A New Year, will this be the year?

Will New York City get a bed bug task force this year?

We’re still where we were yesterday and the year before and the year before. Except worse, of course, and resources to control the spread will no doubt be scarce this year, even assuming the will to combat this problem is found. So the bed bugs are still winning.

A single bed bug blood meal is a victory and not a small one. The female bed bug mates after gorging with our blood. Several males do their best to outlive their destinies. Eggs, survival and prosperity ensue. (Bed bug egg production ranges broadly but one researcher helpfully placed the single-day maximum at 12.)

Every day that there is no public education in our city about bed bugs, no strategy for prevention, no plan for eradication, is a day that infestations are allowed to progress and multiply. Who knows how many secondary infestations a single uncontrolled infestation will generate in the space of a few short months? In a year? We know nothing about incidence rates at all. Because no one is paying attention.

If 14.5% of respondents to a Cincinnati survey say they’ve had bed bugs in a single year, and if David Cain can tell us with a straight face that those old 30% infestation rates are not really that far off, how is it possible that New York City can continue to pretend that there is nothing to be done here?

Do we even realize what a high rate of bed bug infestation will do to our city? We will try to explore this question this year. Our society should not turn back this particular clock.

Please call your council member (find your council member here). Please ask for his or her support for a City Council proposed bill, Intro 873, now in the health committee.

What will Intro 873 accomplish? In reality it will be a very small beginning. But it is the essential beginning. It will entrust responsibility for public education to the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Must the Health Department have this role?

Let me tell you, I am so sick of this are bed bugs a public health concern debate! So we will also try to show you why we’re well past this useless hand-wringing and need to take action now.

But I know how you like to hear it from scientists instead of me, so, a random exhibit:

Clearly, the bedbug media coverage lends public credibility to what experts have reported and provides an epidemiological time line in the news. Bedbug infestations can negatively affect the quality of life and should be treated as a serious problem by local health departments and environmental health officials. Our study indirectly shows that the general reading public has become more aware and concerned about the prevalence of bed bugs. The environmental health professional must also be prepared with information, preventive measures, and solutions. There does not appear to be an immediate worldwide control measure for the resurgence of bedbugs in the United States and other industrialized countries, but environmental health and safety professionals must add provision of information on, and methods for dealing with, this public health pest to the other services they provide to the public.

Alice L Anderson and Korin Leffler, Bedbug infestations in the news: a picture of an emerging public health problem in the United States, Journal of Environmental Health 70 (9), 24-7, 52-3 (May 2008).

Yes, this post is a bit intense and morose. I did not even say Happy New Year. Sorry, but there were a series of calls this week from a bed bug sufferer, a New Yorker at the end of his tether, that shook me. The bed bugs are winning. But we did choose our name carefully, I was reminded recently. There is hope in this contest, New York vs Bed Bugs. You always want to root for the underdog.

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