1/27/2012 NYC Ritz Carlton Crawling With Bedbugs

A room for a midweek night starts at $695 and can soar up to $4,500 for a suite, but this particular hotel on Central Park South may have a problem commonly, if unfairly, associated with more low-rent lodging — bedbugs. And it may also have a bigger issue — grumbling workers.

A worker at the hotel, the Ritz-Carlton New York, said that a guest in Room 1005 reported to the front desk on Sunday that she had discovered a bedbug in her room. The guest then checked out, but not before producing a specimen of the bug, a wingless six-legged bloodsucker.

The worker, Rosanna Polanco, a room attendant, said she was asked on Monday to service the room next to 1005 but was not told about the bedbugs. She found out only when she encountered a worker from Ecolab Inc., a company that supplies cleaning products and pest elimination services.

“He was the one who told me: ‘Be careful. There’s a lot of bedbugs in there,’ ” Ms. Polanco said, referring to Room 1005. “Management didn’t tell me. I found out myself.”

As is usual in cases involving bedbugs in hotels, guests in adjacent rooms and those above and below were moved to other rooms or upgraded to suites. And on Wednesday, workers were given training and shown a video on signs of bedbug infestation, like blood on sheets.

Although bedbugs are sometimes associated with fleabag hotels, they can thrive anywhere and are easily transported. There have been reports of bedbugs in office buildings like the Empire State, movie theaters and stores like Abercrombie & Fitch.

Ms. Polanco said she was worried about her family — in case she had unknowingly picked up a bedbug on her clothing and carried it home. “I haven’t checked my house,” she said. “I don’t know how to inspect my house.”

The hotel has offered to send professionals to her home to check for any infestation, though Ms. Polanco said no one had come as yet.

Scott Geraghty, the hotel’s general manager, confirmed that a bedbug had been found in the room. “Bedbugs are inevitable,” he said. “They’re brought in by guests and come in on luggage or things of that nature.” He said the problem had been remediated.

John Turchiano, a spokesman for the New York Hotel Trades Council, which represents about 30,000 hotel workers, said on Wednesday: “I’m told the hotel apologized for the delay in notifying the members. I can also tell you there was bedbug training this morning and afternoon for management and staff.”

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1/20/2012 Bedbugs Invade NYC Housing Court

City housing officials got so antsy over a bedbug invasion that they shipped off 5,000 boxes of files for fumigation, forcing Housing Court cases to be postponed.

The bloodsuckers turned up at the Department of Housing Preservation and development around Nov. 15, leading to the evacuation of the entire third floor, which contains the tax-incentives divisions and parts of the housing-litigation and IT divisions.

Officials said that even though the critters were spotted only in isolated areas, a top-to-bottom cleaning was ordered, meaning everything on the floor had to be temporarily relocated.

Boxes of documents were sent to a facility in Rockland County for treatment, which created operational headaches. Some paper files weren’t backed up on computers, and so they couldn’t be accessed temporarily.

1/19/2012 University Of Nebraska Students Find Bedbugs In Dorms

When freshman nutrition and health sciences major Emily Mrzlak returned to Abel Residence Hall on Jan. 6, she didn’t expect to spend her evening with bed bugs. Mrzlak, who didn’t notice the unwelcomed guests until she saw them on her roommate’s comforter, immediately broke into a panic.

“I had my boyfriend kill them because bugs freak me out,” Mrzlak said. “After they were dead I didn’t think anything else about it and just went to bed”

But her panic wasn’t over.

“That night I couldn’t go to sleep, I kept feeling these pinches of nerve pain all over my legs and arms.”

Although she figured it was merely a figment of her imagination, Mrzlak woke up the next day with multiple bug bites on her legs.

These bites occurred at night, because bed bugs are nocturnal. They usually reside in dark spaces such as cork boards or mattresses until a human source is available to feed on, according to Keith Zaborowski, associate director of Housing Residence Life who has also done research on the insects.

As soon as Mrzlak found the bites she took major precautions; she threw her sheets in the washer and dryer to kill them with heat. She then texted her roommate, because they were the same bugs they saw on her bed the night before. But the bugs returned.

Mrzlak’s roommate, Ashleigh Auman, a freshman mathematics major, decided to go to their floor’s resident assistant, who pointed her to the Abel Facilities office. When notifying Facilities, Mrzlak and Auman said they learned that the maintenance staff was reluctant to believe there were actual bed bugs in the room.

“We went down to talk to them and they didn’t really believe it was bed bugs at first, but they came to set traps up in our room anyway,” Mrzlak said.

As soon as the staff realized the insects were indeed bed bugs, they set traps. However, once they discovered just how many had infested the room, they decided to call an exterminator.

During the fumigation, the extermination company also checked other places in the room in case the bugs were tucked away in dark hidden spaces.

“When they searched the room, they found the bugs living in the cork board above my roommate’s bed,” Mrzlak said. “After removing it they realized that the bugs had been living there for a while.”

Not only had the insects lived in the cork boards of Mrzlak and Auman’s room, but they also produced a litter of new bugs.

“Housing ended up having to replace both cork boards over the beds, and we both got new mattresses and chairs. They also washed our walls and ended up spraying our room a second time.” Mrzlak said.

During the fumigation, the pair could not stay in the room. They were relocated to an emergency room in the hall, and Housing had to bag all of their soft items such as clothes and blankets during the spraying.

According to Housing, this is the first time that bed bugs have ever affected that room, but due to the maturity of the bugs they are not sure how the bugs got into the room.

Mrzlak said having bed bugs in her room was a shock to her and Auman. They were used to cleaning their room multiple times a week and didn’t understand how it could have been infested since no one had been in the dorm for weeks. But to their knowledge, the bugs have been living in the room since August.

According to Zaborowski, bed bugs can “hibernate for about two years and revamp when there is a host present.”

Because these bugs use human blood to survive, they were able to live in the room without a host during the winter break, he said.

“They stay close to whatever the host is, so whatever the room might be they won’t leave,” Zaborowski said.

The report from Mrzlak wasn’t the first that Housing received about bed bugs this year.

“We have received numerous reports from students who thought that there could be bed bugs in their room.” Zaborowski said. “Out of all of them there were only two cases: Abel Hall and the Village.”

Reports that come into Housing go to the Facilities staff, Zaborowski said. The staff investigates the rooms to identify the insects.

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1/16/2012 Michigan Cheerleaders Not Cheering For Bedbugs

A cheerleading squad that checked into the Quality Inn in Walker said they found numerous bed bugs and evidence of bed bugs in more than one room.

Friday, they drove six hours to the Grand Rapids area for an early Saturday competition.

“I was getting my hair done when we saw a bug crawl across the pillow right next to one of the girls that was sleeping,” nine-year-old Carrigan Craven said. “[There were] eggs, a nest and dead bugs all over it and a bunch of live bugs all over it. It was gross.”

“So we started thinking about, when there’s bed bugs there’s normally more than one,” Craven’s mother, Angela said. “So we tore the whole room apart and found about five live bugs, numerous dead bugs and we found a little nest that looked just like the internet pictures. It was really disgusting, they were crawling all over the place.”

When they contacted the hotel staff, Angela Cramer told 24 Hour News 8, they were offered a $5 discount. That wasn’t good enough. The parents took pictures and insisted on a refund.

After a few hours of arguing and threatening to call police, they were promised their money back, according to Craven.

“I want hotels to recognize they’re there for customer service,” she said. “If somebody comes to you and says ‘I’m not happy with this, I just want to leave’, you shouldn’t try and fight us or argue about it.”

A Quality Inn staff member told 24 Hour News 8, they checked out the rooms but didn’t find any bugs. She also said an exterminator came into the rooms just in case.

Word spread fast.

By the time a group of Junior Varsity Cheerleaders drove down from Harrison Saturday afternoon, they had heard about the pest problem.

“I was kind of grossed out,” Megan McCarrick said. “I didn’t even know bed bugs were real.”

The group checked their matresses & box springs and requested to be on the second floor (bugs were allegedly found on the first floor).

The hotel staff was so insistent it didn’t have bed bugs, they let a 24 Hour News 8 crew into a first floor room.

After searching the matress they allowed the crew to see, they didn’t find evidence of any bed bugs.

But for Craven and her teammates, the experience and the pictures they took are proof enough.

“I’m just glad we found them before we went to bed,” Angela Craven said. “I don’t know what we would’ve done if we would’ve woke up and our girls had bites all over them.”

According to the Kent County Health Department, if anyone finds bed bugs in a hotel, they should call a county health department right away.

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1/14/2012 Scientists Find New Ways To Kill Bedbugs

FEW things destroy the reputation of a high-class hotel faster than bed bugs. These vampiric arthropods, which almost disappeared from human dwellings with the introduction of synthetic insecticides after the second world war, are making a comeback. They can drink seven times their own weight in blood in a night, leaving itchy welts on the victim’s skin and blood spots on his sheets as they do so. That is enough to send anyone scurrying to hotel-rating internet sites—and even, possibly, to lawyers.

New York is worst-hit at the moment: neither five-star hotels nor top-notch apartments have been spared. But other places, too, are starting to panic. Hotel staff from Los Angeles to London are scrutinising the seams of mattresses and the backs of skirting boards, where the bugs often hide during the day, with more than usual zeal. But frequently this is to no avail. Bed bugs are hard to spot. Even trained pest-control inspectors can miss them. What is needed is a way to flush them into the open. And James Logan, Emma Weeks and their colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and Rothamsted Research think they have one: a bed-bug trap baited with something the bugs find irresistible—the smell of their own droppings.

The reason the bugs are attracted to this smell is that they use it to navigate back to their hidey-holes after a night of feeding. To develop the bait for the new trap, Dr Weeks therefore analysed the chemicals given off by bed-bug faeces and attempted to work out which of the components were acting as signposts. She did this by puffing air collected from a jar containing bed-bug faeces into a machine called a gas chromatograph, which separated the components from one another, and then through a mass spectrometer, to identify each component from its molecular weight. Having found what the smell consisted of, she wafted the chemicals in question, one by one, at bed bugs that had their antennae wired up to micro-electrodes, to see which of them provoked a response.

The result, the details of which the team is keeping secret for the moment for commercial reasons, is used to bait a trap, designed by Dr Logan, that is about the size of a standard mouse trap and has a sticky floor similar to fly paper. And it works. To paraphrase the slogan of Roach Motel, a brand of traps aimed at a different sort of insect pest, bed bugs check in, but they don’t check out.

The new trap could be used both to assess whether a hotel room or apartment is infested and also to kill the insects without dousing everything in insecticide—which is, in any case, an increasingly futile exercise, as many have now evolved resistance. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a 19th-century American sage, is supposed to have said that if a man built a better mousetrap than his neighbour, the world would make a beaten path to his door. Dr Logan and Dr Weeks are about to find out if the same thing applies to bed-bug traps.

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1/13/2012 Bedbugs Force Orlando Salvation Army Shelter To Close

A bed bug infestation has forced a Salvation Army shelter in Orlando to temporarily close.

The Salvation Army announced Thursday that the men’s shelter could be closed for up to a week.

The Orlando Sentinel reports officials are scrambling to find accommodations for up to 75 homeless men – just as the temperatures are expected to dip into the 30s. Another 50 men who are enrolled in the agency’s long-term transitional program will be housed in a gym on the shelter’s property.

Officials say it will cost about $15,000 to tent the building for treatment of bed bugs.

Spokeswoman Vicki Hastings says the Salvation Army hopes the public will help cover the costs.

Bed bugs bites can lead to severe itching and skin infections.

1/12/2012 This Lab Is Fighting Bedbugs In Texas: Czech Raised Dog Sniffing Out Bedbugs

Cities are crawling with these tiny insects.
Bed Bugs are becoming a more prevalent problem in the U.S. and here in the Bryan-College Station area.
One local exterminator is able to find the creepy crawlers faster than most.

This is Allie.
She’s a white labrador, raised and trained in the Czech Republic.

Allie works with Jerry Swoboda, at Swoboda Pest Control in Bryan and there are only three dogs in Texas that can do what she does.

“What takes me 45 minutes to do, Allie does in three minutes,” said Swoboda.

Allie detects bed bugs for a living.

Swoboda said, “She lives for that ball. She’ll work like a dog for it too.”

“I called him right then and said “help!” Please come and just, give me piece of mind,” said Sara Duke, a Bryan-College Station resident.
She had the duo come to her home after being bitten 220 times while staying at an out-of-town hotel.

Duke added, “I mean, they were feeding on me, constantly, all night long.”

Allie sniffs out pheromones given off by the bed bugs, and sits when she’s found them.

“I was completely at peace that…you know, no, they had never been here,” Duke said.

Swoboda said, “You can be in a five star hotel, a million dollar mansion, you can still have them. It does not matter how clean you are.”

Bed bugs feed on blood and live on inanimate objects instead of their hosts.
The couch on the side of the road might look nice, but it’s second-hand items like this where bed bugs like to hide.
If you bring it home with you, the bed bugs might come too.

“We’ve gone from doing maybe, one or two a month, to two or three a week,” Swoboda said.

Lately this canine’s been sniffing out about five calls a week in the BCS area.

Allie’s nose is so powerful, that sometimes she finds more than just bed bugs.

“She has found three bags of marijuana,” laughed Swoboda.

Once you find the bed bugs, exterminators say they are easy to get rid of.
Not everyone reacts to being bitten…and some won’t show any outward signs for several weeks.

Continue Reading More/Watching Video: This Lab Is Fighting Bedbugs In Texas

1/11/2012 Indiana Woman Hospitalized Over Bedbugs

A Jeffersonville woman said her 81-year-old sister was hospitalized after receiving severe bedbug bites.Bedbugs are commonly found in apartment complexes,, and the Health Department said one Jeffersonville building has gotten several bed bug complaints.

“These people are actually paying to live with bedbugs,” said Mary Hanley, the sister of a bedbug victim.Hanley’s said her 81-year-old sister was just released from the hospital after suffering severe bedbug bites.Hanley’s sister’s back is red and splotchy and the family said she got the bedbugs at her apartment in the Claysburg Towers in Jeffersonville.“They’re terrible. We pulled it back and it’s like moving, the sheets are moving. It was terrible, horrible,” Hanley said.

The Health Department said bedbugs don’t actually transmit diseases, like mosquitoes, but they do draw blood and hospitals stays because of their effects aren’t unheard of.

“Some cases we have heard of people being hospitalized for secondary infections, not necessarily because of the bedbug and what it did, the bite and the scratching that happened later could’ve caused the issues,” said Doug Bentfield with the Clark County Health Department.The tower’s management declined to comment on the issue, but the Clark County Health Department said since 2009 eight cases of bedbugs have been reported at Claysburg Tower, a public housing complex which is home to low-income seniors and residents on disability.

“Me and my sister went over to her apartment and pulled her covers back and they were just crawling everywhere and we were so scared. We’ve never seen those before and then she had blood all over her sheets where she had just been laying there,” Hanley said.

“It’s got nothing to do with the cleanliness of the environment or anything. It’s got everything to do with, were you in contact with an area that just happens to have them?” Bentfield said.Hanley said her sister, who has Alzheimer’s, was one of the original residents in the building and that many family members have lived there in the past. She claimed they’ve never had a problem there before.“They weren’t on that floor yet. They’re going floor by floor evidently, but they should have been doing better than this. It should have never gotten to that point,” Hanley said.“The problem with apartment complexes is everybody has to get on the same page so if there’s a dwelling that has 40 different families in it, you can’t just treat one apartment. You have to actually treat the entire facility,” Bentfield said.Hanley said she was told management is taking steps to remove the bugs, but her sister plans on moving out.“She’s coming out of there. I’m taking her out. She can’t stay there,” Hanley said.Hanley said though her sister will move out of the Claysburg Towers, they’re too scared to bring her things with her.

The Health Department said the best way to avoid acquiring bedbugs is to use extra caution when buying used furniture. At hotels, keep personal items away from upholstered surfaces and walls and check the bed for signs of the bugs before getting in.

Continue Reading More/Watching Video: Indiana Woman Hospitalized Over Bedbugs

1/10/2011 Bedbug Train Of Horrors

Vampire fiction may be all the rage, but the true bloodsuckers that emerge after twilight are far less charismatic, and far more relentless. No one will testify to this truth more fiercely than the 46 passengers who were pitted against a relentless army of bedbugs when they boarded the AC 2-tier compartment of the Netravati Express – from Thiruvananthapuram to Mumbai – on Sunday. And then the nightmare began.

It sucks!

Versova residents Kartik Shah (33) and his wife Nirali (28), spoke to MiD DAY about the harrowing experience on board the train. They boarded the coach from the Kayamkulam railway station, not knowing what lay in store. The creepy-crawlies ventured out at 3 pm.

Kartik said, “As soon as dusk fell, we switched on the lights. We were shocked to see dozens of bedbugs swarming the curtains. Gradually, all the occupants started feeling itchy sores swell up. We complained to the coach attendant, but he turned a deaf ear to our pleas. We went to sleep a few hours later, but the bugs started crawling all over our sheets. A young couple even spotted that the bugs had crawled into their baby’s bed cloth.”

Refusing to take the matter lying down, the passengers dismounted at Madgaon, Goa, at 5 am, and complained at the station. “No action was taken, yet again. Chaos reigned inside the compartment. We even summoned Balakrishnan, the ticket checker on-board. He said that a request had been made to railway officials at Thiruvananthapuram station, to not attach the coach to the express, but no one bothered,” said Kartik.

By 11.30 pm, inflamed passengers decided to pull the train’s chain, minutes before it would roll into Mangalore station. They then demanded that the station superintendent be summoned and the coach changed. At Mangalore, Station Superintendent Carol Santosh apologised feebly, saying that changing coaches was not a feasible option.

Twice bitten

By this time, a passenger from the adjacent two-tier AC coach emerged, begging for medical treatment, as her hands were swollen from the repeated assault of the pests. She too, was returned to her coach, along with mumbled apologies.

What ensued was a sleepless night, spent tossing and turning, in the throes of discomfort.

“The attendants only offered to spray disinfectants in the coach, but cautioned in the same breath that it would make breathing difficult for us, as it was an AC coach. Since there were children and infants travelling with us, we decided against it, and spent a night of utter agony,” said an aggrieved Nirali.

Passenger V K Sukumaran, a retired railway section engineer said, “It’s disappointing that the trains are kept in this condition nowadays. If this is the condition of a two-tier AC coach, God save the passengers travelling in sleeper class. It is the responsibility of the railways to clean the coaches before they are sent to the platform. The large numbers of pests is clear indication of the fact that hygiene was not maintained.”

P G Shankaram (69), a retired professor, added, “The bugs have travelled to Mumbai with us: they are all over our luggage and belongings. How are we going to enter our homes? We just travelled through hell.”

Rats too?

To add to their shock, Kartik and Nirali found messages left behind by previous passengers, warning them that they had seen dead rats in the coach. “We decided not to take any food from the kitchen,” said Kartik.

At 5 pm on Monday, the bedbug express rolled into the Kurla Terminus, to a few railway officials and waiting pest control attendants. The railway officials found several parasites.

A railway official admitted, “The coach is badly infested. The onus lies with the Southern railways, who should inspect the coaches before departure. We will detach it from the train, and take pest control measures. The situation will be monitored, and if we are satisfied, we will put the train back on track after a day’s interval.”

Chief Public Relations Officer, Central Railway (CR) M V Malegaonkar said, “The work of cleaning, fumigating the coach lies with the Southern Railway, from where the train departed.” He added that he would bring the matter to the notice of railway officials only after he received a complaint from the passengers.

What can you do

Lodge a complaint with the ticket checker in the train

Inform the cleaners, who should be carrying a complaint book where you can file your grievance.

Inform the concerned railway division, to which the train belongs.

Locate the helpline numbers written at the entrance of every cabin. If the train is looked after by WR, send an SMS to 9004477777. For CR, message 9004411111.

Rat attack in Rajdhani Express

MiD DAY had reported in June 2010 how passengers of the Ahmedabad-Delhi Rajdhani Express battled mice, mosquitoes on the train, even as staff refused to tend to the problem (‘Dead rats in Rajdhani,’ June 29).

A few inebriated train attendants and a hapless ticket checker left the 75 harried passengers to defend themselves against the population of rats. Left to their own means, and with the generous help of the TTE Rajesh Gupta, the commuters themselves caught six live rats with the help of a trap.

Continue Reading More: Bedbug Train Of Horrors

1/9/2012 Indiana Sees Rise In Bedbugs: Tippecanoe County Seeing Activity

“Sleep tight and don’t let the bedbugs bite” is no laughing matter for Jacob Robinson.

The pest bothered Jacob Robinson and his three roommates at their apartment for four months before they realized what the problem was.

Robinson showed NewsChannel 18 small red bumps left behind by the pests.

Robinson and his roommates started noticing little bites when they moved into their McCormick Place apartment in August.  They blame this couch furnished by their apartment which has been since thrown away.  They finally figured out bedbugs were the cause of their trouble on December 25.

“We actually found bedbugs on Christmas,” said Robinson.  “It was the first time we saw them.  Talk about ruining the Christmas night!”

Other roommates moved out, leaving only Robinson.

Pest control hired by McCormick Place sprayed the place down last week.

A search of the apartment Thursday found two dead bedbugs in a different couch owned by a roommate.  Robinson said they have found bedbugs on beds and the walls.

“It makes you paranoid,” said Robinson.  “I’m always itching.  I’m always thinking something is crawling on me.  I take a lot of showers.”

McCormick Place spokesperson Kurt Jacobson said in a telephone interview the management acted as soon as they found out about the issue.

“We want to be notified immediately,” said Jacobson.  “We will take care of it immediately and remediate the problem which we did in this case.”

Jacobson said an inspection of neighboring units found no bedbugs.

“We know for all the residents like this, it’s something that’s uncomfortable and that’s why we want to take care of it right away,” Jacobson said.

Although Robinson said he wants to move and be let out of his lease, the terms of the document he signed don’t allow for that.

McCormick Place has scheduled two additional treatments of the apartment to kill any remaining pests.

But what if your landlord is not responsive?

There are few legal options for health officials.

“Right now, there’s no ordinance or state laws against that, that I can use against bedbugs,” said Jake Rowland, Environmental Health Specialist with the Tippecanoe County Health Department.

Unlike a pest like cockroaches or rats, Rowland said bedbugs are not a public health hazard because they are not known to carry any diseases.  If there is an infestation of a pest that is a public health hazard, health officials have more legal options.

Rowland said the Tippecanoe County Health Department gets about 20 calls a year from people with bedbugs, mostly during move-ins in the fall.

It’s something a few years ago that would have been unheard of.

“It’s here and it’s going to be hard to get rid of,” Rowland said.

That’s not a comforting thought for Robinson.  The treatments from pest control must be done several weeks apart to insure that all unwanted guests and their eggs are dead.

Rowland said bedbugs have been in county hotels and apartments and they don’t care if it’s a high-priced unit or a cheap motel.

He said if you’re sleeping in a strange room, it’s always a good idea to check the cracks and crevices around mattresses where bedbugs like to hide.

Continue Reading More: Indiana Seeing Rise In Bedbugs