New York vs Bed Bugs » Squishy

For shame, NPR On The Media recycles David Segal’s bogus squishy stats show

Renee Corea — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 05:24:50 +0000

Oh no, the return of squishy.

Why, oh, why is On the Media recycling David Segal’s discredited bed bug story?

Take a look at that big red correction slapped on his Washington Post story last year.

Yeah, that’s right. It was Segal’s story that was a hyperbolic disgrace.

It did not check out, On the Media. Do they even know what that means?

Mercy.

WashPo comes clean

Renee Corea — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 01:39:53 +0000

The Washington Post has posted a correction:

Correction to This Article
The article about bedbugs said that 500 of the 2,500 bedbug complaints lodged with the New York City Housing Authority between 2005 and 2007 turned out to be actual infestations. After taking a closer look at its records, the authority now says it did not keep detailed reports on bedbugs until last year. Of the 1,720 bedbug complaints received in 2007, a spokesman says, 70 percent resulted in treatment by an exterminator.

I honestly thought they would not correct David Segal’s ‘bed bugs are a product of hysteria’ story. But they did.

And, yes, we noticed. Deflection, played well. What can you do?

Still, I say, bully for us.

Further reading on this tale in several places on our site (it’s pretty much all we did our first week!) and you can read our correction request here.

Make it right, WashPo!

Renee Corea — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 01:24:53 +0000

This was our letter to the Washington Post last week.

I tried to explain why this matters so much to us here.

We should have been able to reference the YTD numbers which were available in January and made other changes.

There is so much we need to learn—including where to place the ampersand in Department of Housing Preservation & Development.

****
Dear Ms. Howell,

The Washington Post’s February 26 article, “Hmm. Tiny, Evil — And Everywhere?” asserted the following:

But there are so many bedbug false alarms that there’s reason to assume many perfectly sane people are ringing them. In New York, the city housing authority has fielded and checked out more than 2,500 bedbug complaints in the past three years; fewer than 500 turned out to be actual infestations. Even allowing for some overlap — two calls about the same bugs, for instance — that’s as many as two or three callers who don’t have bedbugs for each caller who does.

The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA)—with jurisdiction over the city’s public housing tenants—logged 1,720 bed bug complaints in fiscal year 2007 alone. The city’s Department of Housing & Preservation Development (HPD)—with jurisdiction over private residential tenants—logged 6,889 bed bug complaints in the same fiscal period and issued 2,008 landlord violations.

Mr. Segal not only failed to mention the HPD statistics (was he not aware of the “other” housing agency?) but grossly misrepresented the number of “actual infestations” in the city’s public housing system. (We have not been able to confirm where he found the statistic he chose to selectively cite.) Mr. Segal then appeared on a radio show on March 7, NPR’s On the Media, and compounded his various errors in judgment.

The city’s available bed bug statistics, flawed as they are, were available to Mr. Segal at the time of his reporting. Indeed, one of the articles he ridiculed in his piece, a Daily News article on December 30, cited the correct statistics.

In light of the above material inaccuracies, we respectfully request that the Post run a correction at the earliest possible date.

Mr. Segal was either unaware of the city’s available bed bug statistics or was inconvenienced by their failure to bolster his thesis. [snip]

We heard from Howard!

Renee Corea — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 02:47:48 +0000

That’s Mr. Howard Marder, public information officer for the New York City Housing Authority.

What I can tell you is that the revised year-end number for 2007 of all bed bug complaints was 1,720 and that our Chief Exterminator says that in his experience about 70% of cases reported there is actual infestation.

Well.

Let’s play bed bug math, shall we?

That’s an estimate of at least 1,204 bed bug infestations in New York City public housing in fiscal year 2007 alone.

Public housing tenants vs. private residential tenants, complaints vs. violations, 311 vs. a centralized maintenance call center, HPD vs. NYCHA stats… it’s all squishy to WashPo.

We need a “New York City Bed Bugs 101” course for journalists!

I wanted to write about other things for you tonight but now I have to go write a letter to the Post. Wish us luck!

PS: Yes, we noticed the Chief Exterminator part. We’ll have to revisit that in a future post.

The Case of the Incredibly Squishy Bed Bug Stats

Renee Corea — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 16:41:12 +0000

We still haven’t heard from New York City Housing Authority spokesman Howard Marder.

Surprised, you say?

But we did get a nice email from David Segal wishing us well in our efforts.

We know you want to know why this matters. Why do we care that the Washington Post dismissed the bed bug problem in New York City?

We’re not journalists. We can’t be offended at the implicit insult in a story about a “bogus” journalistic trend. We are not pest management professionals, either. It wasn’t our professional integrity and intellectual honesty that were directly questioned. And while the imputation of delusional parasitosis was thrown out in David Segal’s story, we are fairly secure in our own mental health to, if not exactly brush it off, move ahead with our objectives.

So why are we spending any time on this? We have a lot of hard work ahead of us, after all.

Note: the rest of this post was written on March 30, after we’d heard from Howard Marder and requested a correction from the Washington Post.

While the unsupported assertions about PMPs and bed bug sufferers have unsettled many of us, it’s not why we asked the Post to correct its story. Nor is the tone of the story why we care.

Further, it pains me to even have to make this statement but it’s necessary. In his radio interview, David Segal jokingly said that he feared a visitation of Irony Bed Bugs, and that people had been writing to him wishing him bed bugs.

We do not wish bed bugs on anyone, ever, period.

But in this case we have to add: especially not David Segal. He lives in New York. New York City is not doing much to control the spread of bed bugs. Therefore, one more New Yorker who gets bed bugs? Absolute last thing we need.

So, finally, the reason we care: misrepresenting the scope of the bed bug problem in our city is important because it has public policy consequences. And when an influential media outlet does it, the injury is significant and no remedy is available to us.

In 2003, Dr. Tim Myles, in a bulletin of Toronto’s Centre for Urban and Community Studies (warning, link loads a PDF), wrote about the following cause for concern in Toronto’s rise of bed bug infestations in city shelters:

If the resurgence of bed bugs in shelters and other public facilities is not contained, there is the risk of a continuous and escalating growth in the source populations, leading to larger-scale infestations, which will require more frequent and costly control efforts later.

As the source populations grow, the rate of spread will inevitably increase and bed bugs will start to appear in hotels, apartments, theatres, restaurants, public transit, hospitals and eventually detached single family homes.

Well, that day is here. In New York City we have bed bugs in schools and law firms. In a city newsroom. In theaters and maternity wards. Source or primary infestations in multiple sites and the potential for further spread is a reality.

How can cities achieve control? What is the first thing that must be done?

Infestations must be tracked. Counted. All sites of primary infestations, all potential vectors of the spread, must be identified and brought under control. We believe very strongly that infestations must be tracked via a non-adversarial reporting system and that the data must be made publicly available.

The available statistics in our city, from multiple sources and tracking only a subset of all infestations, paint a partial and confusing picture of the totality of infestations. But they are available and were available to the Post. A correction is due.

Waiting for Howard

Renee Corea — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 15:50:07 +0000

Today we wait for New York City Housing Authority spokesman Howard Marder to confirm the numbers cited for public housing infestations in David Segal’s Washington Post piece.

We are rather impatient to hear whether it is indeed true, as Mr. Segal wrote, that there were fewer than 500 actual bed bug infestations in New York City public housing in the last three years.

While we wait, I thought we should take a quick look at what entomologist Richard Cooper wrote to Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell:

Why did Mr. Segal, stop at a single statistic?

That’s a good question, Mr. Cooper.

It’s a good letter; we think you should read it in its entirety.

NYC’s bed bug math problem

Renee Corea — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 02:41:42 +0000

Note: Click here for an update on the most recent New York City bed bug statistics.

This is how New York City’s bed bug statistics have appeared in recent press articles:

Daily News, Douglas Feiden, December 30, 2007:

In the fiscal year that ended in June, 6,889 infestation complaints were logged and 2,008 building owners were hit with summonses.

and

Those travel patterns [bed bugs hitchhiking on clothing, etc.] account for the 1,708 verified bedbug cases in 277 public housing projects this year, the city Housing Authority says. The Department of Education has documented another 74 cases, spread across 50 schools.

Washington Post, David Segal, February 26, 2008:

In New York, the city housing authority has fielded and checked out more than 2,500 bedbug complaints in the past three years; fewer than 500 turned out to be actual infestations. Even allowing for some overlap — two calls about the same bugs, for instance — that’s as many as two or three callers who don’t have bedbugs for each caller who does.

Columbia Spectator, Dino Grandoni, March 5, 2008:

Seth Donlin, press secretary for New York’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said the city received 1,729 bedbug complaints and issued 437 violations to landlords in the last fiscal year.

Emphasis added.

So, is it just us or are there fundamental errors above?

We spoke to HPD’s Seth Donlin today.

The Fiscal Year 2007 (July 1, 2006 – June 30, 2007) numbers are as follows:

Manhattan:

1,729 complaints and 437 violations

Bronx:

1,117 complaints and 347 violations

Brooklyn:

2,382 complaints and 692 violations

Queens:

1,602 complaints and 514 violations

Staten Island:

59 complaints and 18 violations

Grand 5-borough total:

6,889 complaints and 2,008 violations

You can send a thank you note, or a fruit basket, to Douglas Feiden if you are so inclined.

We have great ambition but few resources, so we’re giving the Columbia Spectator a pass and calling Grandoni’s citing Manhattan statistics as city statistics an honest mistake.

And the Washington Post? No, they’re decidedly not getting a pass. We have a call into New York City Housing Authority spokesman Howard Marder.

We’ll continue this tomorrow.

But first we’ll note something that the author of the Washington Post article, David Segal, said in an interview about his story.

I mean, the problem with this story has always been that the stats on it are incredibly squishy.

Indeed, David. David Segal is based in New York.

You can read Bedbugger’s reaction to Segal’s interview here.