12/22/2011 Traveling This Holiday? Be Aware Of Bedbugs

This holiday season, there may be more to worry about when checking off your Christmas list then packing, wrapping and reservations.

Suitcases, gift packages, car rentals and hotel rooms can all be sources of bed bugs – those sometimes hard-to-detect bugs that made headlines last year across the world when what experts called at one point, a preventable outbreak, seemed all of a sudden unstoppable.

“It’s the word you never want to hear because it’s just an ugly little critter,” said Nate Weare, general manager at the Holiday Inn Mansfield. “I say, let’s take a step back and know what we’re looking at.”

Alright.

Bed bugs, which the Center for Disease Control defines as small, flat, parasitic insects that feed on the blood of people and animals while they sleep, and most people describe as just plain icky, started showing up, it seemed, everywhere in 2010 causing, in some instances, panic among hotel guests and travelers who feared for their skin every time they checked in. Though news reports on the subject appear to have died down a bit since then, the problem has not gone away.

The 2011 Bugs Without Borders Survey, conducted by the National Pest Management Association (NPMA), reports that 80 percent of member respondents say infestations are increasing across the country and that nearly all professional pest management companies have received bed bug calls within the last year.

“We do get bed bugs here, and it’s just something we’re going to have to deal with,” said Tom DeJesus, service manager and director of training at Providence-based New England Pest Control. “It’s just incredible how it’s exploded.”

DeJesus, who’s been in the pest control business for 35 years, said in his first 25 years on the job he received in total less than a handful of bed bug service calls. Now, they’re much more common, coming in at times on a weekly basis.

Reports have attributed the outbreak to increased international travel, policies that banned some pesticides and limited knowledge, among other things.

Travel almost certainly has something to do with it. The CDC says bed bugs are experts at hiding in luggage, folded clothes and bedding.

People then can carry bed bugs without even knowing – to hotel rooms, where the next guest can pick up the bugs and carry them on and so on and so on.

That’s where the problem starts with hotels where, 80 percent of NPMA members report having treated for bed bugs this year, compared to 67 percent last year.

“People think of bed bugs and they think of sanitation, and that has so little to do with it,” Weare said. “People have such a negative connotation.”

DeJesus says it’s almost a question of odds.

“Everybody travels and people just go,” he said. “You just have to be careful.”

In fact, the American Hotel and Lodging Association (AH&LA) said the increase in bed bugs has had “a minimal impact on the vast majority of hotels.”

AH&LA urges consumers to remember that bed bugs are brought in by guests and that hotels are not to blame.

The New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has set guidelines for hotels, including the recommendation that they hire a licensed pest control company to regularly inspect the premises.

Often, though, a hotel doesn’t know there’s a problem until a guest comes down to the front desk pointing to a bite on their ankle – if even then.

“Some people get a bite and go to bedbugs.com,” Weare said.

Weare’s hotel was listed on bedbugreports.com, one of several consumer-watch type websites that have sprung up since last year promising a reliable source for which hotels have had bed bug problems.

He said the Holiday Inn in Mansfield hasn’t had a bed bug issue, but that they did have a dog show take place there over the summer.

“If it’s not a bed bug, it’s generally a flea issue,” he said. “We haven’t had bed bugs in years and years and years. But that doesn’t mean we won’t have them tomorrow.”

The Days Inn in Attleboro was also listed on bedbugreports.com.

A general manage there, who asked not to be identified, said the hotel did have an issue over the summer but it has been taken care of since.

She, too, said the panic of the general hotel visitor is misplaced.

“It’s everywhere in the world,” she said. “People travel and you don’t know who brings them in.”

DeJesus cautions that many of the bed bug websites could be misleading. Instead, he points people to visit the NPMA Website and those of pest control companies.

“I’m sure some of the sites are legitimate,” he said. “But anybody can post something to one of those things.”

The CDC says identification of bed bug bites is difficult without finding other evidence of bed bug infestation, including the actual bugs or their exoskeletons, because bites can take as long as 14 days to appear and may resemble those of a mosquito or flea.

It’s also important to note that the CDC says bed bugs shouldn’t be considered a medical or public health hazard.

DeJesus recommends, when traveling this holiday season, to keep your cool and do your best to keep the bed bugs away by examining mattresses, headboards and other easy hiding places as soon as you arrive in a hotel room, keeping your suitcase on a table instead of the floor, and unpacking your dirty clothes while still in the garage into a trash bag and directly to the washing machine.

“I used to be one of those people who would unpack my suitcase,” DeJesus said. “I don’t do that anymore.”

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12/20/2011 Bedbugs Found At Greenwich CT School: Officials Confirm Hamilton Avenue School Has “Isolated Incidents”

Greenwich Public Schools officials are dealing with “isolated incidents” of bedbugs at Hamilton Avenue School.

“They’ve had four isolated incidents,” said school spokesman Kim Eves. “They found a dead one at the end of October, give or take (a few days), one last week, one the week before and one a week before that.” She added, “It’s not necessarily a health hazard … but we’re trying not to spread them. It’s not a concern in terms of disease.”

According to EverydayHealth.com, “Bedbugs are not thought to transmit diseases,” however, they can bite and cause skin irritations.

The existence of the bugs was discovered “in the carpet on the floor. A class was sitting on the floor for a discussion … they bagged it and brought it to the health department,” Eves said.

As of last night, the school district administration had not decided whether it will proceed with a plan to steam-clean the school during the winter break that begins Friday afternoon, according to Eves. In the interim, when a bug has been found and sent to the Greenwich Health Department for testing, the affected classrooms were treated after an inspection from Parkway Pest Services which uses trained dogs to sniff out the bugs, according to Eves.

The inspections and treatments were conducted after students left the school, Eves said.

School officials held an informational meeting with parents on Dec. 15 and have them sent notification via the ParentLink information system. “The parent forum on Thursday was to tell parents how to deal with the situation at home,” Eves said. She said about 30 to 35 parents attended the session

“It’s one or two families involved,” Eves added. Two, possibly three classes are involved, she said.

One of the incidents involved finding a bed bug on a student backpack. Eves said that since the first incident in October, school personnel check each student daily before they’re admitted to classes. The students in the affected classes must place their belongings — coats, hats, gloves — in plastic garbage bags. The rest of the students in the school at 360-plus student school on Hamilton Avenue, must keep their belongings in their backpacks. It was unclear whether the mandate also applied to school personnel and teachers.

When approached outside the school Monday dismissal, school personnel said, “We can’t talk.”

Well, talk is what a few parents said they hope school officials would do. “They need to be more informative. It’s on the school website,” said one mother, who would not give her name, as she waited for second-grade daughter. “There are so many rumors … it’s the same family bringing in something. It’s coming from home. They have to help those people whose house it’s coming from,” the woman said.

Another mother, with two children in pre-K and first-grade, said, “Hopefully it will be controlled soon. … We are concerned about what they’re using.” Her daughter’s pre-K class was one of the groups affected, she said. “Obviously you want it to be treated but we are concerned about the children. We are worried about what they use to treat it,” she added.

As Mark Mantione waited for his two sons, he said, he received the pre-recorded informational calls from the school administration. “We looked but we didn’t find any” bed bugs.

Eves said, “the only thing parents can do is check their kids before they leave home in the morning and check them when they come home.” Eradicating bedbugs from the home include thorough cleaning, vacuuming of bedrooms, furniture and linens which should be treated at temperatures of at least 112 degrees, according to EverydayHealth.com.

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12/19/2011 The Bedbug Body Hair Study

Hairy skin helps stop bed bugs biting, according to new research from the University of Sheffield in the UK. Apparently, not only does the fine hair that covers our bodies help us feel the presence of parasitic insects on our skin, it also acts as a barrier to stop them biting us. The findings of the study appeared in an online before print issue of the Royal Society journal Biology Letters on 14 December.

Although humans seem relatively naked compared to other primates, our bodies are covered in a layer of two types of fine hair. One type is called vellus, which is short and nearly invisible, and the other is called terminal hair which is longer and more visible. The follicles are also quite close together on the skin.

The researchers note there are “relatively few explanations for the evolutionary maintenance of this type of human hair,” so they wanted to test the idea that perhaps it acts as a defense against ectoparasites or bed bugs.

First author and Sheffield Zoology graduate Isabelle Dean picked the study as the subject of her honours project, which she carried out under the supervision of co-author Professor Michael Siva-Jothy, of the University´s Department of Animal and Plant Sciences.

For the study they recruited 29 healthy volunteers who had one arm shaved and one arm left with hairs on, and then allowed hungry bed bugs to be placed on the skin of both arms.

The results show that the fine body hair acts to our advantage because it helps us detect the presence of bed bugs in two ways: by increasing the time it takes for the parasite to find a suitable site to start sucking blood, and by helping us feel their presence on our skin.

They also showed that this advantage was greater for those participants who had more layers of hair: the insects took longer to find an ideal feeding site on their arms.

The study helps explain why bed bugs and other parasites such as mosquitoes, midges, ticks, and leeches, seek out the less hairy body sites such as wrists and ankles.

Siva-Jothy explained to the press:

“The hairs have nerves attached to them and provide us with the ability to detect displacement. By forming a barrier and providing detection these hairs prolong search time and make detection more likely because the bug has to spend more time clambering over them.”

The authors suggest the findings also help explain why we have lost the thick coat of our primate cousins, but still retained some body hair.

“For example, if you have a heavy coat of long thick hairs it is easier for parasites to hide, even if you can detect them. Our proposal is that we retain the fine covering because it aids detection and if we lost all hair, even the relatively invisible fine hair, our detection ability goes right down,” said Siva-Jothy.

Siva-Jothy leads a team that is investigating the biology of blood-sucking insects, how they reproduce and retain immunity. They want to discover new ways to control these parasites, which can help us develop better ways to reduce transmission of insect-borne diseases.

He said men have more body hair than women, a result of their increased testosterone at puberty. But this does not mean women are more likely to be bitten:

“Blood-sucking insects are likely to have been selected to prefer to bite hosts in relatively hairless areas,” said Siva- Jothy.

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12/18/2011 Bedbugs Leave Iowa Family Without Beds

12/17/2011 Bedbugs Lead To Michigan Apartment Fire

A fire started in an apartment as the tenant used a cigarette lighter to chase bed bugs, police told 24 Hour News 8.

No one was injured and the blaze was contained to a bedroom, which sustained fire, smoke and water damage.

The fire was in a second-floor residence at Fox Ridge Apartments, 1400 Alamo Hills Dr. in Kalamazoo.

Members of the Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety were dispatched around 6:35 p.m. Thursday and evacuated the building. They then extinguished the flames in 15 minutes.

The resident admitted to starting the fire and tried using a fire extinguisher but had to evacuate as the fire spread.

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12/16/2011 Are You Prepared For Bedbug Holiday Exposure?

12/15/2011 Nine Out Of Ten Exterminators Have Treated For Bedbugs In 2011

The conflict between humans and insect pests has raged for centuries, but few battles boast the sheer make-your-skin-crawl ick factor as the war between people and bed bugs. And the battle, once played out largely in hotels with high international traffic, has moved to the home front.

Nine out of 10 pest management professionals have treated single-family homes, apartments and condos for bed bug infestations in the past year, according to the 2011 Bugs Without Borders Survey by the National Pest Management Association (NPMA) and the University of Kentucky. Infestations are occurring in homes, hotels, hospitals, day care centers, college dorms, schools, movie theaters, department stores and even public transportation in every state.

Don’t think you’re safe from the little blood-suckers just because you travel little or stay at only the best hotels, professionals say. Bed bug infestations have little to do with cleanliness or quality. Bed bugs are notoriously hardy and just a few of the hitch-hiking pests – which you can pick up virtually anywhere these days – are all it takes to ultimately establish an infestation in your home or apartment.

“NPMA advises consumers against the ‘this can’t happen to me’ attitude, because bed bugs are equal opportunity pests,” Missy Henriksen, NPMA vice president of public affairs, said in a report of the survey results.

Bed bugs (formally Cimex lectularius) draw their name from their tendency to hide in mattresses and box springs. When the lights go off, the bugs come out, and bite and drink from any unsuspecting human who happens to be unlucky enough to be occupying the bed with them. While they’re not yet known to transmit disease, bed bugs can leave you with itchy welts – not to mention severe mental distress.

The good news is that home and apartment owners are not without defenses in the battle against bed bugs. While the tenacious bugs have resiliency on their side, humans have modern technology and awareness in their favor.

Products like ActiveGuard Mattress Liners, produced by Allergy Technologies LLC, can help you take a proactive position in the fight against bed bugs. The mattress cover slips over the mattress and/or box spring like a fitted sheet, and uses proprietary technology to kill bed bugs and dust mites upon contact. The product not only kills new bed bug infestations, it continues to provide protection beyond the typical bed bug life cycle. ActiveGuard can be used as part of a comprehensive bed bug control program or as a pro-active standalone tool for prevention against bed bugs establishing in bedding.

You can also take steps to help reduce your risk of bringing bed bugs home with you. NPMA offers some advice:

For travelers:
* Upon check-in at your hotel, examine bed linens for tell-tale blood spots.
* Conduct a visual inspection using a small flashlight. Pay special attention to the mattress, box spring, headboard and other areas within the vicinity of the bed
* Store suitcases in plastic trash bags during hotel stays.

At home:
* Vacuum suitcases immediately after you return from a vacation.
* Thoroughly inspect second-hand furniture before bringing it into your home, especially mattresses and box springs. In fact, you may want to have items inspected by a pest control professional who is more versed in what to look for.
* Regularly inspect pet bedding for signs of infestation.

When shopping:
* Before trying on an item, inspect it for blood spots left by feeding bed bugs. Look at inside seams for any signs of sticky white eggs, fecal droppings, shed skins (casts) and live bugs.
* In the dressing room, hang your clothes on hooks rather than laying it across cushioned seats or on the carpeted floor.
* On the ride home, keep new purchases tied and sealed in the store bag, and shake articles outside before bringing them into the house. Launder clothes immediately in hot water or steam/dry clean delicate items; 30 minutes at the hottest possible setting will kill bed bugs and their eggs.

If bed bugs manage to move in despite your precautions, it’s not likely you’ll be able to get rid of them yourself. Just 25 percent of consumers try to treat bed bugs themselves before calling a pro, down from 38 percent a year ago, according to the NPMA survey.

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12/14/2011 Body Hair Keeps Bedbugs Away

Finding hairs in your food can be disgusting, and it seems that blood-sucking insects feel just the same.

Scientists have discovered that hairy people are better protected from parasites, as the hair makes it harder for the bugs to reach skin.

Bed bugs and other parasites such as mosquitoes, midges and ticks prefer relatively smooth areas, such as the wrists and ankles.

But as the insects search for somewhere to dive in, the nerves in hairs also increase the chances of them being felt on the skin and swatted away.

Researchers studied 29 brave volunteers who had one arm shaved before hungry bed bugs were placed on their skin.

12/13/2011 Tropical Insecticide Blamed For Bedbug Re-Emergence

New results suggest that insecticide use in the tropics is to blame for the re-emergence of bed-bug infestations.

Exposure to treated bed nets and linens meant that populations of bed-bugs had become resistant to the chemicals used to kill them, researchers said.

The findings could help convince pest controllers to find alternative remedies to deal with the problem.

The results were presented at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene’s 60th annual meeting.

Since almost vanishing from homes in industrialised countries in the 1950s, populations of the common bed-bug have become re-established in these regions over the past decade or so.

These mostly nocturnal feeders are difficult to control, not only because they are adept at avoiding detection by crawling into creases of soft furnishing but also because they have developed a resistance to many of the chemicals that have been used to kill them.

Findings presented at the gathering in Philadelphia showed that 90% of 66 populations sampled from 21 US states were resistant to a group of insecticides, known as pyrethroids, commonly used to kill unwanted bugs and flies.

One of the co-authors – evolutionary biologist Warren Booth, from North Caroline State University in Raleigh – explained that the genetic evidence he and his colleagues had collected showed that the bed-bugs infecting households in the US and Canada in the last decade were not domestic bed bugs, but imports.

“If bed-bugs emerged from local refugia, such as poultry farms, you would expect the bed-bugs to be genetically very similar to each other,” explained entomologist and co-author Coby Schal, also from North Carolina State University. “This isn’t what we found.”

In samples collected from across the eastern US, the team discovered populations of bed-bugs that were genetically very diverse.

This suggested that the bugs originated from elsewhere, and relatively recently because the different populations had not had time to interbreed, Dr Schal explained.

He suggested that the source for the new outbreaks was warmer climes, where the creatures would have probably developed a resistance to chemicals.

“The obvious answer is the tropics, where they have used treated bed nets [and] high levels of insecticides on clothing and bedding to protect the military,” Dr Booth told BBC News.

He explained that although bed-bugs were essentially eradicated from industrialised countries in the 1950s, they continued to thrive in Africa and Asia.

“Its very likely that it is from one of these areas where insecticide resistance evolved,” he said.

‘Home-grown’

However, UK-based pest management specialist Clive Boase questioned that hypothesis.

He said bed nets, to protect against mosquito-transmitted malaria and dengue, were only used in parts of Africa that were hot, where the tropical bed-bug (Cimex hemipterus) was found.

But, he added, it was not the tropical bed-bug that was the problem in the US and UK; instead it was their temperate cousin, Cimex lectularius.

Dr Boase explained that comprehensive records showed that infestations of bed-bugs in Europe were less pervasive in the 1970s and 80s, but they were still present.

By continually exposing these populations to insecticides, which came on the market in the late 1970s, these creatures likely developed resistance, he said.

“We don’t have to invoke stories of disease control programmes in Africa; all the evidence here in the UK is that our problem is home-grown.”

Dr Boase wondered that if the US had similar long-term records whether the researchers would have reached a different conclusion.

Evolutionary biologist Richard Naylor from the University of Sheffield agreed: “I am kind of surprised by [their interpretation].

“It doesn’t seem that difficult to develop resistance or lose it; in lab cultures, if you stop exposing [bed-bugs] to pyrethroids it drops out of lab populations very quickly,” he said.

Mr Naylor asked that if the US bed bugs had been exposed to the chemicals elsewhere in the past, “why would they still be resistant?”

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12/12/2011 Are Bedbugs On Your Holiday List?

With all the preparations for the holidays, bedbugs might the last thing on your agenda. However, if you have kids coming home from college or are hosting out-of-town guests, you may get more than you bargained for.

I recently had a scare when my son was traveling with the baseball team and stayed overnight in a hotel. He described insects that resembled ticks on two of his roommates when they woke up the next morning. Collecting the insects would have been helpful so I could have ruled out bedbugs, but what 20-year-old thinks of that? I immediately went into action and proceeded to heat treat everything before his belongings were allowed entry into the house. Folks need to take this seriously. Bedbugs are showing up in area hotels, schools, dormitories, and apartments, so the problem is real. They move around easily on students’ backpacks from their home, to school and then to your home.

So what is a bedbug? Bedbugs are about one-quarter-inch long, are brown and have an oval flattened body. Before feeding, they are clear in color but, after consuming blood, they change to a dark red color. Female bedbugs lay eggs that are 1/25 of an inch long in clusters where adults reside. Eggs hatch in four to 12 days and take 35 to 48 days to mature. For a bedbug to grow, it needs to feed. An adult bedbug, however, can go up to a year without a bloodmeal. In the absence of humans, they may feed on birds and rodents.

Bedbugs hide during the day in cracks and crevices in loose wallpaper, behind molding or throughout all areas of a bed. At night, they emerge to inject their mouthparts into an unsuspecting host creating a painless bite while taking a blood meal. How do you know if you have been bitten by a bedbug? If you have never been bitten by a bedbug, it may take 10 days to 2 weeks for a reaction to occur. Others that have been previously exposed may wake up with several red, scratchy welts (usually in a row) the next morning.

The best advice is to avoid bringing these guys home with you. My family makes fun of me when we stay in hotels. The first thing I do is to peel back the sheets and look at the mattress pad for signs of excrement and/or reddish-brown spots from blood stains about the size of a pencil point. When leaving the hotel, check clothing and suitcases for small insects. If the room you stayed in had bedbugs, do not bring the suitcase into your home. Unpack it outside and put clothing directly into the washing machine. Wash in hot water and then dry on high heat. If the clothing requires dry cleaning, let the cleaners know that you suspect bedbugs so it can be handled appropriately. Treat the suitcase before bringing it into the home.

When bedbug numbers build up, a sweet, musky odor becomes obvious because of an oily substance they emit. Some describe it as a sweet raspberry odor. If you find signs of these insects, request another room or go to another hotel. Some folks are taking extra precautions by cleaning luggage and clothing carefully after staying in hotels.

These insects are very difficult to control and the help of a professional pest control operator is preferred. Control options are varied. Some homeowners throw away bed, frames, mattresses and pillows trying to rid their homes of these critters. We recommend that you keep the bed but place a bedbug encasement over the mattress, pull the bed away from the wall, and use monitor traps at the base of the bed. Also, don’t move the pillows to the couch because they will move with the pillows. Sticky traps can be placed around the room and bed to determine the hiding areas. Some pest control companies are using canines to detect bedbug places with great success. It’s amazing how efficient dogs are at detecting bedbugs because of their enhanced sense of smell.

Once the hiding places are determined, one can develop a line of attack. Initially, remove as many bedbugs as possible from the area. Vacuum to remove bedbugs from beds, sofas, carpets, etc., then put the vacuum bag in a zip lock bag and place in a deep freeze for a week or more or immediately throw it away. Bedding should be washed with soap and borax in hot water and then dried using high heat. Placing items in the dryer for one hour on high heat is sufficient to do the job. Send curtains and pillows to the dry cleaners or place in the dryer. Clean out drawers in the room(s) and treat with pesticides. Homeowners may try treating this problem on their own, but pest control companies have additional products available for treatment and are trained on dealing with these pests. For more information on control and pesticides for treatment, refer to http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ig083 .

University of Florida researchers have found a way to treat bedbugs without the use of chemicals. Cold doesn’t affect these critters, but turning up the heat does the job. All the furniture is moved to the center of the room and a box is placed around the furniture. By using two heaters and a fan at the center of the box, the heat is pushed up to 113 degrees. Go to http://news.ufl.edu/ 2010 / 08 /02/bed-bug-remedy/ for a short video on the process.

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