Reporter Murray McNeill spoke to local Pest Control Operator Lincoln Poulin:

So how big has the bedbug problem become in Winnipeg?

Poulin said that in his first six years as a full-time exterminator — he’s been doing it for nine years — he only handled two bedbug calls. Last week, the company handled 15 in a single day.

“We also get 10 to 15 people per day, on average, coming into our store to buy sprays and dusts,” he said.

What’s more unnerving is that Poulin said he thinks this is just the tip of the iceberg.

“I don’t even think we’ve started to see the peak in bedbug activity yet. I think the bedbugs will get a lot worse.”

That’s because the critters multiply like crazy, and a lot of Winnipeggers refuse to believe it’s a problem.

“People say, ‘bedbugs? What are you talking about! Bedbugs don’t exist here!’” Poulin said. “But believe me, bedbugs are no longer just a bedtime story.”

Because people are in such denial about the existence of bed bugs, the problem keeps growing. This is big business for Poulin’s, which is experiencing phenomenal growth. And bad news for all of us, as bed bugs spread, and spread, and spread, and bed bugs bite, and bite, and bite.

Public Health Canada entomologist Robbin Lindsay is also cited in the article:

Lindsay said because governments don’t track bedbug counts, it’s hard to say how much they’ve increased in recent years.

And, as we’ve always maintained here at Bedbugger.com, governments need to track bed bug counts. But they’re in denial too: as long as they do not have an accurate gauge of the scope of the problem, they don’t have to take action.

You can read the rest of the article here.

• Sleep deprived woman with bed bugs trips and falls in front of subway
• Bed bugs at Stanford again
• Roger Smith Hotel on Lexington in NYC: latest bed bug lawsuit
• Dr. Michael Potter on bed bugs: “It’s going to get worse. We’re in for some very, very interesting times.”

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Broadwayworld.com reports that

The New York Musical Theatre Festival and Leschen, Mrozek & Sauter present the world premiere of BEDBUGS!!!, an official selection of the New York Musical Theatre Festival’s 2008 Next Link Project. 80’s rock excess meets the Creature Feature in this hilarious and extremely timely hard-rocking new musical by Paul Leschen and Fred Sauter directed by Samuel Buggeln.

BEDBUGS!!! runs September 16-27th, 2008 at the TBG Theater (312 West 36th Street, 3rd Floor). Tickets are $20.00 and will be available at www.NYMF.org or by calling 212-352-3101.

It’s 2012 and Carly, an exterminator hell-bent on avenging her mother’s freak death, has accidentally mutated NYC Bedbugs into bloodthirsty killer Hair Metal Rock Gods. Sweet sidekick Burt has a plan, and troubled Canadian chanteuse Dionne Salon has stumbled onto the scene. But will Carly listen to them and save NYC-or be seduced by her own creation?

More from BroadwayWorld.com, and BugBugsTheMusical.com.

Who’s going?

• Bedbugs!!! wins theater contest
• Songs for Bedbuggers
• Berkshire Fringe show conveys “the neurosis, the exhaustion, the paranoia, the fascination” of bed bugs
• Do not watch this if you have an active bed bug infestation

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The backstretch workers are employed by individual trainers, who typically train horses for several thoroughbred owners. Some workers told investigators that they were paid just $5.06 an hour, far less than the state minimum wage of $7.15 an hour, Ms. Smith said.

In addition, workers told of being bitten by bedbugs in the racetrack’s dormitories and of eating at soup kitchens because they could not afford the restaurants in Saratoga Springs.

It sounds like bed bug problems are not isolated to this race track, either. The Times article later noted:

Lauro Ventura, 61, a groom for 15 years, said in a telephone interview on Wednesday that living conditions at the track were bad. “Three or four of us sleep in a room that’s 10 by 10,” he said in Spanish. “Some guys sleep on air mattresses, some buy little cots, and some just sleep on the floor.”

Bedbugs are a big problem in the dorms, he added. “A lot of the workers bring their sleeping bags from Belmont, where the bedbug problems are much worse,” he said.

Click here to read the full article.

• inspectors find 600 unsanitized mattresses at Charlotte, N.C. used furniture store
• Bed bug aggregate pheromone traps “within two years” says Dr. Gerhard Gries
• Sleep deprived woman with bed bugs trips and falls in front of subway
• Texas A and M researchers: chickens and bed bugs?

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Readers may recall that it was just last February when another reporter from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Dennis Holt, was mocking the idea that the city might spend money to work on the bed bug problem. (He was responding to the Bed Bug Seminars the Housing and Preservation Department presented in the spring.)

So it’s good to see this paper give some space to serious coverage of what is a real and worsening problem plaguing this city and many others. Mary Frost cites Rick Cooper, who calls for federal assistance for people dealing with bed bugs (a position this blog has also held since it began in 2006):

Without intervention at the federal level, Cooper predicts that some segments of society will see bedbug infestations rise dramatically. While the wealthy will have the resources to deal with the problem, bedbugs will evolve into a lower-class problem. “The past two or three years we’ve seen the number in the lower economic sectors rise dramatically.

“We’ll also see major instances in senior centers and in senior living residences. We’re dealing with people whose eyesight is not good and who may already have rashes. If we don’t have proactive and educational programs, the bugs have the opportunity to spread.”

I couldn’t agree more.

You can read the rest of Mary Frost’s article here.

• Brooklyn journalist muses on value of NYC spending money to fight bed bugs
• Bed bugs and the elderly: a story from St. Paul
• Bed bug infestations on the increase in Australia, says The Age
• Bed bugs in a senior apartment building in San Diego

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German tourists Billy and Helga Held didn’t travel to Cortez to have a close encounter with bedbugs, but that’s exactly what they got.

In the wee hours of Aug. 18, before they were to visit Mesa Verde National Park, the couple awoke at 1:21 a.m. to discover bugs in their bed at the Comfort Inn.

“At first I was in a panic,” said Billy. “My bedsheet was completely full of bed bugs. My wife was crying.”

Helga stripped the sheets and took them straight to the reception desk.

“The boy at the front desk took them and just put them in the washing room,” she said. “He said, ‘Do not make a big deal of this - you can move to a new room.’”

Oh that’s very reassuring! Customer service these days…

In fairness, the hotel did call out a pest control operator, and refunded the couple’s room costs.

Comfort Inn Owner, Ryan Griglak, said their hotel has tried to be as proactive as possible in controlling bed bugs - by employing Orkin to spray as well as relocating the people to another room.

Griglak said after Orkin inspected all the rooms, they found the only two infested were the two where the German family had been.

They were moved to a second room, and these two rooms were the only ones found to be infested!

Let this be a warning to hoteliers who simply move people to the next room, without attempting to help them decontaminate their belongings first.

The article also reports that the branch of Orkin in Cortez has had a 50% increase in bed bug calls in the past year. You can read the rest of the article here.

• 25% of hotel rooms have bed bugs? I don’t think so.
• bed bugs in Greenpoint (NYC), Stamford (CT), Glenwood Springs (CO), and the Internets (.com)
• Rockford, IL: half of Red Roof Inn shut down due to bed bugs
• Motel 6 room design changes: cooler, more functional, less bed bug-friendly

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This is not a great idea at a time when bed bugs are spreading so widely (and to all classes of hotel).

Anything that hotels move from room to room without washing and drying (that is, anything but towels and bedclothes) are in potential danger of carrying bed bugs around the hotel.

• if bed bugs bite you in a hotel…
• FAQ: dry cleaners and bed bugs
• FAQ: how do I deal with clothing during treatment for bed bugs (and for a while later)?
• Aaron Rents: furniture rental firm sued over bed bugs

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The person who posted it, iamyournot, said in the comments,

The Video doesn’t show how bad it really was, I had to stop taping because there were thousands of bed bugs running over the top of the bed, after the opening shot, the video was taken on the second visit, the room was clear by then, it took three visits to totally clean out this apartment of bed bugs.

It sounds like it was a thousand times worse in the first visit. It’s hard to believe someone could have an infestation this bad. If they did not react to bed bug bites, they must surely have seen the bed bug feces everywhere– let alone “thousands of bed bugs” running around– and wondered what was up?

I also found this lovely ad for PCI (Pest Control India):

And this one, from Suburban Exterminating:

And finally, though Harris Pest Control in Detroit makes no mention of bed bugs in their ad, this was priceless and delightful:

• bed bug nymphs, bed bug eggs, bed bug feces, on wood
• Bed bugs bite gospel group, Milford, Connecticut
• What do you wish people knew about bed bugs?
• YouTube video documents a serious bed bug infestation

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Savvas Othon, technical director at Rentokil, said: “The short turnaround times for planes and other forms of transport means they are sometimes not inspected as thoroughly as they used to be. What should happen is a good vacuum around the back of seats and in the creases of seats. Any small gap is ideal for a bedbug, which can go for quite some time without a meal.”

Pest Control company Rentokil said it was now treating all kinds of public vehicles for bed bugs:

Rentokil says that it has seen a 24 per cent increase in work related to airlines, a 51 per cent increase in road-related call-outs, a 59 per cent jump in the shipping sector and a 9 per cent rise on rail in the past 12 months, compared with the year before.

“Bedbug infestations will continue to rise,” Mr Othon said. “Delays at airports don’t help as people sit in airport terminals, take things out of their bags and the bedbug jumps out and goes in search of another source of blood.”

While the general public is starting to think about hotel rooms as potential sites of infestation, it’s helpful to see a major newspaper highlighting the spread of bed bugs in airports, airplanes, trains, cars, and ships.

Awareness is key, as David Cain of Bed-bugs.co.uk stressed to the Times:

He said: “The number one reason for the spread of bedbugs is the lack of public awareness. People simply do not know how to detect them in the way they would have done in the 1950s and 1960s.

“They are a problem on buses, trains and subway systems, and on cruise ships too — any form of transport where there is a high turnover, really. Recently, on an overground train in South London, I pulled at the parting of the upholstery and found at least four months of dirt and debris.”

• Thai trains play the bed bug blame game: blame backpackers for bed bug infestation
• Bed bugs infest Thai trains, Bangkok Post reports
• Attention Oxford Mail editors: bed bugs did not return because students suddenly stopped cleaning their flats
• News of the World: New Bedbug Horror Facing England

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Often, they bring a vial of bed bugs, and someone (the entomologist, the reporter, a downtrodden grad student) “feeds” a hungry bed bug. Most of us have wondered what might happen if those bed bugs got out of their trusty vial.

Read this story from the Peterborough Examiner in Canada, about how one such program went terribly wrong.

• new, good Bed bug videos
• Bed Bug Outbreaks on the Rise in SoCal (Fox News)
• Stanford still fighting bed bugs
• Apparently bed bugs are still a cute idea for many

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The article is enlightening in that it describes how our ancestors, recent and long-past, dealt with bed bugs. Before they came under control (with the widespread use of DDT) in the early fifties, bed bugs were everywhere:

One interesting account from World War I states, “In the East African campaign the bugs invaded the cork lining of the sun helmets of the soldiers. As the helmets were piled together at night, all soon became infested and the soldiers complained of bugs attacking their heads.” (Medical Entomology, 1932). Bed bugs also occupied warships and the nooks and crannies of submarines.

But civilians had even more ingrained bed bug problems:

… bed bugs were common years ago in laundries, dressing rooms, factories and furniture upholstery shops. Theaters had big problems and sometimes had to tear out entire rows of seats and install new ones. Coat rooms and lockers in schools were commonly infested, as is happening again today. All modes of transport including trains, buses, taxicabs and airplanes were spreaders of bed bugs. A 1930s survey of 3,000 moving vans in Sweden found bed bugs on 47 percent, foretelling big concerns for moving and storage companies today. Perhaps most unnerving was that bed bugs used to be common in hospitals — another pattern from the past which has resurfaced in recent years (see “The Business of Bed Bugs,” Pest Management Professional, 2008). Heavy infestations of bed bugs likewise once occurred in poultry houses and were spread via the crates in which birds were shipped or held at market. A similar pattern in poultry production is reappearing today.

What resurfaces again and again above is that in regards to bed bugs in schools, moving and storage companies, hospitals, chicken production: “a similar pattern … is reappearing today.”

The article goes on to examine how treatments for bed bugs have evolved over the years.

Those new to the bed bug problem commonly call for the return of DDT. But the evidence is that this would not be the powerful solution today that it was when it was first released. Today’s bed bugs’ resistance to pyrethroids is mirrored in the resistance bed bugs began to show to DDT as early as 1947!

Failures were first noted in barracks of the Naval Receiving Station at Pearl Harbor in 1947 — only a few years after the product was introduced. During the next 10 years, other cases of DDT resistance were confirmed, and by 1956, the National Pest Control Association was recommending malathion as an alternative.

Other methods followed for sporadic bed bug infestations in the years after DDT came along:

Other products used during the 1950s to 1970s to control occasional infestations of bed bugs included diazinon (when the bugs became resistant to malathion), lindane, chlordane and dichlorvos (DDVP). Mattresses were sprayed and aired as part of the overall treatment. As with DDT, a single application often did the job, provided spraying was thorough. Sporadic recurrences of bed bugs during the 1980s were eliminated with organophosphate or carbamate insecticides, none of which are available today.

Dr. Potter’s words describing the future outlook are nothing if not foreboding:

All of society will be affected as infestations appear in the same places they had before. Besides homes and hotels, watch for them in such places as schools, theaters, and especially health care facilities. Small cities and towns will be spared for awhile but not for long. There will be new challenges this time around including an unprecedented mix and movement of people from across town and across the globe; more bug-friendly belongings and clutter in which to hide; fewer options and more restrictions in respect to fumigation; societal apprehensions about pesticides; and a pervasive feeling today that when someone is harmed they should sue.

Bed bug management will be handicapped until the chemical industry invents a safe, residually potent product with a permissive label. This will not be easy given the priorities and challenges facing our industry partners.

Today, on the downside, we have a much more mobile society, a lot more stuff, fewer chemical treatment options.

The upside is that we now have powerful dry vapor steamers and ziploc bags. Those two factors alone tell me it may be easier in some ways to live with bed bugs these days, but it may actually be harder to get rid of bed bugs.

And there lies the problem: don’t we really want to get rid of them? After all, bed bug bites are every bit as uncomfortable now as they were then.

Your best bet for getting rid of bed bugs is the same today as it was in 1940: thoroughness; Dr. Potter’s footnotes cite the following words of wisdom, from a 1940 pest control manual:

“Thoroughness is the key word and only experience will teach a man how to best find every possible place bed bugs may be harbored. Most operators take the beds completely apart and remove the casters from the bed legs. Dresser drawers are removed, rugs rolled back and pictures taken from the walls. Floor lamps are upturned, moldings pried loose in some cases and books and papers carefully examined…” — Bed Bug Spraying, Pests and Their Control, 1940.

Be sure to read the rest of Dr. Potter’s Lessons from the Past in the current PCTOnline magazine.

And if you want to learn more about current challenges with bed bugs and pesticide resistance, check out this PCTOnline article Insecticide-Resistant Bed Bugs–Implications for the Industry by Alvaro Romero, Michael F. Potter and Kenneth F. Haynes.

• PCTOnline on its bed bug seminar last week
• Potter’s Studies on Suspend, Kicker, Phantom, Bedlam, Sterifab; new information about bed bug behavior
• new mattress protectors available
• Maclean’s on bed bugs

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