10/10/2011 Flagstaff Arizona Crawling With Bedbugs: Rise In Northern Part Of State Do To Heavy Tourism
Erin Kilbane and a friend awoke last Friday at a Flagstaff hotel to find themselves covered with small bugs.
“We both woke up in the middle of the night completely covered in bites, swollen, feeling sick, and we found bed bugs crawling on the bed,” she said.
The two later disposed of all of their clothing, and the motel needed an exterminator who would likely tell the business the mattresses had to go too.
Unfortunately, Kilbane and the hotel have plenty of company: Like Europe and other parts of the United States, northern Arizona is crawling with bed bugs.
Reports of the bugs in this region are up about 12-fold compared to past years, probably due in large part to tourism.
They’re found in Flagstaff, Page, Winslow, Tuba City, Window Rock at the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and beyond, and have been the cause of hotel room closures and lots of work for exterminators.
“We are finding them in all types of public accommodations — in motels, hotels, from the most expensive to the least expensive. They don’t discriminate,” said Marlene Gaither, an environmental health manager with Coconino County’s health department.
And they’re in apartment complexes, private homes, and anywhere a traveling friend or relative might spend or borrow a night on a couch or bed.
“It can be anywhere,” said Judy Shelton, owner of Conn Pest Control.
The bugs are reddish-brown or pink, 1/4 to 3/8 of an inch in length and tick-like in shape.
As nocturnal parasites, bed bugs hide in dressers, headboards, mattresses, and near a bed or couch until they can bite and draw blood from sleeping victims at night, often biting several times in sequence.
They can be transported in luggage or clothing, and it’s recommended that mattresses in infested houses be broadly cut open before disposal to prevent anyone else from re-using the mattress.
Testing for an outbreak can involve a visual inspection, or setting a chunk of dry ice in a pie tin and surrounding it with sticky paper. The bed bugs are drawn to the carbon dioxide emitted as the ice vaporizes, and they get stuck on the paper as they approach.
Coconino County’s public health agency used to receive five reports of bed bugs in Coconino County per year.
Now it’s more like five reports per month.
“We’ve gotten so good — I hate to say this — at finding bed bugs,” Gaither said.
Surprisingly enough, some people live with the blood-dependent bugs, but don’t find themselves being bitten.
That was the case for one woman who came to visit her sister and inadvertently brought the bugs with her.
And it was also true for a northern Arizona couple who photographed the bugs at their home and lived with them for months, but reported no bites.
“He took a picture of his mattress, and there wasn’t a square inch that didn’t have a bed bug,” Gaither remembered.
Calling an exterminator at the first sign of the bugs is highly recommended before the parasites can multiply and spread.
Eradicating them involves the repeated application of pesticide, in several different forms. The chemicals can be harmful to people if used incorrectly.
“It’s a pretty involved process. There’s no quick fix here,” Shelton said.
Repeat treatment is required because the pesticide cannot kill the eggs, or anything it cannot contact directly (such as the inside of a mattress.)
Conn Pest Control workers wear scrubs and sanitary equipment over their clothes and shoes to avoid taking the bugs home. Some inn employees are becoming trained in how to clean a vacuum to avoid transporting the bugs between rooms.
If Coconino County has anything in its favor amid this outbreak, two factors count:
The bugs aren’t known to spread any blood-borne pathogens or other diseases, outside of some skin irritation related to bites, Gaither said.
And unlike some other locations, the bugs here are defeated by a less-toxic cocktail of pesticides and have not yet developed resistance.
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