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Bite sensitivity, new data

by Renee Corea on February 17, 2010

in Public Health,Research

The results of the bed bug bite survey we heard so much about are reported in this new article, The Sensitivity Spectrum: Human Reactions to Bed Bug Bites (PCT February 2010, Michael F. Potter, Kenneth F. Haynes, Kevin Connelly, Michael Deutsch, Erich Hardebeck, Don Partin, and Ron Harrison).

This is unprecedented stuff, so let’s take a very close look.

474 respondents, all with confirmed bed bug infestations, in Chicago, New York, Cincinnati, Louisville, Atlanta, LA and Miami. 66% living in apartments and 15% in single-family homes. All ages. 58% female, 42% male.

The breakdown for infestation level:

Infestation level Bugs Respondents
Low ≤10 34%
Moderate 11-100 47%
High 101-500 14%
Very high > 500 5%

“Have you experienced any bites or skin reactions from the bed bugs in your dwelling?”

70% yes, 30% no.

Essentially the reverse of what was previously thought. Though there were also skeptics—see this note about last year’s article by Reinhardt and others.

The female/male differences were not statistically significant. And neither were ethnicity differences. The level of infestation was also not a factor.

Not so with age, however:

Significantly more people over the age of 65 reported no bites or skin reactions than those who were younger. Forty-two percent of the eldest individuals surveyed said they had no bites or reactions from bed bugs in their dwelling, whereas 26 percent of those aged 11 to 65 reportedly did not react.

This corresponds with an earlier survey where 76% of elderly tenants in one “severely infested” building did not react to bites (or reported not reacting). Possible reasons for this mentioned by the authors include reduced responsiveness to allergens in the elderly, medications that suppress the immune response (corticosteroids), and “diminished awareness due to other competing health issues.” For another discussion of a similar case, see the ASHES/Orkin white paper (PDF) from last year.

I think everyone is rightly worried about the elderly. Their infestations may go unreported, grow undetected, and then may be treated incorrectly.

Relationship to mosquito bites

The bed bug bite response reported in this survey corresponded with the level of mosquito bite response in the following way:

  • “Barely visible” mosquito bite reactions = 53% reacted to bed bugs
  • “Small (dime-size) welts” from mosquito bites = 77% reacted to bed bugs
  • “Large (quarter-size)” / “severe (half-dollar size or larger)” mosquito bite reactions = 89% reacted to bed bugs

Characterizing the reactions of the 70%

  • 72% had “itchy red welts”
  • 50% had “redness or discoloration”
  • 28% had “itching in the absence of welts”
  • 21% had “a ‘pinprick’ or ‘stinging’ sensation”

Okay, let me pause here. On this last point the authors say: “which may or may not be symptomatic of bed bugs.”

Personally I have to say I can’t count the times people have reported this. Bed bugs!

There’s a lot more about the reported reactions.

The public health question, etc.

This is remarkable:

Other oft-mentioned symptoms from respondents living with bed bugs included nervousness, paranoia, anger, frustration, embarrassment, devastation and depression. Anxiety, stress, sleeplessness and depression are medically important symptoms that can lead to other conditions. Dismissing bed bugs as “not a public health pest” on the grounds that they are unproven disease vectors ignores the pain, suffering and emotional distress inflicted on their victims. When government agencies finally concede this point, additional resources may be allocated to combat the problem, as they were years ago.

I may have to put that on a post-it.

I hope they’re right.

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#44

by Renee Corea on February 17, 2010

in Public Health,Statistics

Not sure how I missed this but check out the CDC’s internal site search stats for 2009. Bed bugs rank #44 on the list of keywords, behind scabies, above smoking.

25,506 searches. Frustrated searchers to be sure.

I’m good for at least 20.

As previously noted, nothing but some journal articles and a key.

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Laundry and the motivating power of the bed bug web: Q&A with Richard Naylor

by Renee Corea on February 16, 2010

in Featured,Interviews,Research

First, the study.

Naylor, R. A., and C. J. Boase. 2010. Practical Solutions for Treating Laundry Infested With Cimex lectularius (Hemiptera: Cimicidae). Journal of Economic Entomology 103 (February): 136-139. doi:10.1603/EC09288.

In keeping with our recent interest in the first line of these research abstracts, here is this one:

The common bed bug, Cimex lectularius (L.) (Hemiptera: Cimicidae) is known to become associated, from time to time, with clothing or linen.

From time to time…

The author surveyed 100 websites offering information on bed bug control in 2007, and found specific, practical information lacking.

Washing

3.2 kg dry weight of laundry, about 7 pounds, washed at 30°C/86°F, 40°C/104°F and 60°C/140°F in a 90-minute cycle wash (that’s the standard cycle in the UK) with a standard laundry detergent. Bed bugs (10 adults, 10 third instar nymphs, 10 eggs) were placed inside clothes pockets, in cotton pouches and sealed with a sandwich bag clip.

The 40°C/104°F cycle killed all adults and nymphs, but 75.6% of the eggs survived.

The 60°C/140°F cycle killed all stages.

Tumble drying

7 pounds of laundry (dry) in dryers set to “hot” and “cool” for 10 minutes and 30 minutes.

The temperature in the “cool” cycle never got above 30°C/86°F.

The 10-minute “hot” cycle did not kill all bed bugs, probably because it took more than 15 minutes to get above 40°C/104°F. (The authors reference the published thermal death point from previous work in the 1930s-40s in the range of 40-45°C/104-113°F.)

30 minutes in the “hot” cycle killed all life stages.

Here is a graph of the temperature logged during these drying cycles. The 40-45°C zone is the (previously published) dead zone, but it took more than 15 minutes.

temperature change over time, hot (A) and cool (B) drying cycles.jpg

temperature change over time, hot (A) and cool (B) drying cycles - Naylor & Boase 2010

Cold soaking

7 pounds of laundry in about 15°C/59°F tap water, without detergent.

Almost nothing dies if soaked for two hours. But, interestingly, all adults and nymphs died when soaked for 24 hours.

The eggs, however, survived. All of them.

Dry-cleaning

Professional dry cleaning with perchloroethylene.

100% kill of bed bugs and eggs.

Freezing

A laundry bag of 2.5 kg (about 5 and a half pounds) in a freezer drawer of a standard household freezer with a minimum temperature of -18°C/-0.4°F — a separate test was done with bed bugs placed in pouches in the freezer for two hours at -17°C/1.4°F.

2 hours at -17°C/1.4°F killed all bed bugs and eggs when placed directly (not in clothes) in the freezer. But when a bag of laundry was placed in the freezer, it took about 8 hours for the temperature at the center of the bag to reach -17°C.

The researchers advise caution about the regional differences in laundry equipment:

[T]here are regional differences in the operation and performance of domestic appliances that stress the importance of understanding the local situation when making recommendations. For example, washing machines in Europe typically heat their water to the user-selected temperature, whereas washing machines in the U.S. and Australia tend to use the household hot water supply and are therefore limited by the temperature of the water coming from the boiler. Furthermore, wash cycles in the U.K. typically last 90-120 min, whereas in the U.S., wash cycles of 20-30 min are much more common (Procter 2000). As Tables 1 and 2 demonstrate, differences in temperature and duration may make the difference between success and failure in terms of clothing disinfestation. These differences emphasize the need for caution when considering adopting advice generated in one country, for use in another.

For comparison of these results with some American laundering tests reported by Potter et al. in 2007, see this PCT article.

Q&A

Richard Naylor is a doctoral student at the University of Sheffield (UK). Take a look at his bed bug photographs here. I particularly like this one:

bedbug cimex 6 - Richard Naylor University of Sheffield.jpg

Bedbug. Copyright Richard Naylor.

He generously answered our questions via email.

New York vs Bed Bugs: Your group regularly produces some of the most fantastically interesting research about bed bugs and yet I have to say it is a joy to ask you about something as simple as laundry. Because in fact it is not so simple… so it is wonderful that you took an interest in this subject. I like that your study shows that people have options (e.g., you can disinfest clothing even if you don’t have access to a dryer), but you note that regional differences in laundry equipment are important to consider. So, with that in mind, if we were to make judgments based on temperature and time (in places where one doesn’t really know the temperature of washers and dryers but can use, say, a household thermometer for some limited testing), what would be a useful rule of thumb? Often people are confused by thermal death points, especially because they seem not to be stable in the literature and have much to do with method and duration of exposure.

Richard Naylor: The important thing does seem to be the temperature, whether washing or drying. 40 degrees [Celsius] seems to be the magic number. In simple terms this is about the temperature of a nice warm bath, so it doesn’t need to be scolding hot. Some washing machines don’t heat their own water and so the maximum temperature they can achieve is the temperature that the boiler is set to. If your hot tap produces water that is slightly too hot to hold your hands under for any length of time, it is probably fine for killing bedbugs. Unfortunately one can’t get round having to know something about their washing machine if they plan to use it for treating bugs. Perhaps it would be simpler to fill the bath with hot water. As long as it is a bit too hot to hold your hands in it should be fine. Hot water penetrates the fabric much quicker than hot air, so time isn’t really a factor as long as all the air is pummeled out of it.

New York vs Bed Bugs: Did you really read 100 bed bug fact sheets on the internet? I am honestly impressed by that diligence because that sounds like torture to me. Did you find great variability in the practical information on offer?

Richard Naylor: Yes I did. A lot of the sites offering advice were run by local councils. The advice wasn’t particularly variable because people just republish the same “knowledge” over and over again. I just kept a tally of every mention of “hot wash”, “tumble-dry” etc. and worked my way down a google search. Every now and then you stumble over a blinder, involving a bloody steak and a roll of sellotape, which keeps the motivation up! I keep a folder on my computer of all the best bedbug misinformation I can find on the web!

New York vs Bed Bugs: Can I ask you what you are working on? What are some of the interesting questions in need of answering?

Richard Naylor: I am currently interested in their ecology and dispersal. We actually know a lot more about the ecology of swallow bugs than we do of bedbugs, simply because when an infestation is discovered, it is normally treated straight away. People don’t want to wait a few weeks for studies to be made and experiments carried out. The solution I have come up with is to build about a dozen 3 meter long arenas complete with blood feeding station and around 200 bedbugs in each. I am trying to understand how they behave in an infestation and to figure out what factors are important in driving their dispersal.

New York vs Bed Bugs: I once saw what looked like a carved wood panel of mating bed bugs at your university’s website (can’t seem to find it again)—I am curious about just how old that is? Is it an artifact of the current interest in bed bugs or is it from much earlier? It is beautiful and I wonder if you’ve always had it.

Richard Naylor: Well spotted. We (though not me) started studying bedbugs at Sheffield University about 15 years ago. Mike [Siva-Jothy] used to be particularly interested in sexual conflict, which is the idea that males and females of a species are purely out to do the best for themselves as they can, often at the expense of the opposite sex. Bedbugs are a prime example, as males will mate with females much more often than the females require to stay fertile and as a result the females live about 25% less long than they would otherwise. We believe that traumatic insemination arose out of sexual conflict as a way of males preventing females from exerting choice over paternity.

Anyway, the carving was commissioned about 6-7 years ago and is made up of lots of images from old books and photographs around the department. The bedbugs are copied from an electron micrograph that we had done of some of our bugs at the time.

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What’s working for bed bug control in multifamily housing: a new report from NCHH

by Renee Corea on February 15, 2010

in Featured,Issues and Challenges

The National Center for Healthy Housing, with funding from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Pesticide Programs, has published a report on the actual practice of bed bug control: What’s Working for Bed Bug Control in Multi-Family Housing: Reconciling best practices with research and the realities of implementation (PDF).

The report is authored by Allison Taisey and Tom Neltner. It is intended for an audience of “health professionals, housing professionals, and pest management professionals seeking to plan for or respond to a bed bug infestation in multi-family housing. It is not a best management practices document” — this is important to understand I think. Practices are evolving and there is so much that is not known.

Don’t miss the case studies.

You can find other resources on the Healthy Homes Training website of the NCHH: Pest Control in Affordable Housing – Integrated Pest Management.

bed bug control in multifamily housing - National Center for Healthy Housing.jpg

click to download PDF

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A tendency to synchronize feeding

by Renee Corea on February 15, 2010

in Research

Reinhardt, K., Isaac, D., & Naylor, R. (2010) Estimating the feeding rate of the bedbug Cimex lectularius in an infested room: an inexpensive method and a case study. Medical and Veterinary Entomology 24, 46-54. doi:10.1111/j.1365-2915.2009.00847.x

The authors developed a method, with potential forensic applicability, to determine the time from the last bloodmeal based on measurements of the abdomen — actually a ratio of the abdomen size and width of the thorax, its average decrease over several hours with the process of digestion, at different temperatures:

The overall procedure for our method was as follows. Firstly, we quantified the decline in abdomen size of fully fed animals at different temperatures. Secondly, we tested whether the propensity to feed is temperature-dependent and, thirdly, we measured the shrinkage of the bugs’ bodies in the most commonly used preservation media, 60% and 96% ethanol. In a case study, we then applied this method to measure the digestion status of bedbugs in a naturally infested room and to calculate an average feeding rate for bedbugs in that room.

As for the room in question, I am grateful for the reserve of these researchers who describe the room simply like this:

Samples of bedbugs were collected from 21 harbourages in a heavily infested dwelling in London (Figs 1 and 2) in June 2007. The temperature in the infested room was maintained by a thermostat at a constant 26° C throughout night and day. The only tenant of this apartment was an elderly man who kept most of his newspapers, books and other belongings in stacked piles throughout his home (Fig. 2). Harbourages were mainly found in the stacks of newspapers, which were at most separated by a few centimetres (Figs 1 and 2).

Yes, there is a graphic photograph in the article, but what you really want to see is this drawing:

schematic drawing of an infested room - Reinhardt, Isaac, Naylor 2010

schematic drawing of an infested room - Reinhardt, Isaac, Naylor 2010

From this room, from all those harborages in newspaper stacks, they collected “a small proportion” of the total bed bug population. 3,750 bed bugs. (So this is how lab colonies are built…) Some were kept alive and some were preserved in ethanol, hence the need to figure out how much bed bugs shrink in ethanol.

The average time from the last bloodmeal for female bed bugs in this room was 2.5 days (at a temperature of 26dC/78.8dF), which is at the low end of a 2-4 day feeding interval estimate for this temperature. In lab conditions, the authors say that feeding rate increases as the temperature increases (1-3 days at 32dC/89.6dF vs 5-9 days at 18dC/64.4dF).

(Mellanby previously estimated that adults fed every 5-6 days at temperatures between 20-27dC/68-80.6dF. And by the way he had to paint individual bed bugs and recapture them on their feeding excursions… his “natural” infestation was in rat cages.)

One wonders if it’s not just temperature and if feeding intervals would be different in a lower-density infestation.

You might remember, Pfiester et al. observed that the percentage of female bed bugs grouped together rises with population density, especially in female-biased aggregations. Well, the sex-ratio in all those paper stacks in this study was definitely female-biased, 65.8% of adults collected.

The graphs in the drawing above show the mean number of days since the last bloodmeal for each harborage location they represent (these are female bed bugs in harborages that contained more than 10 adult females). Notice the difference between harborages immediately next to each other on the bed? The authors don’t know what accounts for this but, as ever, it may have to do with mating:

These differences between harbourages cannot be attributed to temperature differences because they were found in the same confined room. They are also unlikely to be caused by the switch of sleeping sites (between sofa and bed) of the inhabitant of the apartment because harbourages that were next to each other differed in feeding stage distribution (Fig. 1, Table 3). There is a possibility, however, that the tendency towards synchronous feeding may be related to the mating biology of bedbugs. Mating and feeding are closely linked in bedbugs because fed females cannot avoid mating (Reinhardt et al., 2009b). Males control the mating rate of females and frequent mating reduces female lifespan and egg production (Stutt & Siva-Jothy, 2001). As females cannot reduce feeding without ceasing reproduction, Reinhardt et al. (2009b) speculated that females might lower male attention by engaging in synchronized feeding.

Fascinating.

But all I can think about is that poor man, futilely alternating between the bed and the sofa, trying to find relief.

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Silly red circles on a chart

by Renee Corea on February 10, 2010

in Bed Bug Task Force,New York vs Bed Bugs

I made this logic tree (PDF) a while back to try to figure out all possible solutions. (Because I read a book! A great book, actually, and thought I’d try its tools.)

But it’s only been 4 months and in looking at this today I find it almost painful to look at.

The only solutions that hold any promise, and they are on a scale from might never happen to don’t hold your breath, are the reintroduction of effective residual insecticides, real DIY protocols, and new technologies.

I missed the deadline to write a comment on the propoxur request because I read the NRDC (PDF) and Beyond Pesticides letters and then could not get the emotion out of my letter. Where do these people live, I wonder? (Also, I thought NRDC had NPMA on speed dial these days. Couldn’t they, I don’t know, pick up the phone and get a clue?)

Sometimes I get emails from people in other cities and I always tell them to look to the work of the Central Ohio Bed Bug Task Force, to the planning work of the Cincinnati/Hamilton County Joint Bed Bug Task Force and to all that has been achieved in Toronto.

The New York City Bed Bug Advisory Board is writing its report. It is due in little more than a month.

New York vs Bed Bugs will end its run after its release — and if it is not released, well.

I will do my best to write about all the things I wanted to write about before then.

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Bed bugs make the home page of the NYC Department of Health

by Renee Corea on February 5, 2010

in Featured,Issues and Challenges,News

You have to see this.

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has published a new bed bug guide, Preventing and Getting Rid of Bed Bugs Safely (PDF), available in English as a printed booklet by calling 311, and in Spanish (PDF) and Chinese (PDF) on the web.

This guide is a part of the Health Department’s Healthy Homes guides. It uses spare and easy-to-follow text and drawings like this one:

getting rid of infested items graphic from DOHMH bed bug guide

Infested with bedbugs - graphic from DOHMH Healthy Homes bed bug guide

Not to understate things but you must realize that this is a vast improvement on the city’s previous bed bug fact sheet.

Here are some key messages that I like in this new publication:

  • It tells you one of the most important things you should know about bed bugs:

Some people do not react to bed bug bites.

  • It tells you that bed bugs are not your fault:

If you have bed bugs, you shouldn’t feel ashamed. Anyone can get bed bugs. Notify your landlord and neighbors. The sooner everyone responds, the more successful everyone will be.

  • It tells you not to use foggers and bombs in the only language that will mean anything to you in your desperate state:

Do not use pesticide bombs or foggers to control pests. They can make conditions worse.

  • It tells you that your efforts will help but does not lie to you and doesn’t shame you for not being able to get rid of bed bugs solely with a vacuum cleaner (like so many others do):

Cleaning and disinfecting will help to reduce bed bugs and their spread but may not get rid of them totally.

  • It recommends to landlords that they:

Notify tenants, and inspect all units adjacent to, above and below apartments found to have bed bugs.

If you’ve been around the bed bug block, I know exactly what you are thinking. I do. So here are some suggestions for you.

If you think the guide leaves out important information, or you have specific tips to share, take out a red pen! Call 311 and order a copy of the guide and then annotate it with your best tips and information before you give it to your friend, neighbor, acquaintance down the street. But please do share it. If you know there are bed bug problems in your neighborhood, share this guide with others. Spread the word and be a part of the solution and all that.

Now there is finally a city publication that can serve as a basic guide both to build awareness and to help the newly exposed.

Please share and build upon this effort. We’re all in this together. (Okay, I’ll stop before I tell you how moved I was to see this on the Health Department’s website.)

Please note that this guide, like the HPD bed bug course, was not developed by the Bed Bug Advisory Board. The advisory board is not a task force, remember?

Still, this is such important progress. You have no idea. Or maybe you do, and so I hope you will appreciate what this represents.

Here’s a screenshot of this I-never-thought-I’d-see-it development:

bed bugs on DOHMH's home page

New bed bug guide on the city's Health Department website - February 5, 2010

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The active spread of bed bugs in buildings: the stakes for cities

by Renee Corea on February 4, 2010

in Featured,Research

A new article in the Journal of Economic Entomology should have important implications for policy making—if we are smart enough as a society to appreciate the stakes.

Wang, C., K. Saltzmann, E. Chin, G. W. Bennett, T. Gibb. 2010. Characteristics of Cimex lectularius (Hemiptera: Cimicidae), Infestation and Dispersal in a High-Rise Apartment Building. Journal of Economic Entomology 103(1):172-177 DOI: 10.1603/EC09230

First let me get this out of the way. Check out this first sentence from the abstract:

Bed bugs, Cimex lectularius L. (Hemiptera: Cimicidae), are a fast-growing urban pest of significant public health importance in the United States and many other countries.

Significant public health importance. I think of this phrase every day. May it one day mean what it says, yes?

Dr. Wang and colleagues studied a bed bug infestation in a 233-unit building for low-income elderly and disabled tenants in Indianapolis. The infestation is believed to have started with one tenant moving in, but it had already spread to more than 10 apartments by the time building management learned about it. Bed bugs spread in this building between 2006-2008 and a variety of treatments were tried, including educational efforts and treatments by the researchers themselves in 24 apartments from 2007-2008.

From December 2008 to April 2009 the researchers conducted inspections of apartments with reported infestations and interviewed the tenants. Bed bugs were counted and removed and Climbup Interceptors were installed. Adjacent apartments were then inspected and, not surprisingly, there were a number of apartments that could not be inspected.  Apartments across the hall were also inspected:

After an apartment was identified as having bed bugs, the two adjoining units and the two units immediately across the hallway from the infested unit were also inspected. If no bed bugs were found, the apartments were inspected again 1-3 mo later to confirm the absence of bed bugs. Residents from ≈ 15% of the apartments declined the inspection services, citing their belief that bed bugs were not present.

Across the hall dispersal

The researchers found a way to test their across-the-hall dispersal hypothesis by placing two interceptors baited with a chemical lure outside five infested apartments. The article addresses the question of using lures in these traps thus:

Although chemical lures were used in the interceptors to detect bed bug dispersal, a separate study in nine apartments indicated that the presence of lures did not significantly increase the number of trapped bed bugs (our unpublished data). Thus, we considered the counts from interceptors placed at entry doors or in the hallways to be random catches of bed bugs that were passing through those areas.

bed bug traps outside apartment door

bed bug interceptors outside apartment door - Wang et al. (2010)

In any case, management objected to the traps in the hallways and so they were removed after 7 days. They were then placed behind the front doors of eight infested apartments:

Three of the five pairs of interceptors placed in the hallways trapped two bed bugs per pair after 1 wk, supporting our hypothesis that bed bugs used hallways as a route for dispersal. The mean visual counts from these five apartments before placing the interceptors were 196.4 ± 58.7 per apartment. The average number of bed bugs detected at entry doors over 4 wk period was 6 ± 2 (n = 8 ) and the maximum was 42. Among the 138 bed bugs examined that were caught at entry doors (dispersing), 30% were nymphs, including first instars. Some of the first instars were from eggs laid by trapped adult females as evidenced by the presence of empty eggs in interceptors. The difference between the proportion of nymphs at entry doors versus under furniture indicates that adult bed bugs were 9 times more likely to disperse than nymphs.

It’s not all active dispersal though—who would have thought one could write that after all these years—because standard mechanisms of the spread were observed too, including an infested wheelchair used in common areas, the introduction of infested furniture, “not wrapping infested furniture in plastic before removal from the building” and visits by residents and “guests harboring bed bugs on their clothing or belongings.”

The characteristics of a building-wide infestation

The facts gleaned about this infestation in this building:

  • three years after the first suspected introduction, 45% of the building’s apartments were known to be infested, 101 apartments as of April 2009
  • in the apartments visually inspected, there were 53 identified infestations; of these, 53% were adjacent apartments on the same floor and 45% were apartments across the hall
  • in 40 apartments with a history of reported infestations, only 12 residents were aware of bed bugs; of these 40 apartments, 24 were still infested
  • of 40 residents surveyed, 50% received bed bug treatments provided by the building management, 40% tried to control the infestation on their own with chemicals, 35% threw away furniture and 20% used store- or internet-bought pyrethroid-based sprays or foggers. Otherwise, alcohol, bleach and boric acid were used—as well as laundering, covering cracks with tape, placing blankets under doors and using mattress encasements

Information gleaned from interceptor traps in 20 infested apartments:

  • while there was a 77% reduction in bed bug counts, after 12 weeks there were still bed bugs in 11 of 20 apartments
  • 78% of the trapped bed bugs were nymphs
  • 89% of trapped bed bugs were in the outer well of the interceptor “suggesting movement into the trap from the room” and that “most of the bed bugs missed by visual inspections were not on the furniture”
  • more than 98% of trapped bed bugs were already dead when counted

This last item is interesting but I’m not sure what to make of it because, in fact, one of the conclusions of this study is that pest control efforts in this building were ineffective at eradicating the bed bugs. This may simply be that elusive line between mitigation and eradication. Unless they’re dying of fright? (Sort of joking but sort of serious—is there any possibility that being trapped makes them, well, not spry let’s say.)

Prospects

The researchers underscore what to me is an astonishing fact, that 50% of residents in infested apartments were unaware of their own infestations, this despite each tenant receiving a bed bug educational brochure and having the opportunity to attend a seminar.

This is in part what I believe this means: education alone will not solve the problem of bed bugs in our cities. Even assuming a significant investment in educational resources (an insurmountable if at present), there will not be a way to reach everyone.

At some point, you have to have access to all infested locations and then you have to kill all the bed bugs, with something—whatever it is, it must be inexpensive and widely deployable.

Impossible?

What else does this study show us?

This is what the researchers say:

Several of the surveyed apartments in this study were infested for more than two years. The active and passive bed bug dispersal mechanisms observed during this study and the rapid spread of bed bug infestations suggest an urgent need for more effective bed bug monitoring and intervention programs to curb the exploding problem of bed bug infestations. Without such efforts, bed bug infestations will continue to spread in our society and likely become much more widespread in low-income housing in the years to come. Bed bugs cause more than discomfort and pain. Bed bug infestations have economic, social, and legal ramifications (Potter 2006). Thus, it is critical to act early to prevent bed bug infestations from becoming chronic and incurring much greater health and economic consequences.

These are the facts on the ground. From people who know what they’re talking about, not wishful thinkers or would be social engineers.

Clearly, I believe that while many are beginning to recognize the need to act, no one really wants to. It will just take too much money.

But what happens then if we continue on this particular bed bug road?

_______________________

Active dispersal is an intriguing topic that is near to my heart. Here are some other posts on this subject:

And here are previous posts about the research of Dr. Wang and colleagues:

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Letter in support of the Community Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell

by Renee Corea on February 3, 2010

in Featured,Issues and Challenges

Below is our letter in support of the Community IPM Program — links added in this online version. Please take a moment to review the appeal (PDF) by Dr. Donald Rutz, director of the NYS IPM Program, and please consider writing a supportive letter to save the program. As always, many thanks…

February 3, 2010

The Honorable Antoine Thompson
Chairman
Senate Environmental Conservation Committee
Legislative Office Building, Room 902
Albany, New York 12247

Dear Senator Thompson,

I am writing to you in support of the Community Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University.

As a co-founder of New York vs Bed Bugs, a policy advocacy organization in New York City, I have worked closely with an IPM Specialist at the Community Integrated Pest Management Program, Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, most recently on the New York City Bed Bug Advisory Board which Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann chairs.

Bed bugs are rapidly spreading in New York City, as in other North American cities, causing extraordinary physical, psychological and financial distress wherever they appear; and severely straining the budgets and resources of families, property owners, social and health services providers, business owners and government agencies.

Current bed bug control methods and practices are variously difficult, ineffective and, crucially, unaffordable. There are no programs or resources available to the majority of New York residents who are affected by bed bug infestations. It is particularly troubling that the most vulnerable populations are at higher risk for suffering entrenched bed bug infestations.

In a period of deepening economic austerity, the prospects for bed bug control in New York City are realistically bleak. In this challenging landscape, therefore, the work of the Community Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University is vital. The Community Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University has worked to develop and deliver educational resources to combat bed bug infestations in New York City and New York State. In 2008 it produced Guidelines for Prevention and Management of Bed Bugs in Shelters and Group Living Facilities, a publication that has had a significant impact far beyond its intended audience, becoming an extremely valuable resource for all affected New Yorkers. The Program has a comprehensive website about bed bugs and delivers bed bug management education and advice through various channels, including innovative tools such as informational wallet cards [PDF] targeting the needs of travelers and college students. This combination of attention to an emergent public health pest problem and concerted effort at producing useful guidance and educational materials, especially for underserved populations, is a critical response that is singular in the state, with no other organizations taking on this task.

I urge you to restore the Community Integrated Pest Management Program at Cornell University to its historic funding level of $400,000. Please take steps to preserve one of the few pest management education resources available to New York residents at a time when they are ill-equipped to cope with an unprecedented resurgence of bed bug infestations.

Respectfully,

Renee Corea
New York vs Bed Bugs

cc: Donald A. Rutz, Director, NYS IPM Program

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Bed bug treatment specs in TCH’s July 2009 RFP

by Renee Corea on February 2, 2010

in Issues and Challenges,Toronto

If you want to see an example of bed bug treatment specs within the context of a full RFP, see Toronto Community Housing’s Integrated Pest Management Services Request for Proposal from July 2009.

Pest treatment specifications for bed bugs are in appendix B-4.

Please note that the PDF has a wayward dot—you may need to rename the file (add a .pdf extension) in order to open it.

See also previously: Bed bug treatment specs from ONPHA. (The ONPHA specs are substantially the same but the warranty is specific to bed bugs and other details have been elaborated upon. Highly recommend that you check them out.)

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