem expensive at first, but will save money in the long run, over other approaches.

To read more about how colleges are dealing with bed bugs on campus, see this post which considers the model of Texas A&M, which proactively uses bed bug sniffing dogs to detect bed bug problems before students do, and TempAir to treat bed bugs in one shot with thermal remediation.

Heat also features at the University of Florida, where mattresses and other infested items are heated in a makeshift oven, as part of bed bug treatment, according to this article frem Channel 2 in Charleston.Similar Posts:

• Ohio County, WV Health Dept. official: bed bugs “public health nuisance” and “psychological disaster”
• Boston University dorm residents bitten by bed bugs
• University of Central Missouri (and other Missouri colleges) vs. bed bugs
• Toronto municipal councillor pushes for bed bugs to be declared a health hazard
• Bed bugs at Spring Valley, NY apartment complex

MSNBC did a report on Friday about the problem of bed bugs on college campuses, warning students and their parents about bed bugs going back to school (or, for that matter, coming home from school).

Don’t be put off by the fact that Matt Lauer opens the segment by dropping the nursery rhyme bomb.

Watch the video below, and pay special attention to the system senior pest control technician Wayne Walker is using at the University of Florida: baking bed bug-infested items in a “makeshift styrofoam oven” constructed inside the room. Of course, the room itself also needs thorough treatment.

Please do not try this at home. But let’s all hear it for imaginative and creative professional bed bug killers!

Wayne Walker also stresses the need to educate students on how to avoid bed bugs.

We also hear that The University of California at Berkeley is using heat, cold, and pesticides to fight bed bugs.

Matt Lauer talks to Rick Cooper, who brings in a sample “mattress” with fecal stains, and talks about mattress encasements, how students bring bed bugs into their homes (and parents’ homes), and the difficulties of bed bug treatment.

(Bonus: watch Matt Lauer giggle in embarrassment at the phrase “fecal stains”!)

Along with other segments appearing in the print and tv news in the last week or so, I’d say this year marks the most back-to-college bed bug coverage we’ve seen yet.

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This USA Today article from Wednesday gives a rundown on recent bed bug battles in a number of US colleges and universities, such as Ohio State, and the University of Florida.

This is an issue that administrators are increasingly thinking about in advance of a crisis arising (as evidenced by recent sessions on bed bugs at a conference for college administrators), and this is a good thing.

USA Today gives a lot of attention to Texas A&M, where an administrator says of bed bugs:

“They’re taking off right now,” says Dan Mizer, associate director of residence life at Texas A&M University.

It sounds like Mizer is being proactive and has an aggressive plan in place to deal with bed bugs:

Texas A&M has spent $37,000 in the past year to fly in bedbug-sniffing dogs. This fall, Mizer plans to call in a Minnesota outfit called Temp-Air, whose eradicator heats the room overnight to 130 degrees, killing the bedbugs but leaving students’ belongings unharmed. His other secret weapon: eternal vigilance. “When we get a report, we get the pest-control staff, and we respond. These bugs can take over quickly.”

The school is being proactive about finding bed bugs, and has plans to deal with them efficiently. Perhaps they’re being advised by the world class bed bug researchers in TAMU’s own Center for Urban and Structural Entomology, like James Austin.

Local news outlets picked up the “bed bugs in college dorms” idea after USA Today’s article was published, and UPI distributed a short version of the story.

WFMY News 2 interviewed North Carolina public health officials as well as Wake Forest University students about whether they’re concerned about bed bugs:

(The video was much more interesting than the accompanying article.)

WLWT in Cincinnati goes further, giving students tips on how to search dorm rooms for bed bugs:

They should be inspecting the mattress, the box spring and areas around the mattress and box springs,” Scherzinger Pest Control technical director Patrick Boland said.

Boland also said that students should check the headboard and the bed frame itself. Students should also check their home before they leave as well.

Experts said that people should look in the folds and seems of their mattresses. Bedbugs can also be spotted by the black fecal material they leave behind.

Not just mattresses, though! The whole room should be inspected for bed bugs of every size and color (from translucent unfed 1 mm nymphs, to rust-colored, bulging just-fed 6 mm adults), fecal stains, cast skins, and bed bug eggs. These photos may help.

And college students need to know that you may never react to bed bug bites, and may still be the nightly meal for bed bugs.

Also see this video from NBC 10 in Providence, R.I. Similar Posts:

• Bed bugs at college: SUNY Potsdam
• University of Central Missouri (and other Missouri colleges) vs. bed bugs
• Lou Sorkin, “The man who lets the bed bugs bite”
• Man on #2 train with bed bugs: bed bug hysteria? Or fact?
• Colleges react to bed bugs: Loyola (Chicago), Boston University, Brigham Young (Hawaii)

The long-awaited University of Florida study of bed bug dogs that we mentioned last year has now been published:

Ability of Bed Bug-Detecting Canines to Locate Live Bed Bugs and Viable Bed Bug Eggs

MARGIE PFIESTER, PHILIP G. KOEHLER, AND ROBERTO M. PEREIRA
Department of Entomology, Building 970 Natural Area Drive,
University of Florida, Gainesville, FL 32611-0620
J. Econ. Entomol. 101(4): 1389-1396 (2008)

Here’s the abstract in full:

ABSTRACT The bed bug, Cimex lectularius L., like other bed bug species, is difficult to visually locate because it is cryptic. Detector dogs are useful for locating bed bugs because they use olfaction rather than vision. Dogs were trained to detect the bed bug (as few as one adult male or female) and viable bed bug eggs (five, collected 5-6 d after feeding) by using a modified food and verbal reward system. Their efficacy was tested with bed bugs and viable bed bug eggs placed in vented polyvinyl chloride containers. Dogs were able to discriminate bed bugs from Camponotus floridanus Buckley, Blattella germanica (L.), and Reticulitermes flavipes (Kollar), with a 97.5% positive indication rate (correct indication of bed bugs when present) and 0% false positives (incorrect indication of bed bugs when not present). Dogs also were able to discriminate live bed bugs and viable bed bug eggs from dead bed bugs, cast skins, and feces, with a 95% positive indication rate and a 3% false positive rate on bed bug feces. In a controlled experiment in hotel rooms, dogs were 98% accurate in locating live bed bugs. A pseudoscent prepared from pentane extraction of bed bugs was recognized by trained dogs as bed bug scent (100% indication). The pseudoscent could be used to facilitate detector dog training and quality assurance programs. If trained properly, dogs can be used effectively to locate live bed bugs and viable bed bug eggs.

You can easily access it on the Armed Forces Literature Retrieval System, using the title above.

The study used dogs trained by Pepe Peruyero.

The results are impressive: “Dogs trained to locate live bed bugs and viable
bed bug eggs had an overall accuracy of 97%, which is similar to previous studies on insect detector dogs” (1394).

But there was also a 10% no-indication rate on viable bed bug eggs (10% of the time, dogs did not alert to viable eggs being present). The study suggests this can be attributed to a low concentration of the target odor. These false negatives (as well as false positives) can also be attributed to the handler’s “misreading dog behavior” (1394).

Ultimately, the study concludes that

Dogs can be trained to locate cryptic insects that are difficult to uncover visually as long as dogs are trained in a similar manner to the method we used, training is maintained regularly, an experienced handler is used, and nontarget odors are separated from target odors (1395).

This comes as no surprise, but cannot be emphasized enough. We know that bed bug dogs can detect bed bugs. We also know that it doesn’t always work.

Bed bug dogs have to be properly trained, the training needs to be ongoing once they’re with the handler, and the handler has to know what they’re doing and do it well.

Everyone is not cut out to be a dog handler. This is a booming industry and a lot of people are trying to get in on it. People with no experience handling dogs are among them and some of these may not be cut out for it.

The potential is there for people to obtain bed bug dogs from the trainers but to handle them improperly, or not maintain training. So even if your bed bug dog handler got his or her dog from the same source, depending on how the handler is working with the dog now, your results may not be as impressive.

Consumers considering a bed bug dog need to remember that anyone can hang out a shingle and advertise their “bed bug dog;” there’s no government agency certifying their effectiveness. So get references and recommendations and choose wisely.Similar Posts:

• Milwaukee Housing Authority purchases bed bug sniffing dog
• Bed bugs bite in Edmonton sleep disorder clinic
• Apartment Therapy on bed bugs, bed bug sniffing dogs
• Intro. 57: bed bug task force to get New York City Council vote on 3/11
• Man on #2 train with bed bugs: bed bug hysteria? Or fact?

The University of Florida News reports on tests being run by U of F researchers on bed bug dogs:

Nine-pound Nudie’s feet skitter across the concrete floor as she speeds by, keeping her tiny nose to the ground. She scurries around the perimeter of a bed, then hops on top.

“Find your B’s, find your B’s,” handler Jose “Pepe” Peruyero commands. Within seconds, she’s pawing furiously at a spot on the bed as if trying to dig through it.

She’s found her “B’s” — meaning bedbugs. She gets a handful of kibble, a hearty “Good girl!” from Peruyero and a kiss on her scruffy head.

Nudie is a bedbug-detecting Chinese crested terrier mix trained by Peruyero’s J&K Canine Academy in High Springs, part of a 3½-year collaboration with University of Florida entomologists.

They’ve worked together to gauge the accuracy of more than 17 termite-detecting dogs since 1998, but early next month will be the first time they’ve added bedbug-sniffing dogs like Nudie to the mix.

About 20 dogs will be tested for their termite- and bedbug-detecting accuracy during the Southeast Pest Management Conference May 6-9 on the UF campus. UF entomology graduate students run the tests.

Though the bed bug dogs are not a “silver bullet” for finding bed bugs, they can often find them where humans can’t easily do so:

“We’ve been working to try to make sure that there are quality dogs out there to detect termites, and now bedbugs,” said Phil Koehler, an entomology professor with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “Both those pests are very difficult to detect in structures.”For instance, he said, researchers have found as many as 15 bedbug nymphs in the slot of a drywall screw.

That’s the sort of stealth that makes bed bugs so hard to find. Humans need all the help we can get, so bring on the trained bed bug dogs, and bring on the tests of their efficacy.

Thanks to lmk for the tip!Similar Posts:

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