Remember the “bed bug sauna” which was designed into the new Lux residence by Vancouver supportive housing developer RainCity?  There’s an article on the building in The Province today, which notes:

The latest supportive housing building to officially open in the Downtown Eastside has something no other building in the city has: a bedbug sauna.

The nine-storey Lux on 65 E. Hastings boasts a 400-square-foot hot room on the ground floor that heats up to 65 C to cook the voracious apple-seed-size parasites that plague many Metro Vancouver homes and Downtown Eastside hotel rooms.

It’s already seen a lot of use from Lux tenants.

“I’ve already brought my couch down two times now, said Greg Cornish, 50. “It’s a really great feature.”

And yes, it also cooks bed bugs which are not “apple-seed-size” but are as small as first instar 1/32″ (1mm) long nymphs.

I want one in my building!  That and the luxe bamboo flooring… sweet.Similar Posts:

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Remember when we reported back in June 2008 that a new RainCity Housing development in Vancouver was going to contain a “bed bug sauna” for treatment of infested items?

The new building “The Lux”, at 65 Hastings Street, is in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a highly infested neighborhood, and provides 25 transitional housing units, and 67 supported long-term housing units.  And they’ve started baking tenants’ bed bugs.

RainCity is a chartiable organization which provides housing to people who need it.  Their website states,

The men and women who benefit from the services of RainCity Housing are treated with dignity and respect, and are offered a safe place to live, independence and improved quality of life.

Nothing says “dignity and respect” as much as helping people to live without the presence of bed bugs.

The Vancouver Courier reported of the new sauna room, that

Staff take bed bug-infested furniture to a 200-square-foot cream-coloured room with a grey cement floor and four metal troughs. A gas boiler heats water and an electric fan spreads heat throughout the room. Simpson, operations manager for RainCity, wraps infested mattresses, carries them carefully to the ground floor room, cranks the dry heat to 60 degrees Celsius for four to six hours, and watches bed bugs creep from the highest point of an item down, until they dry out and fall off.

It does not replace bed bug treatment for the unit, but does mean tenants do not have to throw out belongings which they may have been asked to toss in the past.

However,

RainCity hasn’t run the belongings of tenants moving into The Lux through the oven before they get set up, but it might do so when the flow of tenants moving in decreases. The nine-storey building provides low-barrier transitional housing with intensive staffing on two floors, and provides apartments for men and women who have a history of homelessness.

In my opinion, it would be best to run new tenants’ belongings through the unit.   Many people will not notice they have bed bugs until the problem is pronounced — especially since many people do not react to bed bug bites.  And tenants with bed bugs can spread bed bugs to others via common areas, and outside of the building (buses, hangouts, etc.).

With construction and consultant costs, Simpson estimates the bed bug room cost $8,000 out of the $22 million it took to construct 92 new social housing units in the Downtown Eastside. Extra money was spent in an attempt to seal each unit. Electrical outlets include flanges to keep bed bugs at bay. RainCity’s maintenance contract with a pest control company continues but in this new building, treating rooms above, below and next to an infested one shouldn’t be necessary.

$8000 out of $22 million?   Peanuts.

And simply sealing each unit carefully from the outset may go a long way to helping prevent bed bugs spreading.

The bed bug sauna idea is attracting interest from public housing provider BC Housing:

Bill Briscall, RainCity’s communications manager, said B.C. Housing is interested in including bed bug saunas at each of the 12 city-owned sites where social housing is planned. RainCity Housing runs shelters, including the controversial HEAT shelters under Granville Bridge, long-term housing, outreach programs, life skills and food services.

The Globe and Mail also reported on the Bed Bug Sauna at The Lux (PDF here).Similar Posts:

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• Entire Kansas City high-rise gets thermal treatment for bed bugs
• Bed bugs bite in Richmond, California public housing development
• Towels under the door: when cities abandon tenants with bed bugs
• Mark Sheperdigian on the limits of bed bug inspections

A recent article from the Vancouver Courier was prompted by a woman’s sighting of bugs on a seat,

Kara Ardan was sitting near the back of a Hastings Street bus earlier this month, when something on the seat in front of her made her jump to her feet.

“I just saw something move,” she said. “It was probably a body louse. A good sized one, too. There were a few of them just hanging out there on the back of the seat.”

So the Vancouver Courier asks the valid question of whether local public transportation buses have bed bugs, and we’re told that

… Derek Zabel, the manager of media relations for Coast Mountain Bus Company, says Coast Mountain has had few reports of bugs on buses and none of its vehicles have been fumigated. Every three to four months each bus is scrubbed from top to bottom and a steam cleaning “extractor” sucks the contents out of the cushy seats.

TransLink switched to cloth seats in 2006 and 2007 because people with limited mobility could too easily slip off the old vinyl seats. Of its fleet of 1,400 buses, about 480 have cloth seats.

Then the following claim:

Brian Johnston, a supervisor in environmental health with Vancouver Coastal Health, doubts cloth or vinyl matters when it comes to bugs. He said bed bugs aren’t often transported on people. They generally feed when their human victims are in their deepest slumber, from 2 a.m. to 6 a.m., and then hide. Johnston said bed bugs are lazy, or smart. They don’t stray far from their food source, so if bed bugs bite your ankles, they’re probably living near the foot of your bed.

[Emphasis mine.]

We’ve actually heard that bed bugs are proficient hitchhikers.

Reports of bed bugs on public transportation used to be commonplace.

If bed bugs don’t get transported on people or their stuff, how in the world would bed bugs be spreading from place to place, not just within buildings? How would they have gotten into this Victoria, BC pediatric unit? Or this Vancouver Island detox? Or this fancy hotel?

Just because bed bugs are most likely to be found in beds, does not mean they do not travel.

Perhaps Johnston’s point is that everyone with bed bugs is not going to be carrying them and distributing them everywhere they go all the time. (True.)

However, bed bugs do travel with people, make no mistake.

That’s how our friend Sneaky Simes gets around all the time.

See Coast Mountain denies buses infested with bugs.

See also this related story: Times Article on Spread of Bed Bugs via Trains, Planes and Automobiles.Similar Posts:

• Megan McArdle on Atlantic.com: bed bugs and Craigslist
• Bed bugs bite Edmonton
• Bed bugs continue to multiply in Winnipeg
• Pest Control Technology’s Aug. 2009 bed bug supplement
• Don’t Let the Bed Bugs Bite Act of 2009: new and improved

The Structural Pest Management Association of British Columbia (SPMABC) will be hosting a free information session on bed bugs and related topics this Saturday (February 28th) at Library Square from 9:00am – 1:00pm. Admission is free, but on a first come, first served basis (the room holds 300 people).

Topics will include:

• General Bed Bug Information
• Prevention Tips
• Detection Methods
• Health Concerns
• Tenant Rights
• Landlord Obligations

For more information please email info@spmabc.com.Similar Posts:

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Orkin in Vancouver has just acquired a bed bug sniffing dog.

Vancouver, meet Frankie!

Frankie was rescued from a shelter and trained for 600 hours at Florida Canine Academy (run by Bill Whitstine).

An Orkin employee wrote to Bedbugger,

For a VERY limited time our company will be offering free inspections to those in the Vancouver area that fear they have bed bugs but professionals have not been able to turn up any evidence.

It is important to note that we will not be doing inspections for people that have not yet had any pest control professionals do an inspection first.

They will need to provide proof that the pest professionals are stating that they did not find evidence. We will also only be able to do this free of charge for a limited number of people.

Just to repeat, you must have already been told by a pest control operator that you do not have bed bugs, based on an inspection.

This will surely be a good offer for some in the area. Thanks to Orkin for sharing it with us.

If you’re in Vancouver and qualify, please call the Burnaby manager at (604) 434-6641 and tell them Bedbugger sent you.Similar Posts:

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Ahhh, lovely image, no?

Baked Bed Bugs in Vancouver, well known in our Bedbugger Forums, is in the news today, having done a thermal bed bug remediation for a New Westminster, BC family that was short of funds and going through a bad bed bug infestation.

The Province reports that Laura Powell, a mother of two, asked a Christmas wish bureau for help, and received not only gifts for the family, but the greatest gift a bed bug sufferer could get for Christmas: an end to bed bugs.

After Powell’s story ran, she was contacted by the Christmas bureau and told there were several families who were willing to sponsor her during the holidays.

On top of being showered with gifts to put under the tree, a bedbug company by the name of Baked Bed Bugs offered to fumigate her apartment free of charge.

“He is one of the nicest men I have ever met in my whole life,” she said of the owner of Baked Bed Bugs. “We are wonderfully happy. I’m just so pleased.” After having just about all her Christmas wishes answered — although she was unable to visit her family due to the snow — Powell is looking forward to the new year. She hopes to move to a new apartment soon.

Of course, they referred to the thermal treatment as “fumigation.” That word — as a stand-in for “treatment” — seems particularly beloved to the Canadian media.Similar Posts:

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The Official 2010 Olympics Newswire blogger David Eby says

News is ripping through the DTES that BC Housing may have found an effective way to control bedbug populations in SRO hotels.

The DTES is Vancouver’s bed bug-beleaguered Downtown Eastside.

And now, Eby continues,

BC Housing determined that ‘food grade diatomaceous earth, fresh water based’ within the wall cavities of SRO hotels will be a very effective method for dealing with the pesky critters.

We’ve heard about the drill-holes-in-the-wall-and-fill-them-with-DE method before, and have heard of PCOs doing this to help counteract the spread of bed bugs within the walls of buildings, from one unit to another.

It seems like a useful enough measure, but luckily, it does not seem to be the whole plan.

This BC Housing Newsletter (click for a PDF, see page 4) indicates the organization is considering and/or trying out some of the newest bed bug technologies including bed bug sniffing dogs, extreme temperatures, steam, thermal treatment (such as the sauna placed in the new RainCity development) and (this is a new one to me) smoke pellets which are said to be currently in use in the US but not yet approved by Health Canada.

As DTES resident stephanie argues in the comments, the plan is not a cure-all, and instead,

BC Housing should be getting a pest control company to treat infested buildings as a cleanout – each infested unit, plus the units above, below, and on either side, or even building-wide. *Minimum* two treatments two weeks apart. There is no substitute for a comprehensive, well-executed pest control strategy.

The other thing they should be doing is routine inspections for bedbugs – every three months to start, cutting back to every six, maybe, once it’s under control. A very large number of people don’t react to the bites, so they don’t become aware they have the bugs until the bugs become visible – and given how well bedbugs hide, if you start seeing them you have a very serious infestation on your hands. Relying on self-reporting, combined with inadequate landlord response, is what’s got a lot of buildings into this mess in the first place.

Yup. We know self-reporting is inadequate in terms of determining which units are infested.

stephanie also gives her bed bug activism credentials:

A note: the reason I can yabber about this is because I’ve been involved in DTES community responses to the bedbug crisis, and because I helped to develop my DTES co-op’s bedbug strategy. It’s worked. Because we’ve been proactive with inspections and treatment (including helping disabled members with unit prep, etc.), we haven’t had a single instance of unit-to-unit transmission in my building.

Right on, stephanie! Sounds like the rallying cry to potential members of (the as yet not existing to my knowledge) Vancouver vs. Bed Bugs.

Shout out to my fellow bed bug activists.

I got to this story via Beyond Robson.

This is the Vancouver page on the Bed Bug Registry.

This is Vancouver Coastal Health’s Guide to Bed Bug Control.Similar Posts:

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Maciej from the Bed Bug Registry has let me know of a few site improvements he’s added.

First, you can look up hotels and see all reports for a given chain. Here’s an example. Of course, no chain is immune to bed bugs, but companies may deal proactively with bed bugs to different degrees.

Also, you can now enter an address at the Bed Bug Registry and get an alert if anyone later reports bed bugs at the address.

Don’t assume that no report for your address is necessarily good news, however; most people still don’t post their infestations on the registry.

But look at what happens when they do: this Vancouver address has 108 reports.

It looks like these folks are using the Registry to do their tenant organizing!

Thanks, Maciej, for the site, and for sharing your news!Similar Posts:

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The Vancouver Sun reports,

Bedbug complaints in Metro Vancouver, which first started in 2003 with 40 complaints, have doubled each year for the past five years, said local expert Shelley Beaudet.

That means there were:

40 bed bug complaints in 2003,

80 in 2004,

160 in 2005,

320 in 2006,

640 in 2007, and

1280 in 2008.

That’s a total of 2,520 in five years.  And I imagine those are just the official complaints.  I would guess most bed bug cases never get officially reported by fearful tenants, their landlords, or homeowners.

When buildings like the one in Pendrell Street, described in this article, have 114 units and are 80% infested (that’s 91 infested units), it’s hard to believe the numbers aren’t even higher.

They will be soon, if this keeps up at the current rate: we can expect

2,560 complaints in 2009

5,120 in 2010 (just in time for the Vancouver Olympics!), and a whopping

10,240 official bed bug complaints in three years’ time, in 2011.

Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

Vancouver needs to aggressively treat this problem, especially in the besieged and densely populated Downtown Eastside community.

There is some hope in that developers are beginning to respond to this problem.  The article mentions the new RainCity development going up in Vancouver which will have a built-in sauna for decontaminating infested items.

The Vancouver Sun also goes into the stress bed bugs cause:

[exterminator Mark Amery of Vancouver Bed Bug Control Inc.] said living with bedbugs is stressful. “Usually [people] are sleep-deprived because the bedbugs eat at night,” Amery said. “Some people are crying on the phone. Some people are just done.”

Don’t we know it!Similar Posts:

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This Globe and Mail article is about Vegas, Care Pest and Wildlife Control’s bed bug dog, based in Burnaby, British Columbia.

But it includes a section on the status of bed bug aggregate pheromone research being undertaken by Dr. Gerhard Gries of Simon Fraser University:

Understanding how insects communicate with each other is the key to developing effective new tools in the fight to eradicate bedbugs.

Simon Fraser University professor Dr. Gerhard Gries, an expert in insect chemical ecology, is investigating how bedbugs use airborne chemical compounds called pheromones to communicate.

Not only have Prof. Gries and his collaborators identified this compound, they now know how to manufacture pheromones in a laboratory.

“A synthetic replica of this message, made of very harmless chemicals, can be put into a trap and placed in a room with a potential infestation, and if any insects appear, you know there are bedbugs in the room.”

The SFU-developed pheromone traps have been patented and will soon undergo testing. If all goes well, they will be in the toolboxes of Vancouver exterminators within two years.

We’ve heard more than one team is working on bed bug pheromone traps.

Whoever wins the race to the working bed bug trap will have a lot of happy customers.

Not to sound ungrateful, but I sure hope it takes less than two years.Similar Posts:

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