The Ontario Non-Profit Housing Association (ONPHA) has produced an educational video about bed bugs. It is the first in a planned series for tenants and site staff; the second video will cover preparation and treatment.
I think the video does a good job of hitting the necessary points—although I’m sure we all would select, emphasize and deemphasize different things if we had the chance; for example, I could do with less footage of advanced infestations as I think it’s prejudicial in basic awareness materials.
It is always humbling to see organizations doing their jobs and taking on the essential and difficult tasks. Our city is now so woefully far behind, far behind is no longer descriptive.
Sam Bryks of Housing Services Inc. sent us the link and says that subtitled versions in four major languages in the Greater Toronto Area are being planned. Housing Services is providing technical assistance.
From ONPHA’s website:
There are almost 1500 non-profit housing providers in Ontario. They can be found in 220 communities, and range in size from 4 units to over 58,000 units. They own and manage shared houses, townhouses, small apartment buildings and high-rises in cities, towns and rural areas.
These pages may be of related interest:
{ 1 trackback }
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
HI Renee,
thanks for posting the link to the video.. I shot the video of the active infestation, and the ONPHA editor of the video selected the segments. We do make a strong point about the fact that infestations can be found in any home, but we wanted to show what live bed bugs look like in a real setting. Any of the shots could represent an undiscovered infestation even though they were taken in a severe infestation case simply because it provided the visuals. These are not National Geographic quality as we are really amateurs in the medium, but a single shot of a few seconds from a national geographic video costs many hundreds of dollars to use. As it turned out, the shots we used are things that a person could actually see whereas the NG videos are taken with amazingly sophisticated macrophotography setups. I have improved my set up by getting extension tubes and a monopod so in future i may be able to get even better macro shots, though in truth, people like Michael Potter and Dini Miller do have wonderful images of bed bugs close up.
The video was a co-production of HSI and ONPHA though it sounds like we were only technical advisors. We provided the original script, and most of the images and video. The life cycle images were courtesy of Stephen Dogget, but ONPHA did the animation of those to good effect. ONPHA shot and staged the acted scenes and the wonderful editing and presentation format including the BEWARE – BE AWARE title animation.
This was really done on a shoestring budget, and I am embarrassed to even hint at the actual cost which was very modest. Modern technology sure allows a lot of good stuff at very modest costs.
The amount of excellent material out there now on various processes in bed bug management is amazing. Stephen Kells detail of inspeciton and treatment for pest control folks comes from his years as Technical Director for Abell Pest Control. I did my “apprenticeship” there as well from 1979 – 1987 as Quality Assurance Manager, and certainly put in the time in field situations learning the ropes the hard way. One never forgets successes of addressing and solving pest issues against the backdrop of being accountable to clients. Some of those successes come from failures that one has to correct. Failures of service quality that has to be corrected sometimes, and sometimes a learning process on how to solve and prevent a problem. Those learning processes are very satisfying, and many of us are in that modality as we struggle to address this pest that has resurfaced so amazingly the last 10 years. A most interesting journey to be sure, and with the motivation to help people. A good combination of motivations.