WFTV in Florida helped some low-income tenants with bed bugs to get help.

The owner of Oakwood apartments in Mount Dora tried to charge seven families almost $3,000 each for extermination fees.

The South Florida based company, Miami Mar Incorporated, told the residents they would be kicked out if they didn’t pay.

Whether this is fair, or legal, is one question.

Whether asking low-income tenants to come up with that kind of money for treatment is practical is an easy “no.”

But HUD had other ideas:

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development [HUD] helps pay the rent at the complex for people who can’t afford it. After Eyewitness News contacted HUD, the agency told the landlord extermination is an operating expense that the tenants don’t have to pay for.

Watch WFTV’s video at Residents Told To Pay For Bed Bug Infestation – News Story – WFTV Orlando.Similar Posts:

• Status of New Jersey bed bug extermination bill A3203: so far so good

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

In some places, landlords don’t have to provide bed bug treatment.

According to this site, Florida isn’t one of them. The site notes,

General Landlord Duties

Landlords are required to deliver possession of the rental property to the renter when the lease period begins. Failure to do so may entitle the renter to sue for damages. A landlord must ensure that residential property is habitable. This includes complying with all building, housing and health codes … Certain pests (e.g., rats, mice, roaches, ants, bedbugs) must be exterminated. … If a landlord fails to keep up with required repairs, a tenant should give the landlord written notice of the noncompliance. If the landlord fails to make the repairs within seven days of receiving notice, the tenant has the right to terminate the lease.

I’m not sure of the situation here (if there are exceptions, as in some places), but this Jacksonville tenant is tossing out her furniture and trying to self-treat because she can’t afford a pest control professional. Click here for the video, or here for the article.

Update 11/26:  The Jacksonville woman, Nicole Fenton, has now had Turner Pest Control bring their bed bug dog Abby in and treat her home free of charge.  Thank goodness!

I hope her bed bugs are completely gone very soon.

Similar Posts:

None Found

According to this report from TampaBay.com, Personal Enrichment for Mental Health Services, 11254 58th St. N, in Pinellas Park, Florida (near Tampa) was closed for bed bug treatment last week.

Interestingly,

The bed bug infestation came to light last week after the Pinellas County Health Department received an anonymous call about the problem.

So do call those health departments to report bed bugs in public spaces, or your workplace, people.

Even more interestingly,

Unlike roaches, which can be spotted easily, bed bugs hide, so “we don’t even bother looking for them,” said Charles Minor, a supervisor with the health department’s environmental division. “If we get a complaint, we assume that they’re there. We focus on getting rid of them.”

We’ve heard some pest control operators treat bed bugs the same way, even though in many places, it’s illegal to treat without evidence. Yes, bites are a form of evidence, but they can come from other sources, and so don’t definitively indicate bed bugs.

Still, I appreciate the Pinellas County Health Department’s enthusiasm for treating bed bugs.

PEMHS stopped taking new patients, moved those in the facility elsewhere and tented the building for fumigation, said Erin Gillespie, a spokeswoman for the Department of Children and Families, which oversees PEMHS. The building remained closed until Monday when employees and residents began moving back in.

It sounds like the building was treated with vikane gas fumigation. The facility may wish to educate employees and clients about bed bugs, since we can assume the bed bugs may have both been brought into the center from someone’s home, and may have been taken home by others, infesting their homes.

If employees or clients have bed bugs at home and do not get proper treatment, the facility can easily become reinfested.Similar Posts:

None Found

This article reports that bed bugs are getting around in Orange County, Florida:

“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.Similar Posts:

None Found

TheStar.com | Joe Fiorito updates us on prior bed bug story

“… when bedbugs spread to her apartment, and when the Toronto Community Housing Corporation could not respond to her complaints…, she booked a fumigator on her own and paid… to take care of the problem. She has now been reimbursed by TCHC.” This public housing agency in Toronto seems to be taking bed bugs seriously.

Bed Bugs Force Orlando Family To Throw Out Furniture – Central Florida News 13

Tenants in Orlando “throw out mattresses and wash all of their clothes, but the bugs are still there.” This video reminds us that tenants, landlords, and journalists need to be better educated about bed bugs. Tossing furniture out is not the way to get rid of bed bugs.

And, finally, the first ever Bedbugger.com “Aim Higher” award goes to this shelter resident, who declares living in a shelter with bed bugs “beats sleeping outdoors:”

Billings Gazette (letter to the editor): Staying in Mission beats sleeping outdoors

“As a resident of the Montana Rescue Mission, I have experience with bedbugs. They aren’t fun, but no worse than a few mosquito bites at a barbecue. Anyone who says they prefer to sleep on the streets isn’t credible.”

Absolutely, sleeping on the streets is almost always worse than bed bugs. But I disagree that they are no worse than mosquitoes. For many of us, much worse. Bed bug bite reactions vary from not noticeable to extremely uncomfortable. Some are so allergic they end up in the hospital, while others on the “itchy” end of the spectrum lose sleep and experience discomfort.

In any case, I believe strongly that people living in shelters should be entitled to accommodation that’s a darn sight better than sleeping rough. Isn’t that the point?Similar Posts:

None Found

We were part of a radio station’s answer to a trivia question, and we had no idea!

It was 1015 The Point in Tampa, Florida’s Nearly Impossible Question, and we have no idea when, but suspect it was after Tampa’s News 10 mentioned us last April.

Anyway, this is old news. Eight months later, bed bugs have had a lot more press, as they’ve continued to spread. This means bed bugs are becoming so well known they may soon not be as eligible for the “Nearly Impossible Question.”

Similar Posts:

None Found

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:

None Found

You can click here to see a map of the last 90 or so visitors to the site. It will look different from what I describe below, because I am writing about what I saw there about 4-5 hours ago. Now it’s almost midnight in New York, and the Aussies are starting to surf in.

For those of you who don’t know, webpages can tell where you’re coming from (though not very specifically). They know the location of your ISP. For most people, this comes up as somewhere near where they live, though it’s not always precise and sometimes it’s just the country. It also tells the webmaster what internet browser you use (Go Firefox!) and whether you like Macs or Windows machines. No, I do not know your name, or where you live, don’t worry!

This may all seem very “meta,” so far, but we know that our readership consists of four kinds of people:

a) People who have, or think they have, or recently had, bed bugs.
b) People whose work makes them concerned about bed bugs (pest control professionals, entomologists, politicians, landlords, hotel managers, social service agencies, government officials, are just some sectors that I have heard from).
c) People who have heard about bed bugs and are concerned, and want to know more.

I think that group (a) is in the majority, and although most people don’t comment, most commenters fit in group a. In any case, the Bedbugger.com readership is a map of bed bug concern, and you’d be pretty safe betting its a map of where bed bugs are popping up–with the caveat, of course, that our site pops up more in US search engines than those abroad, and also that our readers are overwhelmingly English-speakers, though we have dreams of breaking down those linguistic barriers!

This is where the last 89 readers were reading the blog (circa 6:30 this evening):

1. San Diego, California, United States
2. Nottingham, Nottingham, United Kingdom
3. Walden, New York, United States
4. Long Island City, New York, United States
5. New York, New York, United States
6. Plattekill, New York, United States
7. Hull, Quebec, Canada
8. Durant, Iowa, United States
9. Miamiville, Ohio, United States
10. Gibraltar
11. Calgary, Alberta, Canada
12. Boston, Massachusetts, United States
13. Humble, Texas, United States
14. Germantown, Maryland, United States
15. Rowland Heights, California, United States
16. New York, New York, United States
17. New York, New York, United States
18. Hadley, Kentucky, United States
19. Buffalo, New York, United States
20. Hveragerði, Arnessysla, Iceland
21. Pine Falls, Manitoba, Canada
22. Livonia, Michigan, United States
23. Bayside, New York, United States
24. Woodhaven, New York, United States
25. Denver, Colorado, United States
26. New York, New York, United States
27. United States
28. Waterloo, Quebec, Canada
29. Los Angeles, California, United States
30. Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
31. Santa Maria, California, United States
32. Beamsville, Ontario, Canada
33. Kansas City, Missouri, United States
34. Corona, New York, United States
35. Barker, Texas, United States
36. Readville, Massachusetts, United States
37. Palo Alto, California, United States
38. Salt Lake City, Utah, United States
39. Mill Valley, California, United States
40. Ridgewood, New York, United States
41. Mehama, Oregon, United States
42. San Francisco, California, United States
43. Feeding Hills, Massachusetts, United States
44. Swedesburg, Iowa, United States
45. Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
46. West New York, New Jersey, United States
47. Lancaster, Blackpool, United Kingdom
48. New York, New York, United States
49. Miami, Florida, United States
50. Anaheim, California, United States
51. Harrow, Harrow, United Kingdom
52. Wilsonville, Oregon, United States
53. Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom
54. Forest Hill, Ontario, Canada
55. Wayne, New Jersey, United States
56. Kecskemét, Bacs-Kiskun, Hungary
57. Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, Canada
58. Short Hills, New Jersey, United States
59. Seattle, Washington, United States
60. Jackson, Mississippi, United States
61. Tulsa, Oklahoma, United States
62. Secaucus, New Jersey, United States
63. Long Island City, New York, United States
64. United States
65. Tranbjerg, Arhus, Denmark
66. Naples, Florida, United States
67. San Francisco, California, United States
68. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
69. Gainesville, Florida, United States
70. Edmond, Oklahoma, United States
71. Hempstead, New York, United States
72. Everett, Massachusetts, United States
73. United States
74. United States
75. São Paulo, Sao Paulo, Brazil
76. Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada
77. Bismarck, North Dakota, United States
78. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
79. Downers Grove, Illinois, United States
80. United States
81. Bend, Oregon, United States
82. Henderson, Nevada, United States
83. Montréal, Quebec, Canada
84. Sunnyvale, California, United States
85. Arlington, Texas, United States
86. United States
87. New York, New York, United States
88. Fairfax, Virginia, United States
89. Rochester, New York, United States

You might expect that most of these people came from the bed bug hot spots. We get lots of readers from Chicago, Boston, NYC, San Francisco, Vancouver, Toronto. So it’s surprising that 89 people came from such a wide variety of places:

68 from at least 33 states (only 12 of these from NYC, San Francisco or Boston);
11 from 5 provinces in Canada;
4 from 4 cities in the UK (none of them London);
1 person each from: Hungary, Ireland, Denmark, Brazil, Iceland, and Gilbraltar.

In New York state, 10 of the 17 visitors were from NYC. And of the 10 in NYC, 60% were in Queens, where, unlike Staten Island, Brooklyn, the Bronx and Manhattan, each neighborhood has its own name used for the purposes of the postal service: Ridgewood, Corona, Long Island City, Woodhaven, Bayside, New York, are all in Queens, and part of NYC. Remember the Queens Gazette speculating that Queens was the “ground zero for NYC’s bed bugs? Well, I am still not sure it’s true, but it seems plausible: we certainly have a lot of Bedbuggers in Queens.

I peeked at the traffic report for the site because I have a geeky side and I find it interesting to know where you’re coming from. However, looking at it can tell us something about the bed bug problem. This is not a scientific study, but just a snapshot of our site’s traffic does tell you who’s worried about bed bugs (and, we can assume, many are worried because they have bed bugs).

Most of those cities were not capitals or the biggest cities in their regions or countries. A small percentage are from those places you think are hot spots. It should serve as a warning sign that bed bugs, like Bedbuggers, are everywhere, and way more spread out than you thought.Similar Posts:

None Found

Oh dear, yesterday’s news round-up missed the Tampa Bay CBS news website’s article about bed bugs, which kindly directed many Tampa residents here.

Well, I wish I’d seen it yesterday, so I could have warned more of the folks from Tampa. The CBS article isas originally posted, was wrong: do NOT use the diatomaceous earth (DE) designed for pools in your home to fight bed bugs. It’s dangerous. Use food grade freshwater DE instead. See our FAQ on the subject. (CBS 10 has now updated its article to reflect the dangers of pool grade DE.)

We also have FAQs about what to do if you think you have bed bugs. Hint: the first step is not, as the article states, to treat yourself, the second is not to have a PCO apply one aerosol, as the article also states. Bed bugs are serious and you’d do well to have a Pest Control Operator who knows bed bugs come in and treat your home properly from step one. Don’t believe me? Ask people in the forums.

Florida’s been getting a lot of misinformation and lousy bed bug advice from its news media this month. In such a temperate climate, you have to take bed bugs seriously, or they’re going to have a field day this summer.

Heat. humidity plus bed bug bites = misery, trust me, even though I’m just a New Yorker.

Update 3pm EST: As mentioned in the comments below, several of us have attempted to leave comments mentioning the problems with pool grade DE on the Tampa CBS website, but these were subsequently removed. I think journalists who won’t correct their information, or even allow dissent in a space provided for comments, should be ashamed. Read the SF Chronicle article instead, for less biased information.

Update 10pm EST: My comment is up now (having apparently reappeared some time after I wrote the above), and the journalists have, in fact, corrected the article to say that Pool Grade DE should not be used due to health concerns. Had I known, as ALex points out in the comments, that pool grade DE is also less effective against bed bugs, because of the way its processed, I would have stressed that too. Nevertheless, the Tampa Bay article still contains poor advice about the recommended treatment, and what to do first–namely, call a PCO who knows how to kill bed bugs, since they don’t all know. We’re glad they linked to us and hope Florida readers will find more assistance here.

Update 4/11: Unfortunately, the Southwest Florida News-Press article “State Sees Bed Bug Invasion” includes the entire original Tampa Bay 10 article referred to above, including the advice to buy pool grade DE from the pool supply store. There’s no comment box. There’s no telling how many other Florida papers may carry this story, online or off. That’s a lot of misinformation. Interestingly, the side-box on the article announes “More from News-Press.com:” and the subsequent link “Learn about bed bugs” directs readers to Bedbugger.com, without mentioning us by name. (And clearly, what you’re reading right now is not “More From News-Press.com” at all.) Come to think of it, Tampa Bay 10 didn’t name us either. They just said “click here.” What’s with that?

Okay, let me start over:

Welcome, News-Press readers, and please look at our FAQs. Much of what was written in the article you just read was erroneous…Similar Posts:

None Found