I am honestly not sure what to make of Richard Fagerlund and his advice anymore.
Pay attention to the comments, especially the one about the unintended consequences of isolating the bed.
These pages may be of related interest:
- Namechecked (plus the eminently quotable Dr. Susan Jones in PCT)
- Reenactment of Article 151 of the NYC Health Code was adopted
- We are reviewing the new NYS Department of State proposed mattress sanitizing regs
- Lou Sorkin, Susan Jones and Michael Potter hit it out of the park
- Dr. Philip Tierno: “I would never buy a refurbished mattress, a reconditioned mattress, under any circumstances”
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Renee,
My mother is 85, so when this bedbug plague first broke out I asked her if she had them in her youth and what they did before DDT. She said that they washed everything in the house thoroughly and took everything outside and washed everything including the springs, frames and mattresses at least twice a year. I asked if that worked and she laughed and said for a while it was better; and that is the real point. They never got rid of them entirely!
All of the suggestions made by Mr. Fagerlund will work to some degree, but the residual impact will be little better than the heat treatments he eschews, and probably won’t kill as many bedbugs as heat treatments.
Another dimension to be considered is the amount of work involved. This will take hours to do properly and how many times will someone do this, especially in an apartment building where this type of problem is rampant? How about old people or the infirm? All of this is impossible for a large portion of the population. All of these “natural” remedies have a degree of efficacy, but they were all available in days gone by except with the exception of diatomaceous earth. DE was available in the 1880’s, but not in wide use until the 1950’s.
Everyone involved will make a lot of money, and make no mistake about it; many companies only increased their revenue this year because of bedbugs. Including me! However, until inexpensive, efficacious chemistry is made available to the general public this problem will not go away.
Rich
Inexpensive, efficacious _________. Something for sure! Could it be cheap and effective heat? Cheap and effective what? I really think it won’t be pesticides but we’ll see.
And yeah, I remember a Harry Katz article, or letter to the editor, about his recollection of using DE; I won’t dig it up since it’s not a use of DE that would be considered safe today, but now that you mention this I have not seen DE mentioned that much and certainly not earlier as you say. There seem to have been plenty of powders and they had variable effectiveness, though of course often the ingredients were not mentioned. I think they were mostly pyrethrum, the so-called Persian insect powder, but there was this one other botanical dust I’ve seen mentioned that the British Army used before DDT became available, derris (not low-toxic by any means). I wonder what was really in all the other dusts commonly in use.
I think what your mother describes, the effect of doing something for bed bugs and having them come back, is what is happening increasingly to many people in NYC. They always come back. After a while, people just go about their lives knowing that this is something they have to cope with. This does not make them “tolerant” of bed bugs as has been suggested. Walk a mile in their shoes. Anyway. It’s all rather depressing as usual.
Renee,
There will never be anything that could be called low cost heat. It is labor intensive; cost intensive to use and the equipment is very expensive. And afterwards there is no residual impact. The potential for re-introduction is just as great after the treatment as before. There must be some form of effective residual impact in order to have long term effect on the emerging population or those that may be re-introduced.
The efficacious, inexpensive ___________(something) must be chemistry, which would include dusts. That is the only hope we have to meet all three of the criteria I have set forth to eliminate bedbugs in America or anywhere else for that matter.
Efficacious:
1. Heat absolutely works on any bedbugs that remain in the immediate area.
2. Fumigation absolutely will kill every bedbug in a facility. There is nowhere to hide or escape to.
3. Vacuuming and steaming are only partially effective.
4. Current chemistry is ineffective, either totally or partially.
Inexpensive:
1. None of the above meets these criteria. Even with the use of current chemistry so much has to be done (and more than once) that the cost starts to spiral out of control.
Available to the general public:
1. The first two can only be provided by professionals.
2. Vacuuming and steaming don’t work well in anyone’s hands.
3. The chemistry is even less effective in the public’s hands than those of professionals.
The only solution is efficacious, inexpensive chemistry that is available to the general public; chemistry that will have an effective residual impact on bedbugs.
Rich
I think we will never again see the days of pesticides that work available to the general public. Is this too pessimistic, Rich? Or is your stand the advocate’s stand, i.e., you also know what the odds are but this is what you believe is necessary?
I think we’ve just moved on too much and modern concepts of safety will not permit it.
Unless termiticides are the model? I don’t know much about termites (nothing actually), can Joe Public treat for termites himself? And actually have a chance of succeeding? So, once something effective for bed bugs comes along, like cockroach gel baits and termiticides… is that it? But that would be something new, yes?
Renee,
John Q Public has never really been able to effectively treat termites himself. There are baits out there for the public, but I don’t think that they have been all that successful for them. It takes discipline and time for baits to work, and even then, I don’t see our people using those particular baits much or without additional techniques.
Termite work also varies around the country depending on the type of termite that is infesting a house. In my area we only have subterranean termites. Although there are 5 or 6 different species of that type in Ohio, their habits are all the same and soil treatment is the most effective technique, although there are some companies that only will do Sent icon baiting systems. This takes time and discipline and is not inexpensive. Furthermore once a company commits to such a system they have a substantial investment that cannot be overlooked down the road.
If a company has 20 termite routes that means that they have 20 trucks, 20 equipment set ups and hired 20 people who are specifically trained in this computer driven termite program that requires an initial set up at the home and multiple inspections on a regular basis before and after the termites start to hit the bait. Big investments require big commitments.
In other states they have Formosan termites; a subterranean termite that doesn’t need contact with the soil. That can be difficult. Then there are dry wood and wet wood termites, and so on. All of these take different techniques and tools, including fumigation. However, once completed they are all dead and with the exception of the fumigation jobs there is a residual effect if they used soil treatments.
Unless something really radical and serendipitous appears, gel baits will never work on bed bugs. My stand for efficacious, inexpensive chemistry available to the general public is based on history. I also feel strongly that everything that we are told should bear some resemblance to what we see going on around us. History and current events brought me to this conclusion long ago, even as I saw so many from our industry displaying “sanctimony” over what should be done. My views will not change just because they aren’t part of the latest philosophical flavor of the day.
In the end it is the least among us who count. If they cannot rid themselves of this problem, the problem will never go away.
Society’s “move” to safety has been based mostly on scares promoted by some “anti” crowd, going back to the first health scare known as the Great Cranberry Scare of 1959 and the “anti’s” have followed this same pattern ever since.
The perspective on what is constituted safe will change as more and more issues requiring older technology emerge. Make no mistake about this; if bed bugs were vectors of West Nile Virus, the Black Death, or hemorrhagic fever this issue would have been resolved long ago.
Best wishes,
Rich
I have been swamped with other things so really could not give much attention to newer posts, but this is most interesting in terms of perspective and outlook and hopes for the future.
I just don’t have the time to answer too expansively, but will do my best on some key points.
I agree that the recomendations of Richard Fagerlund were not on the mark in a number of areas. The low toxicity products sound wonderful in a way.. soap and alcohol and DE, but as one of the people commented at the site, what a lot of work.. Heat treatment works and Richard’s comments about the fact that it has no resicual are really of little value. It is expensive, but hopefully with more firms doing this into the future, it may become more affordable, and the work out of Florida on small heat chambers in units does hold promise.
Rich did make a lot of very useful comments, but I am not so sure about the idea of domestic actives to control bed bugs. I do hope that new actives that have low human toxicity but work on arthopod physiology to kill bed bugs will work, but if we look at bed bug treatment even historically, it has mostly been that of professinal exterminators and I believe that it will remain in that domain into the future. Certainly with multi-dwelling structures, domestic control is a fantasy except for the rare and exceptional individual willing to go those 99 yards (not the 9 yards we usually speak of).
And to keep true to character, it still comes back to IPM .. without the logic and common sense of IPM .. sustainable control is a hopeless goal. It just is not going to happen. With IPM there, sustainable control is absolutely possible. I think of a recent piece int he New York Times Magazine about Evidence Based Medicine which spoke of how in Utah a group studied how specific established protocols of practice resulted in remarkable improvement in care and outcomes for patients. An example of this was the establishment of specific required steps for infection control that were implemented as strict rules in hospitals and enforced and how this reduced infections dramatically when compared to other hospitals in which the rules were not promoted.. Now most hospitals have the rules posted everywhere so that no one ignores these… IPM is like that., Establishing Decision Rules of Practice that make sense and keeping to those rules except when new circumstances or new evidence indicates that the rules must be modified or supplemented.
New actives are so important, but without good treatment practices, in this age or reducing risk of excessive pesticides in the interior environment, it won’t work. You would be surprised at how many firms do not bother with vacuuming for bed bug control, and focus on spraying mattresses instead of vacuuming up bed bugs of all stages AND EGGS TOO… though eggs are sticky, when one applies a crevice tool.. the vast majority of them come loose. Of course one needs to protect a mattress inside an encasement, but the point is that mechanical removal helps loads and why would a firm not include this in their practices? I guess due to cost and a tech switching from one practice to another..
I think Rich is right in comparing bed bug control to termite control in terms of the necessity of professionals, though of course the private citizen can do lots to help….