• Edgie in San Francisco
• San Francisco mattress photos
• Street Mattresses, Larkin and Sutter, San Francisco
• Shout out to bedbuggers in San Francisco

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It’s not a particularly helpful story, however.

For starters, there are inaccuracies. Let’s start with this caption below a photo of an adult bed bug:

Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/4 inch long. They are brown or red-brown in color…

No!

They are never 3/4 inches long. Bed bugs, fed or unfed, range from 1/32 to 1/6 inch long. After hatching from the egg, they have 5 nymphal stages and one adult stage. Unfed bed bug nymphs (first instars that have never eaten) are clear in color. Fed bed bugs can be anywhere from red to rust to brown in color.

(Editor’s note, the error was made less egregious: by late Sunday night, it said “Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/8 inch long.” This is still inaccurate, however.)

This matters because people considering whether they might have bed bugs need to know the correct size, and that unfed nymphs are translucent, not red or brown.

Also, the “do’s and don’ts” suggests people “bag books, papers, most loose objects, and contents of closets so exterminators have access to all cracks and crevices in the home.”

This is not good advice in and of itself. If you bag up everything in your home, or discard it (for that matter), before a Pest Control Operator (PCO) has inspected and verified the presence of bed bugs, then it may be very difficult for them to diagnose your problem. You may end up with all your stuff in bags and PCOs telling you you don’t have bed bugs. And they may be wrong.

What’s more, simply bagging stuff that contains bed bugs or their eggs means you have bags full of bed bugs. What are you going to do with that, now?

Your PCO may advice you to carefully inspect and clean and bag items, for a time during treatment. Make sure you do so only after the problem has been identified by the PCO, and after the PCO has told you when you will be removing stuff from those bags. The answers on that seem to vary. Reading this FAQ might help you be prepared to discuss the issue with your PCO.

One interesting tidbit was an update of the previous data from HPD on bed bug complaints and violations.

The numbers are off the charts: In 2004, New Yorkers placed 537 calls to 311 about bedbugs in their homes; the city slapped 82 landlords with bedbug violations, data show.

In the fiscal year that ended in June, 6,889 infestation complaints were logged and 2,008 building owners were hit with summonses.

They must get rid of the pests within 30 days or face possible action in Housing Court, the city Department of Housing, Preservation & Development says.

This would be for fiscal year July 2006-June 2007. You’ll recall that approximately 1/3 fewer complaints were logged by 311 the prior fiscal year, and less than half as many were declared actual bed bug cases.

But these numbers are misleading because they only represent cases where those with bed bugs were tenants in city apartments and called 311 to report their bed bugs. As I have been saying for more than a year, most people do not do this. Out of a hundred tenants in NYC with bed bugs, I’d be surprised if more than one or two called 311. Most people don’t even realize this is an option–they know from past experience that pest complaints are directed at landlords. Moreover, those who do know, more often than not, choose not to call, because they’d rather work through the landlord if possible, rather than file a housing complaint and risk alientating the landlord. (This is often the last resort.)

The numbers are also misleading because they don’t include public housing, which logged, “1,708 verified bedbug cases in 277 public housing projects this year, the city Housing Authority says.”

The numbers also do not include statistics for those who own co-operative apartments, condos, or other housing.

The statistics offered on bed bugs in the schools (50 schools suffered a total of 74 bed bug “cases”) don’t line up with data the same newspaper shared back in February 2007, when the same newspaper reported that 43 schools had identified a total of 95 live bed bugs. (The story is gone, so you will have to read about it here.) Though it’s interesting to know that only an additional 7 schools have discovered bed bugs in the last ten months, it seems they must be defining “bed bug case” differently now than then, to have gone from 95 “bugs” to 74 “cases”.

Any statistics from the schools are skewered, however, since teachers have to see, catch, and mail away a bed bug for verification before the presence of a bed bug in the classroom will be registered. And while this may seem reasonable, anyone here will tell you you can be bitten badly and for a very long time before you ever see one. A lone teacher in a busy NYC classroom has slim chance of finding a bed bug on a student. Shall we assume, then, there are more?

Perhaps the most intriguing story in the article was that of Bernard Spitzer’s apartment building. We’re told,

[Bed bugs] even contaminated five or six apartments in the swanky rental tower at 220 E. 72nd St. owned by Bernard Spitzer, the governor’s 83-year-old father.

Several tenants described a persistent, if intermittent, infestation on the 15th, 16th and 17th floors.

A few infested floors, midway up a high-rise: nothing unusual there. But wait:

Spitzer’s 28-story building sits atop the six-story home of Marymount Manhattan College, which discovered seven infestations in two residence halls. The problem was under control by October, a spokeswoman said.

Marymount Manhattan has three residences for students, none of which are in this building. It does cause one to wonder whether there is any connection between the incidents on the 15th-17th floors and in the homes of some of those who spend part of their time in the first six floors.

We also get an update on the city’s “response” to bed bugs:

City officials say HPD inspectors are increasing enforcement as complaints mushroom and the Health Department is handling education and prevention efforts. It’s not more actively involved because its focus is on disease-spreading pests, officials said.

“That’s not good enough,” said City Councilman Gale Brewer (D-upper West Side.) “It’s great that we’re not smoking as much, and great that we’re not eating trans fats, but we need to focus on bedbugs in the same aggressive manner.”

Brewer wants to create a Bedbug Task Force and bar the sale of reconditioned mattresses, which the Bloomberg administration opposes because it “would adversely impact lower-income New Yorkers,” a mayoral spokesman said.

I love Brewer’s comments about smoking and trans fats, both of which are banned from local restaurants. Bed bugs are not.

Brewer first went down this Bed Bug Task Force/resales of mattresses road in the fall of 2006, but we haven’t really seen any results yet from these initiatives.

All in all, the city’s response is very ostrich-like. Let’s compare with other cities in the US: San Francisco has guidelines for dealing with bed bugs in apartment buildings, hotels, and other locations, as does the state of California. Lexington, KY and Cincinnati, Ohio health departments (yes, health departments, Mr. Bloomberg) have both declared war on bed bugs.

Lexington tells residents to call the health department if they think they have bed bugs.

Cincinnati has a hotline just for bed bug information. They also have dedicated bed bug trash pickup for discarded furniture. We think encouraging residents to throw furniture away, rather than helping them pay for treatment, is misguided. But Cincinnati is trying. They think education is key. Hear that, Mr. Bloomberg?

San Francisco City Supervisor Chris Daly got $63,000 in this year’s budget to help low-income residents pay for laundry and freezing of possessions. San Francisco politicians listened to SRO activists who told them this money was needed. Because poor people seriously can’t afford to do the necessary tenant’s part of bed bug treatment.

And let me be clear: not one of these localities is doing enough to combat bed bugs. None of them, not by a long shot. Much more help is needed, especially laws about disclosure of infestations, tracking of infestations by government agencies (so someone is actually paying attention to where bed bugs are spreading), and financial assistance to landlords, homeowners, and tenants who are having trouble paying for preparations and effective treatment. Bringing back some of the recently outlawed, more effective pesticides for targeted bed bug use would go a long way (and no, I do not mean DDT).

Meanwhile, NYC is doing none of this. The NYC Department of Education has deployed “bed bug kits” to schools. Their website claims:

Schools are not an ideal location for bed bugs to reproduce, because they are nocturnal insects that require feeding prior to reproduction; but in the event that bedbugs do show up in our schools, the DOE’s Pest Management Unit is providing a Bed Bug Kit to deal with specimens.

This is erroneous information. Bed bugs are nocturnal if food is available at night, pure and simple. Transplanted to schools, they will bite, reproduce, and thrive. This is an example of wishful thinking, which seems to be the backbone of NYC’s bed bug policy.

NYC does not even tell tenants to call 311 about bed bugs, unless they wade through the HPD website looking for this directive.

And yet bases its assessment of the severity of the problem on those calls.

Discuss.

If you have trouble with the article link at top, try this one.

• Lexington, KY vs. New York, NY: a tale of two bedbugged cities
• Excerpt from article re NYC Department of Ed policy
• The UFT (NYC teachers’ union): how do we get the city to be proactive about bed bugs?
• Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington in NYC: latest bed bug lawsuit

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The week before Christmas and raining, to boot, some 14 families were tipped out of a Ventura inn because of electrical hazards and an infestation of bedbugs.

— Richard Neal, his fiancée and her mother with late-stage lung cancer.

— William and Tina Kirkpatrick and their two children, 7 and 5.

— Franchine Ivans, Steve Jordan and their four children.

They are among the approximately 40 people — including about 15 children — staying in the 37-room Travelers Beach Inn told 4 p.m. Tuesday by the county Building and Safety and Health divisions that they would have to leave until the motel’s problems are fixed. It is not known when the motel might reopen, as reported by Star reporter Kevin Clerici in his Wednesday article, “Bedbugs, electrical issues force tenants from motel.”

Tenants at Travelers Beach Inn, 929 E. Thompson Blvd., pay $275 weekly rent. Although it is more costly than renting a small apartment, many can’t afford to pay first- and last month’s rent.

Whoever you are, whatever the state of your bank account, bed bugs are a burden. But they seriously worsen the already bad conditions many are living under. In this case, people who can barely make their current rent are temporarily displaced, with no means of moving to a new home.

We hear time and again of people with serious illnesses, disabilities, infirmities related to age, Alzheimer’s disease, single parents, parents of small children–all facing bed bugs. Their battle with bed bugs is not easy, or quick. If you think it’s hard for young, healthy professionals like Nicholas Brown, consider how bad it can be when the deck is stacked against you.

When people say “it’s just a bug”–well, yeah. I get that. But it can seriously wipe many people out financially, energy-wise, timewise.

We need bed bugs to be taken seriously, and for motels and other establishments to be proactive in identifying and treating problems–and educating residents about how to spot and prevent bed bugs.

And we need the government, as well as private industry, to take responsibility. Not just for shutting things down when codes are violated. But for helping avoid such drastic measures in the first place.

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it. The Christmas story is about a couple with no where to sleep and a baby on the way. I’ll be thinking about those homeless Travelers Beach Inn residents on Christmas.

Update (1/12/2008):

This article  says the Traveler’s Beach Inn has reopened, “pest-free” and with the other repairs done:

The motel also was thoroughly fumigated, and a health inspector says it is now free of bedbugs.

It is unclear whether the motel was actually fumigated with vikane gas, which has a high success rate as a one-off treatment (we’re told), or whether “fumigation”
is being used as a shorthand for pest control spray treatments, which often require many follow-ups.  I am not sure how well this works when people are not present.  (We do know that in serious infestations, when inspectors or others come in after the room has been vacant, bed bugs often appear, in daylight, looking for food.)

Perhaps soon housing inspectors will take advantage of bed bug dogs as an aid to doing visual bed bug inspections?

• entomologists podcasting; bed bugs and disease; another bedbugged motel closed; Singapore, Hawai’i
• Bed Bugs and Christmas
• Spring break bed bug warnings!
• Bed Bugs in Hampton Roads, Virginia hotels

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• San Francisco mattress photos
• Heavens, when will it end?
• 48th Street between 3rd and Lex, last night
• California fights bed bugs: good news from the golden state

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Welcome to any SFist.com readers who might be feeling a bit itchy of late. You might need the FAQs, or the forums. It might be bed bugs, but we hope it’s a false alarm.

• Bed bugs bounce back: outbreaks in all 50 states
• What do you wish people knew about bed bugs?
• Homage to Catalonia, Props to Apartmenttherapy.com
• National Geographic story on bed bugs

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• Pest Management Professional - Continued technological and educational advancement in pest detection, identification, treatment and control methods. | Web Exclusive | 10 Questions with Jerome GoddardTen Questions with Jerome Goddard (Pest Management Professional Podcast)–includes interesting discussion of whether bed bugs are potential transmitters of disease, or not. From 9/06, but new to me and maybe you too.

  (tags: interview audio bedbugs Dr.JeromeGoddard entomologist sept2006)

• PCTOnline.com :: Article :: [Focus On Public Health] Do Bed Bugs Carry Disease?Article from PCTOnline by Jerome Goddard (11/2003) on whether bed bugs spread disease.

  (tags: bedbugs disease health diseasevector Dr.JeromeGoddard PCTOnline)

• Pest Management Professional podcast | 10 Questions with Alvaro RomeroInterview with Univ. of Kentucky bed bug researcher / graduate student Alvaro Romero. From April 2007.

  (tags: podcast alvaroromero researcher)

• Pest Management Professional Podcast | 10 Questions with Rick CooperInterview with Rick Cooper of Cooper Pest, NJ–focusing on pesticide resistance. September 2007.

  (tags: rickcooper interview podcast sept2007)

• San Jose Mercury News - Bedbugs, electrical problems force evacuation of Ventura motel“A bedbug-infested low-rent Ventura motel was shut down by authorities, forcing poor families and disabled tenants to spend the Christmas season hunting for cheap lodging.” The 37-room Travelers Beach Inn hopes to reopen in a week.

  (tags: bedbugs hotelclosure ventura california travelersbeachinn motel code dec2007 2007 budgetmotel)

• Review of Judith McNeil’s The Girl with the Cardboard Port :: Sarah Chew, thestar.com.my“She recalled with humour the shock of discovering squat toilets, bed bugs, and corpse-eating rats…” From a review of an Australian woman’s memoir of life in 1950s/early 1960s Singapore.

  (tags: singapore bedbugs 1950s 1960s judithmcneil memoir dec2007 2007 bookreview)

• Rats: Hawaii’s first invasive species - The Molokai Times“In cities, rats are one of Hawaii’s biggest pest problems after ants and bed bugs, said Tim Lyons, director of the Hawaii Pest Control Association.” Bed bugs are #2? Not for long, I suspect.

  (tags: bedbugs hawai’i hawaii pests dec2007 2007 spread)

• bed bugs in Virginia Beach (again), Brown County, Ohio, and potential health risks
• New PCT podcast with Dr. Michael Potter
• Ventura County motel closure makes many families homeless at Christmas
• a bed bug story from Hawai’i; Fagerlund on aerosol bombs and pesticides

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• bed bug news for 2007-11-16
• Bed bugs in homeless shelters, casinos, hotels, apartments: Waynesboro, Atlantic City, Greenpoint, Toronto
• bed bug news for 2007-11-15
• bed bugs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and at Cornell University dorms

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Rene Laraine of Thousand Oaks, California, has bed bugs.

Laraine said that after nine treatments performed by two pest control companies, the bedbugs are still there.

A representative for Essex Properties, the company that manages the complex, said the company is doing what it can to try to treat the problem in Laraine’s apartment.

What?

No. I am sorry.

If you have had nine treatments and still have bed bugs, I would seriously question whether someone–landlord, pest control operator, tenant, or neighboring tenant– is not doing what they should to eliminate those bed bugs.

Let’s just go through some things that might be going wrong:

1. The landlord has not had a qualified and knowledgeable pest control operator inspect every adjacent unit (top, bottom, and all sides) and treat them properly if necessary.
2. Treatment is not being repeated by the PCO at appropriate intervals (hint: PCOs who know bed bugs tell us they treat every 10-14 days; at least one in Denver treats at 3-week intervals instead, due to low humidity). Treatment must continue without a gap, until all bed bugs and signs of bed bugs are completely gone.
3. The residents in every infested unit are not getting the same treatment, at the same times.
4. The residents in every infested unit are not cooperating 100% with treatment, and following preparations as instructed by a PCO (who has such guidelines)– these often include washing and drying all clothes and linens on hot, and keeping them in sealed bags, and encasing the mattress. They may be much more extensive.
5. Tenants or building employees are unknowingly re-infesting the unit. (This can happen if you got bed bugs from somewhere and you are getting them again, and again.)

Some of these things can happen due to simple ignorance about how bed bugs operate. For example, a landlord might ask neighbors if they had itchy bites or saw bed bugs. If they say no, it might be assumed they are not being bitten. (Not necessarily true!) PCOs may have treated bed bugs a number of times and may still not understand that fact.

Likewise, PCOs might have difficulty finding visual evidence, or may only count actual bed bugs as visual evidence. (But not seeing these, or not seeing them easily, does not mean a tenant is bed bug-free.)

Landlords may suspect or know neighbors are infested but may be allowing them to refuse treatment (based on anything from religious to medical objections to pesticides). While people may be concerned about the actions of pesticides on children, people with illnesses, and pets, bed bugs must nevertheless be remedied somehow. Neighbors who refuse traditional pesticides must be treated somehow. There are other options.

PCOs may refuse to treat infested units that are not properly prepped. Or may treat un-prepped units without success.  Landlords might simply ignore those tenants’ units. This is a big mistake. Even if Rene is prepped, if his neighbor isn’t, the bed bugs can keep coming.

Other issues may be happening to make bed bugs hard to eradicate: pesticide resistance is real. However, good PCOs are aware of it and have options in their arsenal like dusts which have a mechanical action, and steam: neither of these can be resisted if the bed bug is in contact with them. Combined with pesticides, PCOs should be able to eliminate even pyrethroid-resistant strains of bed bugs, which do exist.

Some of these factors may be the tenant’s fault, make no mistake. Or they may be another tenant’s fault. Many of these factors mean landlords are mismanaging treatment, or hiring PCOs who mismanage treatment. I would put my money on adjacent units being infested and either overlooked or not treated properly.

Whatever the cause, landlords and tenants should be trying to avoid the above situations.

And if you have bed bugs after even four treatments, let alone nine, something is terribly wrong.

• Bed bugs at Berkeley will be treated with… say what?
• Bed bugs & tenant organizing: don’t take this lying down
• Bed bugs in North Jersey
• 25 Grant Street in Denver, Colorado: bed bugs for two years

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O’Farrell St., between Hyde and Leavonworth, San Francisco

Some exciting things are happening in California, and have been for some time. Since we’ve been giving a lot of love to Cincinnati lately, I wanted to fill you in on the California scene.

First, Bedbuggers should know have a friend in California: Dr. Laura Krueger. She’s the Associate Public Health Biologist in the Vector-Borne Disease Section of the California Dept. of Public Health. Laura has commented here a number of times, and has been reading the site for a while. She co-wrote the Guidelines for the Control and Prevention of Bed Bug Infestations in California (February 2007) (click here for a PDF). The California Bed Bug Guidelines were based, in turn, on other similar documents. A footnote tells us: “CDHS adapted these guidelines for bed bug control from the San Francisco Department of Public Health and the Australian Environmental Pest Managers Association.” (Click here for a PDF of the 2nd edition of the Australian Guidelines (June 2007; California based their guidelines on the first edition); the San Francisco Guidelines link is currently down.

The California Bed Bug Guidelines are just that: suggestions, a good plan, for how PCOs, and owners of hotels and multi-unit dwellings should work to prevent and control bed bugs. The Guidelines are not enforceable in and of themselves.

As an example, the Guidelines suggest that PCOs should come a minimum of three times, spaced two weeks apart; that hotel or apartment managers should respond to complaints of bed bugs within 48 hours with a plan of action (and that the plan of action should be executed within 72 hours of the complaint being made); and that tenants should should not remove anything from the infested room until the PCO comes and directs them.

I would argue that some aspects of the guidelines need to be revised. For example, one guideline states that tenants should report bed bugs to the owner or operator “within 24 hours of the pest sighting”. This seems like good advice, but many people are bitten by bed bugs for a long time without actually seeing a pest. PCOs and other professionals are still learning how very stealthy bed bugs can be.

Nevertheless, the Guidelines are impressive and I am grateful that the California Department of Health Services has compiled them.

There have also been some recent positive developments in California in terms of government funding to help those with bed bugs fight the problem. In San Francisco, as the second item down on this page of the Central City SRO Collaborative (CCSRO) website states,

The Central City SRO Collaborative organized with tenants and other community groups to demand funding for subsidies for low-income tenants. At the urging of this activist group, [City of San Francisco] Supervisor Chris Daly got $63,000 in this year’s budget for subsidized laundry and freezing services for low-income tenants with bedbug infestations, a huge public education campaign for tenants and landlords, and 2 annual forums–one for landlords/tenants and one for social service workers/tenants–that will teach public health code, bedbug cleanup, and tenant advocacy.

Let’s pause a moment and reflect on the historical context of this: the hearing happened three months before NYC held its city council hearing on the resale of mattresses (one which has not yet borne fruit), and a good 16 months before Cincinnati’s recent fabled town hall meeting on bed bugs.

This is a wonderful example of how a tenants activist group (CCSRO) helped pressure the city to take action and provide funding for bed bug remediation and public education campaigns. Of special note is that this funding covers assistance to tenants who cannot afford laundry and “freezing services” (love to hear more about where that’s done!) as part of treating their posessions.

And we have also learned that in San Francisco, the Department of Aging and Adult Services (part of Adult Protective Services) can assist, in some cases, with preparation for bed bug treatment for elderly people who have trouble doing this for themselves.

This is something that is much needed, and I hope the provision of such assistance–for elderly people and those with mobility issues–will increase here and everywhere else.

• Toronto Public Health now has a Bed Bug Action Committee. Action, people.
• New York vs. Bed Bugs: NYC is the underdog!
• Brown student wants to provide free bed bug treatment to those who can’t pay
• Toronto Board of Health gearing up to fight bed bugs

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(The following is not really bed bug news, but a reminder of a time not long ago when encountering a bed bug in a place of business was a bit like finding a hair in your salad, but maybe more common.)

(These last two are not really bed bug stories, but they tell us something about how widely known bed bugs are becoming: they’re starting to mean something in popular parlance once again.)

• bed bugs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and at Cornell University dorms
• Bed bugs in casino and senior apartments in New Jersey, Binghamton University (again) and another dust mite photo in the news
• bed bug news for 2007-11-16
• Bed bugs under discussion at university housing officers’ conference

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