Author Paul Bello interviewed PCOs in various cities about their current bed bug-fighting tactics, including Austin Frishman of AMF Pest Management Services in Boca Raton, Fla., who did many bed bug jobs forty or so years ago, and said of those times, “When I was a technician, we used cyanide egg gas pellets.” Do not try this at home, please.

“Bed bugs are not a simple problem to get rid of,” stresses Frishman. “They require knowledge and a willingness to work hard. As an industry, we are needed more now than ever.”

Ain’t that the truth.

The article offers these recommendations to professionals dealing with Sneaky Simes:

Bed Bug Management: Steps to Success

* Properly train your service technicians.
* Provide customers with written pre-treatment preparation instructions.
* Provide customers with a clearly written description of the scope of your services and reasonable expectations.
* Ensure your service agreement states what you intended.
* Provide your customers with viable prevention recommendations.
* Be thorough.
* Use all viable control means available.
* Use non-traditional control techniques, combined with insecticide treatments.
* Use suitable vacuums.
* Use suitable steamers.
* Use the best-available products at the appropriate label rates.
* Use mattress encasements.
* Follow up in a timely and adequate fashion.
* Consider getting additional help for problem bed bug accounts.

Part 2 is said to be “coming in April” but doesn’t seem to be available online yet.

Thanks to hopelessnomo for the tip!

• FAQ: advice on getting treatment to eliminate your bed bugs
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• how stealthy bed bugs can be
• new mattress protectors available

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The intellectually challenged woman who had been part of our lives for the past two years exists in a complicated, yet porous social safety net. Living semi-independently, she has access to a support worker about four hours a week who helps with everything from shopping to doctor appointments to hygiene to money management to just talking with her on the phone when she’s lonely.

But this is a bed bug website, so you know where I am headed, right?

Yes, she got bed bugs.

Mohan noted how devastating bed bugs were to this woman:

It’s hard to give quality care for someone who has the mental development of a six-year-old in just four hours a week. When her apartment was overrun with bedbugs, all her belongings were thrown out without proper explanation to her. She had to start all over again, including relocating.

This bed bug case may have been mismanaged. In most instances, throwing everything out is not a good idea. It is not necessary, costs the resident a lot of money and heartache, and doesn’t actually solve the problem. It also can help spread the bed bugs to surrounding neighbors. Most PCOs we know don’t tell people to throw everything away, but instead treat mattresses and furniture, direct people to encase their mattress, and give instructions on how to wash and dry clothing, so most or all belongings can be saved.

To throw away a disabled person’s things without even explaining it to her is simply horrible.

Besides the need for thoughtful and proper bed bug treatment, this heartbreaking story also reminds us of the need for better emergency social services for people with bed bugs.

It is not just people with intellectual challenges, as this woman, who might need extra help with preparing for bed bug treatment. The elderly and physically challenged also need help with prep (decluttering, obtaining and fitting mattress encasements, washing and storing belongings, etc.).

Four hours a week of assistance might be reasonable for normal circumstances, but this woman needed a lot more help during her bed bug infestation. With proper assistance, this infestation would not probably have been so devastating.

• Vancouver public education forum on bed bugs is a start, but probably not enough
• bedbugs at Stanford University dorms (again)
• Dumpster-diving tenant evicted after Winnipeg apartment seriously infested with bed bugs
• Freehold, NJ Social Service agency asks county for money to treat bed bugs

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Mangycur has a full report on last week’s bed bug seminar in Greenpoint.

• HPD seminar will be coming to Greenpoint– thanks to community lobbyists!
• Bed bugs in NYC: if we could just get Bill Murray on the case
• HPD expands bed bug seminars
• Merry Christmas; gratitude; the blasted 55-day rule

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Excellent reading. Check it out!

• Bed bugs in Ventura County (Thousand Oaks, California)
• Marty Markowitz’s building has bed bugs
• Bed bugs & tenant organizing: don’t take this lying down
• FAQ: My landlord hired a PCO who comes twice a month, and we still have bed bugs

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Well, that’s amazing, right? Thank Goodness.

Interestingly, there’s more to this article.

Kelly’s living with bed bugs. Her husband is staying in the Gateway Shelter to get away from them, but Kelly is staying in their bedbugged apartment, because she is afraid she’ll lose her home otherwise.

[Husband Randy] Isenberg is staying at Gateway Shelter because their building is infested with bedbugs. He’s got the bite marks on his arms to prove it.

The Toronto Community Housing Corp. building where they live in the Eglinton Ave. and Allen Rd. area was part of a television exposé on the shabby state of public housing in Toronto. His wife remains in the building.

“She doesn’t want to move out because she’ll lose her unit,” he said.

Though she doesn’t sleep at night, Isenberg doesn’t believe fatigue played a part, he said. But existing health issues with her leg have not been helped by the stress.

I suppose if anything will put bed bugs in perspective, it’s escaping death by only seconds.

Despite what she says, I would not be surprised if fatigue did play a part. She is not sleeping because of the bed bugs. Many of us have been there, and know what a toll lack of sleep can mean to our health, productivity, and mental and emotional wellbeing.

I am so glad that Theresa Kelly’s story of tripping and falling onto the subway tracks has a happy ending. I just hope she doesn’t have to go home to bed bugs — and without her husband — for much longer.

• Toronto Community Housing does good; Orlando, Florida tenants and Billings, Montana shelter guest demonstrate why more bed bug education is needed
• After a fire, bed bugs “rain down from ceilings” into other apartments
• bed bug news for 2007-11-11: Lexington, KY and Toronto, ON
• Covington, Kentucky IRS building infested with bed bugs

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Alderman-at-large Ben Clemons wants to amend this law so that landlords also have to give tenants code enforcement department contact information. That way, if landlords don’t respond to a need for repairs (or pest abatement), they know who to call.

The Nashua Telegraph reports in this article,

Currently, under the city housing code ordinance, chapter 182, section 31, property owners are required to post the address and phone number for an emergency contact in a common area of an apartment building or give a copy of the information to each tenant and file a copy with the city code enforcement department.

Where I live, in New York, rental buildings post the phone number of the landlord or super in the lobby.

But here, as in Nashua, there’s no information posted there or given to tenants on what to do if the landlord does not respond promptly.

Back to Nashua:

Under Clemons’ proposal, that procedure would remain the same, but the emergency contact information would also include the code department’s contact information and directions on how to proceed with difficult housing situations.

The directions would inform tenants that they must give their landlords written notice of any nonemergency housing issues and allow landlords two weeks to address the issues prior to the department’s involvement. Also, the postings or handouts would define the difference between emergency housing code violations and nonemergency housing code violations, outlining the landlord’s required response to both.

Under state and city ordinances, landlords must correct emergency housing code issues – those that pose an immediate and serious threat to the health and safety of occupants – as promptly as possible.

For nonemergency housing code issues, state law requires landlords to fix the problem within 14 days of receiving written notice from the tenant or face penalties of $1,000 a day for each day of a verified violation.

And while the 14-day written notice is the procedure city code department officials already require of tenants before taking action in such nonemergency situations, that fact is not spelled out in the current ordinance.

This is partly in response to some cases last year in Nashua.

In 2008, a bedbug infestation at a Temple Street rooming house had several tenants calling the code enforcement department with complaints that the landlord was refusing to properly treat the problem.

At least one of the tenants, Dale Evans, said he worked with his landlord for some time before he ever contacted code enforcement officials, only to find out that he still had to send a letter and give his landlord another 14 days.

As the article points out, if this change is made, it will simply mean information is made more accesssible to tenants whose landlords are unresponsive.

• More bed bugs in Nashua, NH: rooming-house tenant goes to court
• Nashua, NH Health Officers on prowl for bed bugs
• added to the “Tenants and Landlords FAQ”: Washington, D.C. and Florida
• Still more from Nashua, New Hampshire: fewer bed bugs at 23-25 Temple St.

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. . . recent stats show that ticks and bedbugs have been ramping up their itty-bitty attacks. Luckily, it’s easier than you think to KO the little creeps.

How easy is it to get rid of bed bugs?
Is it possible? yes.
Worth doing? absolutely.
Easier than you think? Maybe not so much.

It was nevertheless good to see bed bugs listed in an article about how to get rid of biting insects such as chiggers, deer ticks, and fleas.

Our number one enemy in the fight against bed bugs is lack of awareness.

• Bed bugs spread in Ottawa
• Maybe a new treatment - maybe snake oil
• ancient Bed bug tale, from the Fables of Bidpai
• Are the bed bugs bigger in Texas? University of Texas at Dallas students infested with bed bugs

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This via flickr from:

Mikhaela B. Reid * Angry Cartoonist
cartoons@mikhaela.net * www.mikhaela.net

Click the cartoon to see it in a larger size!

• bed bug and eggs on a pillow sham
• Reader Angie’s bed bug photos
• bed bug-infested trash on flickr
• more bed bug-infested trash on flickr

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Lou Sorkin says of his photo:

“Flat rubber molding pulled back to reveal bed bugs hiding. Notice that bugs are at top of molding in corner where there is no adhesive.”

• close up of bed bugs on mattress
• bed bug harborage inside a recessed screw hole
• spider beetle
• close up bed bug with eggs

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Miss Heather and Renee of New York vs. Bed bugs both blogged about that terrifying (but as to be expected) situation.

Now Pete Donoghue of the Daily News has picked up the story via Miss Heather:

Brownbear cited three stations where he believed bedbugs had, at least temporarily, bedded down: Hoyt-Schermerhorn, Union Square in Manhattan and Fordham Road in the Bronx.

A housing preservation and development spokesman cautioned that Brownbear, while more knowledgeable about bedbugs than the average person, is not a trained scientist or inspector.

NYC Transit spokesman Charles Seaton said the agency would check out the three hubs.

Brownbear may not be a trained inspector, but he had bed bugs in his home for five months. He is probably more qualified than many in the HPD to identify a scurrying bed bug.

I am concerned that they are only going to look at those three hubs. NYC Transit employees should be taught to search for bed bugs, and doing so should be a routine occurrence in all trains and at all stations.

Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign quipped: “Bedbugs on subway benches! Yet another reason not to fall asleep waiting for a train.”

The New York Post declares understatedly that “Bed Bugs Lurk Under Subway.” If they were under the subway, however, we would not have to worry. The problem is, they are in the subway:

Sharis Lugo, 20, of Brooklyn leaped off a bench at the Union Square station when she heard the news, saying, “Ewww! That’s nasty . . . They’ve got to take these benches out of here!”

Now that’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater! Why not get rid of the bed bugs instead?

It is possible, you know. But the first step is admitting we have a problem.

And Fox News shares videos of grossed out subway passengers (though Fox claims this footage represents passengers’ response to this news, this footage could have been stock “the subway is dirty” soundbites– bed bugs were not mentioned).

Perhaps in all the hysteria, New Yorkers will be reminded that we have politicians, we can demand they take action, and right now, the best way to channel that desire is to throw in your lot with New York vs. Bed Bugs. It only takes two minutes to make a difference.

The New York Post asks people on NYC subway benches about bed bugs in NYC subway benches:

Update: More from Gawker.

The U.S. News Health column also picked this up: Bed Bug Infestations Continue.

So did United Press International, the AMNY Subway Tracker, Subway Blogger (imagne a whole blog about the NYC subways! How bizarre! Just kidding, folks), Wall Street Journal blog Buzzwatch, and Gadling.

• Thai trains play the bed bug blame game: blame backpackers for bed bug infestation
• Abbey the Bed Bug Dog: news report
• Mr. K, a North Carolina bed bug dog, in action
• Toronto Star: Within five years, bedbugs “will be more common than mice, roaches, carpenter ants”

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