“When the bedbugs bite” |
| Posted: 23 Nov 2010 08:01 AM PST First, the disgust. Then the silence. When you wake up with bites up and down your arms and legs after an all-night feast by bedbugs, you might reach for the Raid, call the exterminator, call the landlord. But chances are you'll try to keep it all hush-hush. Don't want the news to get out too fast. Don't want to be identified as having a problem. Don't want your friends to dis-invite you from a dinner date. After all, who knows if you're carrying the bugs with you? Discretion is advised. But that's where you're wrong. Bedbugs don't just thrive on your blood. They thrive on your shame. Because that's how they spread: by you ignoring their presence instead of doing something about it quick. For when it comes to creepy crawlies invading your house, embarrassment -not action -usually rules the day. Don't let the bedbugs bite? More likely it's don't ask, don't tell. "The biggest problem is embarrassment -that's No. 1," says Frank Pulcini, who runs Central Extermination, a Montreal company. "People are shy to talk about it, but they shouldn't be," agrees Alex Prud'homme, co-owner of Extermination ABC, another Montreal firm. "There's nothing to be ashamed of. It's like getting the flu; it's just bad luck." Bad luck is good for the extermination business in this city, as it is in New York, Chicago and other cities across North America that are in the throes of similar outbreaks. Five years ago, ABC did about two or three house calls a week for bedbugs; now it does five or 10 a day. Same thing at Central. "It's gone from every other call being about bedbugs to pretty much every call," Pulcini said. Carried in on clothing, on used furniture, on bags and luggage left to sit in hotels and taxicabs, bedbugs have yet to meet a home they haven't liked. In apartment buildings and commercial buildings, where bedbugs strike most often, the problem boils down to non-communication: Tenants don't tell landlords they have bedbugs, landlords don't tell new tenants there were bedbugs there before they arrived. To combat that, Montreal's Public Health Department issued a new guide last month to landlords and building managers on how best to deal with bedbugs. A separate brochure was issued to tenants last year, when the outbreak was worsening and the city began giving training sessions to home-care nurses, social workers and building inspectors in how to detect and report outbreaks. The moves follow similar efforts in Ontario and the U.S. where the bedbug scare has sparked announcements of eradication programs costing millions of dollars ($3 million in Toronto, for example) and led to daily media reports of new sightings at upscale hotels, at Carnegie Hall, at the United Nations. Citizens are getting organized, too. Online, there are support groups for bedbug sufferers (bedbugger.com), registries so people can track bedbug outbreaks (bedbugregistry.com), dating-advice columns on whether to tell a one-night stand you have bedbugs at home (nerve.com/advice). There's an iPhone application called Bed Bug Alert that allows people in 10 major American cities to see where infestations have been reported so they can steer clear. And this week Garry Trudeau made bedbugs the subject of his popular Doonesbury comic strip (from under the sheets, they joyfully exclaim "Contact!" as they bite.) Despite the widespread publicity, having bedbugs still carries a stigma, as we found out shadowing an extermination crew for a day in Montreal. No one affected by the infestations wanted their name or photo in the paper, nor their address, nor anything that identified their business or building. Some were too old and senile to realize they had a serious problem. Others couldn't understand why the bedbugs had targeted them. Others took care of the problem quietly, before it got out of hand. First stop: a century-old triplex on a quiet street in the Gay Village. One flight up a narrow staircase, an old man in a toupee furtively leaves his apartment as the exterminators from ABC get to work. He was born in this place, apparently. His face is covered in bites. What happened? "I don't like to talk about those things," the man replies as he heads down the stairs, trying to avoid the landlord downstairs. "It just gets me down." In the man's bedroom, Jacques Hervieux and Eric Sirois get to work. They call themselves "parasite management technicians" -exterminators, for short -and today they've got a big job to do. A young couple in the fancy apartment across the hall were the first to complain of bedbugs; when the exterminators came to visit, they traced the problem to the old man's place, which was filthy and literally crawling with bugs. They were under the yellowed linoleum floor, they were crawling along the door frames, they established a veritable kingdom in the mattress. No wonder the old man was covered in hundreds of bites. An extreme case, perhaps, but an example of what can happen when you ignore the problem. "Bedbugs aren't only in bad places like here," Sirois points out as he examines the mattress, which has been moved out to the back balcony to be treated with insecticide. "We can visit a place like this in the morning, and in the afternoon be at a $2-million house in Town of Mount Royal. The more money you have, the more you're at risk of getting bedbugs. Rich people travel more, they take taxis, they sleep in hotels." The landlord arrives, cursing, shaking his head at the mess, oblivious to his own state of dishevelment -food-stained shirt, sweaty face. The tenant had always been reluctant to let him in and now he sees why. "Dirty bastard -yeech!" he exclaims as he looks around. "How is it possible to be so filthy? This place hasn't been washed in 40 years -it's unbelievable! He better clean this place up or he'll be moving, I tell you." Hervieux, a curly-haired, jovial young man in glasses and a white protective suit, rips the plaster off the walls, sprays insecticide in the cracks and crevices, cleans the bug excrement off the door frames. "You can do this in hotel rooms," he advises. "When you see little spots like this, just wet it a bit and rub -see how it streaks? Right away, you can be pretty sure you have bedbugs. So if you travel to New York, watch out. My mother was in Pennsylvania last week, they got to a hotel and someone spotted three bedbugs; everybody got back on the bus." Sirois, a burly fellow with a shaved head and his first name monogrammed on his company shirt, goes to the suitcase he's wheeled into the kitchen and gets out a canister of insecticide spray. It's permethrin, a standard exterminator's poison that's messes up the nervous system of bugs so they die. It's used along with a powder that's essentially boric acid with some permethrin in it. (Other treatments include blasts of steam and even blasts of dry ice, a technique by an Ottawa inventor that's pending regulatory approval). Sirois and Hervieux treat the mattress so it can be safely jettisoned off the balcony and carried out to the street for disposal. Sirois is full of stories about cases he's seen in this city. A few years ago, he saw only three or five bedbug cases a month; now it's between 100 and 125 a month. One time, he and his buddies went to a sports bar in the Plateau Mont Royal, plunked themselves down on an upholstered cubicle and to their great surprise, saw bedbugs crawling up the seams. Another time, they got a call to rid a Cote des Neiges cinema of bedbugs. They get calls from five-star hotels, from celebrities, from CEOs of multinational corporations, from politicians living in "des grosses cabanas" where the bugs have moved in. They know of CLSCs that swab down their waiting rooms at closing hour, alert for anything the clientele has brought in (a fact confirmed by health officials). They know of student residences where bugs have shown up. And houses of ill repute, too: Greeted at the door one day by two dolled-up dames, Sirois realized he was in an apartment used by an escort agency. "Imagine all the guys going there and bringing bedbugs back." After he realized he had a problem, the old man in the Gay Village apartment had tried to do his best. He went to the laundromat to wash his bed linen. Good intentions, bad move, says Sirois, imagining what happened. "He takes his sheet to the laundromat, opens his bag, the bedbugs fall on the ground, someone beside him sits down and starts reading his book while his wash is being done, one or two bugs climb up the guy's leg looking for something to feed on, he goes home, gets undressed, the bugs fall out and all of a sudden he's got bedbugs in his house." Next stop: a 90-unit apartment building on a busy boulevard in Park Extension. ABC has been called there many times since the place was bought last year by a new landlord who inherited the previous owner's problem. Cockroaches, bedbugs, mice -her place has had it all, costing her over $35,000 a year in extermination services. Tenants bear part of the blame, she says; she has 14 eviction cases pending at the city's rental board for tenants who don't keep their apartments clean. Sirois takes us to a corner apartment where an elderly couple on the verge of Alzheimer's lives in a pigsty. The gentleman who comes to the door is half undressed; his wife sits silently on the sofa. "Insects? There are no insects here," the man says as Sirois makes his way in. We go into the dusty, cluttered dump of a bedroom where the parquet floor has been ripped up around the walls from a previous visit. Sirois shows us the back of a telephone jack by the bed that's encrusted with bug excrement. The old man -proud, perhaps, or simply deluded? -insists he's never been bitten. Sirois says he's seen the bites: hundreds of them, all over the man's body. One floor down, an ABC technician works inside the apartment of an immigrant family from Bangladesh. The husband is an unemployed architect, his wife is enrolled in French language classes, they have three young children. They moved to this place in the spring of last year and by November realized there was a problem. The kids had rashes on their bodies; the parents thought it was allergies until they saw the bedbugs. Several visits from the exterminator later, they've still got them. "It's horrible," the wife explains. "Two or three times at night we have to wake up and kill the bugs. We turn on the light and we see them -in the mattress, in the sheets, everywhere -we have to kill them with our own hands. The first few months, it was about 80 or 90 bites a night, all over the body. Now, with all the 'medicine' the exterminator brings, it's maybe two or three. But that's still too much." The landlord is at her wit's end. "It's taking a lot of my time," she sighs. "When I visit these places, I wear capri pants or turn up the hem of my pants. I never sit down in anybody's apartment. This is probably the fourth spraying that we have done. Tenants are not happy; they're frustrated with being moved around, with their beds being sprayed, with being moved, with having to absent themselves while the work is done. "As a landlord, I need to have a clean building, but I'm losing money doing treatments again and again. My hope is that I can achieve maybe 80-per-cent cleanliness here. But if the tenants don't do their part, it's a never-ending cycle of bedbugs." Her blunt warning to tenants: "Wash, clean up or move out." Final stop: a small hotel near the city's downtown bus terminal. Its 20 rooms are popular with people who book on Expedia. The untold story is that the exterminators spent two days recently ridding the hotel of bedbugs. The owner is upfront about it -anonymously. She was bitten herself, at home in the suburbs. "One night I woke up at 3 a.m., something was bothering me, I brushed it off and when I woke up again I had three bites on my neck and two on my leg," she recalls. "I called the exterminator. Same thing for the hotel. At the hotel it cost me almost $4,000 but it's worth it. It's better to stop the problem before the bedbugs go from room to room and you have a much bigger problem." Bottom line? If you've got bedbugs, do the right thing: Get rid of them fast. Even if you don't want the world to know. --- Tips for travellers All the comings and goings mean hotel rooms are prime candidates to host the tiny creature that has been getting plenty of press lately: the bedbug. 1. Inspect the headboard upon arrival at a hotel. 2. Inspect the box spring. 3. Leave your suitcase in an area away from the bed. 4. Upon returning home, wash your clothes in hot water and run on a hot dryer cycle before bringing them into your bedroom. (The creatures can't survive above 120 degrees F.) 5. Upon return, inspect your suitcase. While you sleep . . . Bedbugs are about 5 mm long (1/5 inch) and visible to the naked eye. They're active at night and can usually be seen along the seams of mattresses. They feed on human blood. Their eggs are white and are much smaller; their excrement are tiny brown spots that smear when wet. Bedbugs live mainly in the bedroom and come out at night to bite people as they sleep. The bites look like mosquito bites but can last much longer - up to two weeks. They usually appear in rows of three or four bites. How bedbugs affect your health Bedbugs are more annoying than a serious health hazard. Their bites resemble mosquito bites, itch a lot, and usually appear three or four in a row or grouped in one place on skin that's exposed at night. They disappear completely after a couple of weeks. What to do 1. Before any sign of an infestation, as a prevention measure be sure to cover your mattress and box spring in a special anti-bedbug cover (it's made of tightly woven fabric and has reinforced seams and a good zipper). 2. Inspect any used furniture you acquire for signs of bedbugs. Same for used clothing; if you see bedbugs, put the clothes in a plastic bag so no bugs fall out on the way to the washing machine. 3. Vacuum up any bedbugs or eggs you see, remove the bag from the vacuum, seal it in plastic bag and throw it in the garbage outside your house or building. 4. Wash and dry sheets, comforters and any other bedding, as well as clothing, at high heat to kill bedbugs and their eggs. 5. Don't use store-bought insecticides to try to get rid of bedbugs; that will only displace the problem to another part of your home. Call a professional exterminator. Source: www.santepub-mtl.qc.ca/environnement/punaisedelit © Copyright (c) The Montreal Gazette 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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