Sorry, a bit crackly that one: a transcript of our chat with David Cain

We had major technical difficulties during our live interview with David Cain of Bed Bugs Limited (UK) this morning so we won’t post the podcast; instead, here is an edited transcript of the interview.

We did, however, shamelessly guilt David into agreeing to another guest appearance in a future talkcast and so we’ll make sure next time to have him seated comfortably in his office and not driving to a job—and we’ll also get him to say ’sshedule’ for you, just for kicks.

NYvsBB: Why bedbugs?

David Cain: Well the introduction of me and bed bugs started about seven years ago. My background is actually in molecular biology. I was a research scientist for years and then moved into the more business-orientated side. I ended up holding the position of business development director for an investment house in London. And one Monday morning went into work, had a disagreement with my boss and decided that I’d find a completely new job to do and purely by accident ended up as a pest controller because a friend needed someone to work…. Because of my background handling toxic substances in labs, I knew most of the safety precautions to start up with. Initially it was supposed to be a part-time stopgap.

I loved meeting people, getting out there, helping people in difficult situations. And because everyone else in the company had worked in pest control for very long periods of time, they thought it was rather amusing to send the person who they perceived that their tax pounds or dollars had paid for my education to go out on all the nasty jobs, and invariably in pest control, one of the worst jobs that you can get given is bed bugs. But back in those days it was an incredible rarity, we were seeing approximately one case per month and then over the next three months, that grew to about a case a week, three months after that we were looking at a case a day and within six months of that I was doing seven to eight cases of bed bugs per day.

NYvsBB: This was in 2001?

David Cain: That was just in one region of London. London is split up into districts or boroughs and it was one of the West London boroughs I was working for. They had a very high turnover of international residents and therefore it was a bit of a hotspot because, as we all are now starting to understand, part of the picture of the spread of bed bugs is that it’s not just happening in the United States, this is being mirrored in the UK, a massive increase in the population, most of the European cities… the same, so people traveling from far afield as Australia and New Zealand are naturally going to encounter the problem as readily as people now are in New York and Canada.

NYvsBB: [What are some of the differences between the UK and the United States in terms of the pest control industries and the actual practice of bed bug eradication?]

David Cain: Well, although I’ve not worked in pest control in the US, from what I’ve seen there is a very different culture in terms of the industry and people’s perception of it. It seems to be much more acknowledged in the US to have a relationship with a pest control firm who maybe come round once a year to inspect your property or they have a relationship with the building you’re in or with the landlord. In the UK there really isn’t what’s considered to be a domestic culture of professional pest control. To be honest, before I became a pest controller, the only people that I knew of that dealt with pest problems was invariably the local authority, the local borough, or the local council. So, as a result, one of the big issues that’s facing the UK industry is there really isn’t an established model or where people would go in and treat on a regular basis, as you would get, for example, with termite pest control in the United States, or cockroaches in New York, etc. People just don’t have a kind of relationship as individuals with a pest control company, and I think that’s been one of the biggest challenges that I’ve seen over the last couple of years is that people just never think this thing’s going to happen to them and I’m quite often the first pest controller they’ve ever met, which is kind of refreshing, because you don’t have all of the hangups associated with a big established industrial sector, but it does create some cultural differences where people aren’t used to having a relationship with a pest control company because this is a problem that they’ve never really seen before.

NYvsBB: [Do you have a variety of customers, or are they primarily private residential?]

David Cain: We try not to turn anyone away, so it’s really based on the mix of people that approach us. It’s invariably about 80-90% private domestic properties we treat, but we also get inquiries from hotels who maybe have ongoing problems, or it’s the first time they’ve experienced it, but at the moment we’re very much based on private domestic properties. It’s a difficult sector to look at because obviously it is very, very unpredictable, but it gives us the work which is most interesting to look at because there’s a high degree of variability between the various places that you go, one day you may be in a 5-million pound Knightsbridge apartment, 5 or 6 bedrooms worth, and then the next day you may be 14 or 15 stories up in a high rise apartment complex. And the different environments are very different for us to work in.

NYvsBB: I wonder how you handle the adjacent units and the adjacent properties, when you are not being hired by the property manager? How do you handle that? Do you recommend inspections?

David Cain: It’s a difficult one because obviously there are so many social stigmas associated with bed bug infestations which are completely inaccurate, so in the initial phase we have no choice but to treat individual apartments as one-off infestations. So, we assume that the occupants of the flat have come into contact with them external to the property, maybe in a hotel or while they’ve been travelling, and that it’s only their unit that’s infected, but as part of our procedures we make sure that they are aware that by using us they need to communicate the problem with their neighbors if it’s persistent, or, if when we inspect the property, they haven’t been on holiday for a couple of years, they haven’t come into likely sources where they may have been exposed to bed bugs, then very soon in the process, a couple of days in, we will ask them to start communicating with their adjoining neighbors, to educate them about the problem of bed bugs, to explain to them that you don’t have to wait until you are being bitten to have bed bugs, they can be in there, and you may be in the majority of people that don’t respond to the bites. We also make it a principle that if we need to come back for a third visit, that we gain access to all adjoining properties to do an inspection, to make sure that they aren’t in fact the source. Now, sometimes this means that you’re two or three treatments into the program before you realize that the neighbors have a problem, or what’s increasingly more common, is that people are being proactive about it, deciding that it’s sensible to talk with the neighbors at the earliest stage and maybe a couple of days after we’ve treated, we’re getting a phone call saying, actually, my neighbors have a problem, it’s been ongoing for several months, and they would like some assistance in dealing with that at the same time, and then that way we can do all the sensible things, which are dealing with all of the infested locations that adjoin each other at the same time, because it’s only by actually eradicating it from the entire building, will you get your initial client cleared for hopefully the rest of their lives.

NYvsBB: And so you insist on the inspection of all adjoining units…. on all sides?

David Cain: We encourage it and we leave a lot of newsletters and information sheets on our first visit and say to people, look, if you suspect it, you should put this through your neighbors’ door in the next couple of days. And as I said, it’s only if it comes to a third treatment visit will we insist on checking the neighbors and doing the adjoining… because it is still a very sensitive subject, although I personally would say, check every adjoining, floor above, floor down, connected left and right, that would be my ideal situation is to check all of them at the same time, to educate everyone about bed bugs, but the practicalities of doing that it’s very difficult, so we prefer to look at it, and say actually we think this was picked up on your recent holiday to Paris, Switzerland, Berlin, Rome, etc. and if it’s in that situation, we won’t be as rigorous about forcing them to talk to their neighbors, where if it’s problematic and ongoing, then that’s our first line of enquiry.

NYvsBB: My next question is what you would consider the core skills of a specialist bed bug controller? To do this job well…

David Cain: Sorry, went crackly at the start of that… [ ]

NYvsBB: [Repeated.]

David Cain: Okay. I think, a good example of this and I have to be very careful about giving details: as my team has grown it has incorporated both traditional pest controllers and people who have been trained by me personally; at present, we only have members of staff that in fact didn’t start off as pest controllers and were trained by us in-house as it were; the best skills that I can recommend are people who are inquisitive, people who want to actually investigate the problem, who want to get to the bottom of what’s going on, and understand things before they start producing chemicals, before they start trying to treat the property, because it’s only by having those attention to detail skills, to look and observe the situation of the environment that they’re working in, do they understand the implications and ramifications of the treatment they’ve put in place. So, attention to detail is first and foremost; very good eyesight is also highly important, because I don’t want any of my people missing things like fecal trace signs, which, let’s face it, we’re often looking for something which is only a millimeter in diameter in a very, very large room, it is the proverbial looking for a needle in a hay sack. So, attention to detail, good eyesight, a willingness to actually listen to what customers have to say, to understand how they could have potentially come into contact with bed bugs in the first instance, and then finally the last thing I look at on my list is experience in pest control, because you can teach anyone to follow our methods with time, by taking them out in the field and saying, hey, look at this particular room, this is where we predict bed bugs will be present, but this is the methodology that you must follow each time to actually investigate the process, because the chemical treatment aspect of it, to be honest, is probably only 10% of what I think a successful treatment program entails.

NYvsBB: So, the most important thing is… basically, an investigator…

David Cain: Yeah, someone who is intrigued by the problem, and wants to understand how the pests, bed bugs, have interacted with the people who live in the property. So they want to actually understand how this case has affected their lives, how the bed bugs have spread through the property, and what events have occurred have caused it to go from a single room to all of the rooms within the property. So, a good investigational mindset is pretty essential for us. Unfortunately, that’s a skill which I came to find more in other industries. So, I employ someone who was a forensic fire investigator, going into arson crime scenes looking for evidence, so they’re looking for very subtle little signs. I employ other people who either have abnormally good people management skills. Because if you’ve worked for example in parking control and you’ve been giving now parking tickets to irate motorists all day and managing to actually not get a black eye in the process, you’re very good at listening to people, understanding what’s going on in their life, and giving them some of the essential skills to survive this process, because just as there are individual situations surrounding every single infestation, we all handle it, broadly speaking, in different ways, so some people seem calm, relaxed, focused and are very matter-of-factual about their problem, whereas others are obviously a lot more anxious about it and it seems to impact their lives to a greater degree.

NYvsBB: Dealing day in and day out with people who are completely anguished… part of the job.

David Cain: Sorry, a bit crackly that one…

Yes. Absolutely. I can’t stress it enough that we probably get 4 or 5 phone calls per day that start with people saying ‘I’ve got… whaa’ and then bursting out crying, because they’re finding it difficult to even communicate the fact that they have a problem and initially everyone is under the mistaken belief that this has something to do with your living conditions and your home hygiene. Bed bugs, I always try and make very, very clear, they’re an exposure pest. If you don’t come into contact with them, you will not have bed bugs. It’s as simple as that.

NYvsBB: [a question about the stigma and not reporting a problem in a timely way, I think, can't really tell!]

David Cain: To put that into perspective, one of the most common questions I’m asked every day is: your van, it doesn’t have bed-bugs.co.uk down the side of it? Because no one wants their neighbors to be aware of the problem, because of this unfortunate social stigma. Now, from some research I’ve been doing, that seems to track back to public information practices in the 1940s to the 1960s where the new synthetic insecticides, DDT for example, when they came on board, there was a big public awareness campaign because, the mid-1930s, they estimated a third of all dwellings in London had active infestations of bed bugs, therefore the most logical, rapid way of communicating and getting everyone to get treated was to do a little bit of a shame play, and to say to people, hey you’ve got bed bugs because you can’t be bothered to prioritise treatment in your life, we have new ways of dealing with it, and that was the fastest way of getting the message across. Unfortunately…

NYvsBB: I know you always recommend checking and rotating the mattress once a month.

Daivd Cain: Absolutely. It’s one of those things, I say about the cleaning of your bed on a regular basis for two main reasons. One is it gives you an opportunity to check and look for the signs of bed bugs at the earliest possible stage. And again, second reason comes back to the fact that at least 50-, probably 60% of people don’t initially respond to bed bug bites. So, unless you get into the practice and the habit of checking, you’re not actually going to detect an infestation.

And to give you an example, a few years ago I dealt with a fascinating case just south of London. They’d been reporting having bites for three days before they contacted us. We got down there to inspect and there were approximately three to five thousand bed bugs living in a double bedroom, in the master bed, they’d been in there for at least twelve months, and what had happened is the start of the week that we got involved, the gentleman of the house had changed his job, and where previously he was getting in his car and driving out to the lovely, green English countryside, he was now working up in the City of London, which has a much higher pollution factor, and what I think was happening was that, all of a sudden, because of the environmental pollution he was coming into contact with, the fact that even though he didn’t have a bite response, he still had technical bed bug bites all over his body, which are like small little pin pricks and therefore his body was responding to the presence of the pollution which was a new factor in his life, through the fact that he had these small little holes, and that was the only thing that alerted him to having a problem, and we were able to calculate the approximate duration of the infestation, and trace it back to a business trip he’d had in Panama about twelve months previously. And he said at the time, I remember being really itchy, scratching and having a couple of bites in that particular hotel. Fascinating…

Basically, he’d had no response at all in the year between returning from Panama and three days before calling us in. And yet, it was such a significant infestation, I was actually collecting and harvesting bugs from it for some research and we were scraping them directly into a pint glass and we had about 2 to 3 inches of bed bugs in the bottom of the glass so that’ll give you a kind of indication how bad it was.

NYvsBB: I want to switch gears a little bit now and give you a fantasy question, see if you want to tackle it. We’re trying to find a way for our own city to adopt measures to control the spread and so it would be interesting to us to learn what you would consider to be the top priorities of any community, any city that had the intention of curbing the spread of bed bugs and taking control of the epidemic.

David Cain: Okay. A very good question. It’s something I’ve given a great deal of thought about over the last couple of years. And unfortunately there is only one answer: public education. People have to understand what bed bugs are. They have to understand that they have nothing to do with the cleanliness of your home. That they’re an exposure pest. They have to understand what to look for. What signs they may see on furniture in the street. What signs to check for in second-hand furniture. What to look for when they’re checking into a hotel. Because the only thing that we can do to stop the spread of this is to stop the number of people getting infected with bed bugs. And once we get to a stage where people know what to look for, are looking for the signs, are checking their homes on a regular basis, we will start to bring the number of exposure events that are occurring down and under control. And that’s gonna take the media, having articles, factual programs on the television about it, it’s got to come out from public health departments. It needs to be a major drive because unfortunately just on the evidence I’ve seen alone over the last three years, we’re not even scratching the surface here, we’re not dealing with the new infestations that are occurring, and we’re not getting to the bottom of the active and long-term infestations… as people would see reading forum postings on the internet, the number of times that someone gets several months into an infestation and realizes that their adjoining neighbor or a neighbor two floors down has had a big, ongoing problem with bed bugs… if people were better educated, then we wouldn’t get to those more severe degrees, we would catch them earlier, we would have infestations that were a lot lighter and that could be dealt with more generally. So for me, if you want to stop the spread of bed bugs within any community, the entire planet, education I personally believe is the only answer.

NYvsBB: That would be at the top of the list. What about other things, like making bed bugs a notifiable pest?

David Cain: Another very valid point. If they’re notifiable, it means that we’ve actually got some accurate information as to the level of infestation, the location of infestation, and we can start to build up maps and pictures, because at present we’re doing between 6-12 jobs per day across London. We have no legal requirement to notify anyone of those properties and the number of cases, so what’s happening is, increasingly, where that data may have been available through the local authority, it’s just not getting into the public domain. So if they were a notifiable pest, then there would be a system, a database collecting where if you report an infestation and it flags up that your neighbor is infested then someone from the public health department could take on the case and could then screen the building.

In terms of other legislation, the control of mattresses and the recycling of mattresses, the legislation that you shared with me recently, is a very, very good foundation. In terms of legislation in the UK, we are probably 4 or 5 years behind the US at present because our legislative process is a lot more complex and it’s [...] rather than good, sensible, interesting little laws, you have to incorporate it as part of an act of parliament, and that’s going to take 2 or 3 years to debate in itself.

So, the work that’s going on about the mattress recycling, brilliant, because I also see that as giving the ability for, if you’re in an apartment block, you see a mattress outside the property that hasn’t been properly protected, it has signs of bed bugs on it, then that gives you a mechanism to call in the local health department to actually do a screening of the building itself. Now, for me to do something similar in the UK, I have to contact the local borough authority to request their cooperation in the matter, they may or may not take up the challenge to find out what’s going on, but it’s not unusual for that entire process to take 6 to 9 months and require, shall we say, some strong-worded letters to be passed backwards and forwards. Because it’s a problem that people still don’t want to get involved with, because if you’re a health worker and you’re entering infected properties on a regular basis, you don’t want to carry that risk of ending up with bed bugs at home yourself.

NYvsBB: [I know that people always ask you how you manage not to bring your job home with you. And we know that some people who have already experienced an infestation, especially if it was difficult to eradicate, have developed concerns and anxiety about travelling, going to restaurants, riding public transportation, going to movies. What is your opinion of these concerns in general? Are they warranted? And what would you advise those who worry about exposure to bed bugs in public places?]

David Cain: It is a difficult area because obviously people are very, very emotive on this particular subject. For me it boils down to two factors, and they’re a little bit complex to discuss, but I’ll do my best. It’s about possibility of infestation and probability of infestation. Now, as people will know from where they’ve picked up bed bugs, whether it’s hotel rooms, whether it’s friends’ houses, pieces of furniture, the many myriad of ways that you can get bed bugs, are all possible. In the grand scheme of things, you also have to look at the probability. Now, because they’re an exposure pest, as I said earlier in the interview, if you don’t come into contact with them, then you won’t get bed bugs. So, if you take a flashlight with you to the cinema, and you spend 3 or 4 minutes checking your seat, before you sit down, and the seats around you, then the bottom line is, if you’ve done a good inspection, you are at low probability of picking them up by that route, but it’s still possible to do so. So, this is why I say, check everywhere and reduce that probability of being infected, and focus less on the possibility of being infected. If you look at everything that is a possible transmission route, you’d never leave your house ever again, because you’d be constantly fearful about any seat that you go to sit in, any area or public space which is used by other people, so it’s a matter of trying to keep it in check, and looking at it realistically, and saying, well, if I go out there prepared and ready to look for problems, then I’m not going to stumble into one that becomes a problem I take home.

I can only say from personal experience, I’ve been into something in the region of 7,000 infested properties, for bed bugs now, I’ve only ever brought home a grand total of 4 bed bugs into my property. And that’s because, with all due respect, however comfortable someone’s house is, however nice they are, until I have checked the seats myself, I am not going to sit down. I’m also not gonna get up close and personal with their bed, I’m not gonna to lie on it, I’m not going to even particularly touch it. Most of the work I do is at arm’s length. Now, being 6 foot 2 I have nice long arms and can literally hold the bed out straight in front of me, so I don’t need to run the risk of rubbing up against it.

I also am a bit well known for wearing black, leather trousers. Which is partly because they’re very protective clothing, if you’re going to be coming into contact with chemicals and nasty things all day, they protect your legs, and the second aspect is that it’s becoming a more acknowledged fact, but bed bugs don’t particularly like leather, because it’s a difficult material for them to climb up and therefore a good stamp of my feet before leaving the property and there is a very good chance that anything that’s hitchhiked onto my clothing will be left in the property to be dealt with.

NYvsBB: We’ll have to add leather trousers to our holiday shopping list this year…

David Cain: Well, I think they are coming back in fashion. My second bed bug fashion tip of the year has to be shooting sticks. You know these seats which fold out of a walking stick?

NYvsBB: Ohhh, right…

David Cain: Hmm, I predict we’re going to be seeing an awful lot more of those over the coming years as well. It’s easier to take your seat with you than to constantly be inspecting it in public.

NYvsBB: [laughter] Shooting sticks?

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