“Bedbugs on the rise in R.I.” |
| Posted: 26 Sep 2010 06:33 PM PDT 01:00 AM EDT on Monday, September 27, 2010 Tony DeJesus, a 34-year New England Pest Control veteran, examines specimens to determine if they are bedbugs. The Providence Journal / John Freidah John Schultz's wife woke him in the middle of the night in their Warwick hotel room. Something's biting me, she said. "I turned on the light and the bed was just covered with bugs. They were on our hands, our feet and our legs," Schultz said. "There were little babies crawling in the carpet. It was like the floor was moving." The California couple grabbed their belongings and checked into another hotel. Then, worried about their health, they drove to Kent Hospital with some of the bugs in a container. "I had never seen a bedbug, but the first thing I thought was bedbug," said Schultz. While bedbugs have invaded New York City –– infesting the Empire State Building, Niketown and other trendy retail stores, and several movie theaters –– they have definitely arrived in Rhode Island, too. "The first 25 years I did two bedbug jobs," said Tony DeJesus, a 34-year veteran at New England Pest Control. "Now we are doing one or two every day. It's just incredible." A pest whose infamy had been reduced from bedtime horror to bedtime rhyme –– "good night, sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite" –– has made an unwelcome comeback. These days, bedbugs are all over the news. Several new websites are focused entirely on bedbugs. David Letterman even devoted a Top 10 list to them. While the tiny bloodsuckers are not known to transmit disease, their bites can cause swelling, itching and severe allergic reactions. Worse, perhaps, is the anxiety they stir up. "We get a lot of people that get bit and wake up and have an itch and they get in a panic because of the news about bedbugs" said David Spicer, an exterminator for 28 years at Providence-based Griggs and Browne. Flat, oval-shaped and wingless, bedbugs only grow to about ¼ inch in length. But they're the perfect pest: They hide expertly, grow rapidly and reproduce prolifically. Females can lay 1 to 5 eggs a day, and up to 500 in a lifetime. Their resurgence has been so alarming that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the EPA issued a joint statement on bedbugs. In it, they attribute the booming populations to increased resistance to pesticides, lack of awareness of the ancient relationship between the parasite and man and more frequent human travel. The case of the Schultzes perfectly illustrates how easily bedbugs can spread. After rushing out of the Homestead Studio Suites in Warwick in September 2009 they brought their luggage into a different room at a nearby hotel. Then they returned to Los Angeles with their luggage. "There were two in the suitcase," said Schultz. Upset by what happened and dissatisfied at the hotel's response, Schultz aired his bedbug complaints about the hotel on TripAdvisor's website. The general manager declined to comment, but referred questions about the incident to a spokeswoman for the hotel's parent company, Extended Stay Hotels. The spokeswoman did not respond to several calls. [Complaints about bedbugs at other hotels in the region –– none of which are verified –– can be found at the bedbugregistery.com.] Homeless shelters are similarly vulnerable to infestations because of their transient populations. Crossroads Rhode Island has been dealing with bedbugs at its emergency housing sites for the past few years, said Kyle Macdonald, vice president of adult services. The agency no longer accepts used furniture and is gradually replacing wooden furniture that is more prone to infestations. Mattresses are now zipped into special vinyl covers to discourage bedbugs from nesting in them. Guests must wash all their clothing before entering the shelter. And an exterminator treats for bedbugs regularly. "You can have it under control, but all it takes is one person coming through," Macdonald said. "Sometimes it's bad, sometimes it's not. It's a huge expense." Hospitals are also at risk. Spicer, of Griggs & Browne, once was summoned to the room of a patient who had come from a homeless shelter. After looking for the source of bedbug complaints, he found them. "They were coming out of his work boots," he said. College students are another highly mobile population that can contribute to the spread of bedbugs. On Sept. 1, as students arrived in Boston (the 11th worst U.S. city for bedbugs in a Terminix survey), city workers canvassed neighborhoods looking for mattresses and furniture discarded by former student tenants. To discourage their reuse, they put stickers on them with images of bedbugs and the warning, "Caution this may contain bedbugs. Do not remove." In Rhode Island, no such campaigns have been mounted. Neither the City of Providence nor Brown University has begun any bedbug programs. The University of Rhode Island posted information about bedbugs on its website, advising them to report suspicious bites to health services, said assistant vice president of student affairs Chip Yensan. Experts emphasize that bedbugs, because they are spread so easily, can be found in upscale hotels and homes. "It doesn't have to do with housekeeping or economic status," said Spicer. Once you've got bedbugs, getting rid of them can be difficult. They can survive months without a meal. And unlike ants or spiders, you're not likely to see them crawling around in the middle of the day. Instead, they come out at night and, thanks to their painless bites, feed while their prey continues to sleep. The rest of the time they have an uncanny knack for hiding. They fit into nooks and crannies, usually close to where people sleep. Spicer once found them in a smoke detector on a ceiling. Victims, said DeJesus, "are little bit panicky. They ask, 'Why me? How did I get them?' You try to ask them 'Have you traveled anywhere? Have you had any guests? It was probably five or six months ago.' It takes a while for them to build up to enough numbers where you get bit that many times." The state Board of Health doesn't track bedbugs since they aren't disease carriers. Spokeswoman Annemarie Beardsworth notes that state housing codes require landlords to deal with pest infestations, except when the problems are confined to one unit, which is then the responsibility of that tenant. The Health Department advises tenants whose landlords are unresponsive to complain to their municipal minimum housing office. Getting rid of bedbugs can be time-consuming and costly. Heavily infested furnishings have to be thrown away. Nightstands and dressers have to be emptied. Wall hangings have to be removed. Sometimes bookshelves and books must be inspected, even individual pages of photo albums, Spicer said. "If you don't, you run the risk of letting one get away. The preparation can be worse than moving," said Spicer. One of his colleagues once said of his bedbug customers, "I know they are beginning to understand me when they start to cry." These pesticide treatment can cost anywhere from $500 to thousands of dollars, he said, and requires several return visits. [National Pest Management Association reports revenues jumping from $98 million in 2006 to $258 million last year from bedbug treatments.] Some people try to take on the problem themselves, said Spicer. But he advises against what one family tried. "They brought DDT back from South America," he said. They applied so much, "I didn't want to touch anything." On a recent call, DeJesus visited an elderly woman in Swansea. She didn't realize she had a problem until relatives came to visit. By then, the furniture was so badly infested it had to be thrown away. "This house probably had 10,000 to 20,000 bedbugs," he said. "It was probably the worst we've ever seen.Avoiding bedbugs •Encase mattresses and box springs in bedbug-resistant covers •Keep bedding off the floor and headboards away from walls •Don't use dust ruffles or bed skirts •Use white linens to better spot bedbugs •Reduce clutter •When traveling, don't leave luggage on the bed, floor or upholstered chairs •Unpack outside and take travel clothes directly to the washing machine •Inspect and vacuum luggageChecking for bedbugs •Research what bedbugs and their eggs look like •Examine tufts, seams and folds of bedding •Beware of dark or reddish spots that are excreted blood •Look for exoskeletons shed by molting juveniles •Inspect and clean nooks and crannies, particularly in bedrooms This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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