Baltimore’s Bed Bug Response Plan

Baltimore has launched a comprehensive bed bug control strategy:

• the Bed Bug Response Plan (PDF)
• the press release (PDF)
• and the bed bug web page at Baltimore City Health Department.  (You’ll notice here something interesting: EPA apparently has a bed bug fact sheet in English and Spanish.  But why isn’t EPA’s fact sheet available at EPA’s website?)

The plan was developed in consultation with EPA, the National Center for Healthy Housing and the NYC Department of Health. (This is interesting but, honestly, I’m not sure what it means.  You don’t need me to remind you again, and yet I’m doing it, that we have no bed bug strategy of our own.)

These are the actions Baltimore is taking:

• performing bed bug inspections—and offering residents a “healthy homes assessment”
• Baltimore City Health Department Healthy Homes Division staff received training on identification, safety, visual inspection and control
• developing English- and Spanish-language educational materials, a mass media education campaign via EPA’s Hispanic Outreach Initiative, and a Spanish-language community outreach program where community health workers (“promotores”) are trained to educate Baltimore’s Latino community—this community education effort includes IPM, lead and asthma
• training Baltimore City public housing maintenance and management staff and, apparently, impressing upon them “the need to immediately respond to bed bug complaints”

Congratulations, Baltimore.

These pages may be of related interest:

1. A brief update on Toronto
2. Michigan’s Bed Bug Workgroup
3. Leadership and hope: Stop Bedbugs DC
4. Central Ohio Bed Bug Summit on November 10
5. Details of the projected budget needs for Cincinnati’s Bed Bug Inspection Program