Two articles out this week from CUNY journalists Kate Nocera and Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin capture the unnerving story of bed bugs in our city with uncommonly good reporting.
“Their friends got bed bugs”
Kate Nocera’s New York City Takes on Bedbugs features a particularly candid interview with New York City Council Member Gale Brewer:
Gale Brewer discusses the legislative process and the NYC Bedbug Menace from Kate Nocera on Vimeo.
Council Member Brewer’s point, that bed bugs finally came to affect everyone in New York City, has that terrible force of an uncomfortable truth and suggests something yet more distressing, that the inexorable spread of bed bugs was in fact our only hope, the equivalent of a slow Bill Gates-like release of insects in our city. I’m not sure to what extent this dynamic will hold. I think perhaps there is a limited window before the impact of bed bugs on people with resources ceases to be the life-altering experience that it still is. The saving grace of this moment is that no one can easily eradicate this problem. The challenge will be to ensure that any solutions that are developed are widely distributed and leave no one behind. But there are opportunities here as well, opportunities to defeat the stigma, to revisit and find the missing pieces in the history of bed bugs, and to gain new understanding of public health approaches to urban pest outbreaks. (It helps tremendously that the NYC Health Department is now on the side of the good guys.)
There are two other fantastic video interviews, with Dave Woolner and Lou Sorkin. Please check out Kate Nocera’s article; here’s another glimpse:
“I don’t want to be known as a harbinger of vermin and plague,” Woolner said.
Lou’s interview offers a great capsule explanation of how to address the problem of bed bug infestations in apartment buildings. It’s so simple. Will we do it?
This is what it’s like
Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin’s article, City waking up to bedbug assault, features wonderfully open and engaging conversations with New Yorkers who have experienced bed bugs:
Enid Farber’s apartment is neat and tidy, but it wasn’t always. To prepare for their first of many bedbug exterminations, she and her husband had to confront their clutter. They threw out an enormous amount of possessions: books, personal papers and documents, various keepsakes that filled up their two-bedroom apartment. At first she tried to carefully cull her belongings. But eventually, overwhelmed by the project, she began trashing everything without looking, just to get it overwith.
And candid remarks from Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann:
Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, an entomologist at Cornell University who has spent 10 years working with the New York State interior pest management program, says that while scientists may have an understanding of bedbugs biologically, they don’t understand them ecologically.
And from Council Member Brewer:
The problem is indeed mind-boggling. Even the entomologists were unable to agree on many points. And then there were the pest control operators. “Every exterminator thinks every other exterminator is terrible,” Brewer remarks. “I don’t know who’s right and who’s wrong.” The task force, she says, has been mandated to try to figure that out.
The task force, yes, well, these articles have so cheered me up—because good reporting on bed bugs is rare and because before this experience I really liked journalists and did not distrust them and I like having that feeling back—so let’s not talk about the missing task force now.
There is a way to tell the bed bug stories of affected New Yorkers and Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin shows you how it’s done. I think it goes beyond empathy and has more to do with simple respect. Television reporters almost never get this right. Why do you think that is?
Zachary Gelnaw-Rubin’s article at NYCityWatch.
These pages may be of related interest:
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