Of all the disturbing things about bedbugs, their mating habits may be the worst. Cimex lectularius have evolved a breeding technique called “traumatic insemination,” and it’s even more horrible than it sounds.
A male bedbug’s penis is literally a weapon—a sharp, brown hypodermic hook that forgot about the female reproductive canal long ago. Here’s how he uses it: The male pounces on the female, holds her firmly while she struggles, and gouges his hook through her exoskeleton, squirting his sperm directly into her body cavity. The sperm swims through her hemolymph (a bug’s version of blood) and, if the mating wound doesn’t develop a
serious infection and kill her, eventually swims to her ovaries.
Biologists used to believe males and females of a given species evolved together for sexual fitness, the Darwinian version of romance. But bedbugs, scientists have found, have engaged in a millennia-long struggle of “sexually antagonistic coevolution” in which individual males damage individual females for overall reproductive advantage. Female bedbugs have counterevolved “spermalege,” a special sperm-receptacle organ in the abdomen that helps absorb the trauma—if the hypodermic penis hits it. Bedbugs aren’t exactly careful maters. Male bugs sometimes traumatically inseminate each other, though scientists aren’t sure whether this is a function of sexual competition or just carelessness. Regardless, sex is bad for female bedbugs. A 2003 study for the Royal Society of London found that the more sex a female bedbug has, the shorter her life will be.
A bed infested with bedbugs isn’t just a party for bloodsuckers that will make you itch—it’s also a Verdun of buggy sexual warfare.
This past summer, Lauren Hester began to itch. Then she noticed red welts in little rows all over her skin. She was living with her boyfriend, Andrew Lazarow, both of them theater artists and members of Seattle company the Satori Group. But after weeks of hearing his girlfriend complain about the itching, Lazarow still didn’t believe it had anything to do with their First Hill apartment: “I thought it was mosquitoes or something.” Lazarow is a small, earnest man with brown stubble and black-framed glasses, and he has a pained expression as he recalls this part of the story. “I still feel really badly,” he says. “I wasn’t getting bitten and I was dismissive.”
But Hester’s bite patterns were textbook. Bedbugs bite in rows for three reasons. First, they are extremely sensitive to movement. If a sleeper twitches at night, the bugs stop feeding, take a few lateral steps, wait for stillness, and start sucking blood again. Second, the rows can be the result of bedbugs searching for a vein to drill into. Third, according to Bedbugcentral.com, several bugs might be lined up along a fold or overlock on a sheet, “all feeding at the same time, similar to cattle at a trough.” Either Lazarow wasn’t getting bitten or he wasn’t feeling it—people react differently to the bites. (Bedbugs feed by injecting two hollow tubes into their hosts. One tube injects saliva with anesthetics and anticoagulants, the other sucks out the blood. People who get itchy from the bites are having a reaction to the bedbugs’ spit.)
One night, after training with the Satori Group, Hester insisted they check the apartment for bedbugs. (Another company member, Spike Friedman, had experienced a horrible bedbug infestation when he lived in Manhattan.) To make her happy, Lazarow scrutinized the mattress and pillows—and found little black dots, the scat bedbugs leave behind on their postprandial walk home. They lifted the mattress and saw more black dots, plus a few bugs scurrying away. “I freaked out,” Lazarow says. “You could see their feces of our blood. I’m a little OCD and germaphobic: These things are defecating on my pillow! Are there some in my mouth?”
At the height of the six-week ordeal that followed, Lazarow says, “I’d wake up at two in the morning every night, lying there sleepless, knowing they were about to come out.”
Lazarow and Hester ran some clothes through the dryer—heat is one of the few things that can kill bedbugs—and then went directly to the Sorrento Hotel. “They were incredibly gracious,” Lazarow said. The couple explained what was happening, and the hotel cut them a deal. The next day, Hester and Lazarow called the extermination company Paratex (“I can’t recommend them highly enough”). They stuffed everything they owned into a U-Haul to take to Paratex to be put into a big, vacuum-sealed tube for 24 hours of fumigation.
“We loaded everything except for some clothes,” Lazarow says. “Literally everything else. When my friend Spike had his infestation, he saw bedbugs crawling out of his laptop, out of his iPod.” Then back to the apartment to live out of Ziploc bags for six weeks and wash their bedding every day before a second round of fumigation and spraying.
Between the treatment, four nights at the hotel, and the laundry bills, the couple spent over $1,500. Afterward, they weren’t convinced the apartment was fully clean. So they moved out.
Bedbugs hide wherever they can—box springs are good, as are walls, chairs, even suitcases—and, if they go dormant, can survive up to 18 months between meals. Leaving a room and starving them out is not a viable option. Bedbugs tend not to travel more than 100 feet from their host but can migrate easily between apartments if they choose, especially along boards and pipes. Clay Thompson, of Seattle’s Department of Planning and Development (DPD), says the best way to deal with an infested apartment is to treat all the proximal apartments, too: left and right, above and below. But landlords and tenants are reluctant to pay for what they perceive as prophylactic measures. “Bedbugs are,” Thompson says with a note of finality in his voice, “definitely hard to get rid of.”
In Seattle, Thompson says, bedbugs are on their way to becoming a “crisis.” During his first 22 years with the DPD, he had only heard a handful of bedbug complaints. But in the past year, the complaints soared, the majority coming in the past two or three months. “The curve has been very steep,” he says. “When we first started hearing about them, we didn’t even know what to look for. So we had some enterprising inspectors who went to the web and got a photograph to see what they looked like.”
The earliest reports of the bedbugs’ return came out of New York City: In 2004, the city information line 311 received fewer than 100 calls about bedbugs. In 2006, it received over 4,600 calls. In 2008, over 9,000 people called. This year, Bill Clinton and his staff had to vacate their offices in Harlem for a bedbug infestation, which kicked off the predictable
jokes about Clinton keeping a bed in his office. But the bugs are invading other people’s offices. The New York offices of Penguin press had an infestation this year; last year, a bedbug problem at Fox News ended in a lawsuit, when one of its employees claimed she was suffering PTSD after being bitten three times. This past September, advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi—most famous for its campaign for the UK’s conservative party, “Labour isn’t working”—had to fumigate its 17th floor.
And the bedbug invasion has expanded. Toronto Public Health has reported that it handled 1,500 infestations in 2009, up from 46 in 2003. The website Torontoist held a vote for the city’s Supervillain of 2009. Out of 24 contestants, bedbugs won third place.
Blame the bats. Biologists theorize bat caves were the parasites’ original breeding ground; then when early humans moved in, they dropped down and started feasting on us. From the cavemen until the late 20th century, bedbugs—and their big red welts—were just a fact of human existence, one of the unhappy nuisances of being a person. That ended around WWII, when powerful pesticides like DDT knocked bedbugs—in wealthy countries, at least—into oblivion.
DDT also knocked bird populations onto endangered-species lists and was correlated with human cancers. “It all started with the lady named Rachel Carson and her book called Silent Spring,” says Jim Osborn, the no-nonsense but friendly president of Seattle’s 102-year-old Paratex pest control. (Osborn used to get a couple of calls about bedbugs a year. Now he’s getting queries almost every day.) “DDT should have been vastly curtailed, but not banned. It’s a wonderful chemical that should have been restricted to limited circumstances for limited use. But the pendulum always swings from one side to the other. It defies common sense, but that’s how the world works.”
Silent Spring successfully led the charge to dramatically curtail the use of pesticides like DDT.
And bedbugs are back.
It’s been so long since we’ve seen bedbugs, even inspectors have forgotten what they look like. And some people who should know better have forgotten they even exist. “It has shocked me,” says Jeff White, a research entomologist at New Jersey–based business Bedbugcentral.com. “I’ve been on the floor of trade shows of industries where bedbugs should be a major concern—assisted living, for example—and have had people tell me they thought bedbugs were just a nursery rhyme: ‘Sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite.'”
But it’s been decades since the U.S. banned DDT and other potent pesticides. Why are bedbugs only just now staging their comeback?
Nobody knows: not White, not Thompson, not the half-dozen other people I asked while working on this story. But pretty much everyone trots out the same not entirely satisfying theories: increased international travel, cross-contamination from industrial chicken farms (though they prefer people, bedbugs can live off of chickens, which have been the cause of major infestations), and the increase in swapping used furniture thanks to Craigslist. (Get people murdered, put newspaper classified sections out of business, encourage epidemics—is there anything Craigslist can’t do?) And maybe the old poisons were more powerful and prevalent than we thought.
“DDT was a powerful residual pesticide,” says White of Bedbugcentral.com. “You apply DDT to a baseboard and if a bedbug walks across it years later, it’ll die. And just because DDT was banned in the 1970s doesn’t mean people stopped using it in the ’70s. People had old stores of the pesticide they were using up. That takes time.”
If White’s theories are true, we are only just now beginning to live in a DDT-free world. And it looks buggy.
In the absence of DDT, exterminators use a constellation of other methods to kill bedbugs: liquid, gas, earth, and fire. The four elements. It’s like medieval magic.
The liquid and gas methods are about what you’d expect: pesticide sprays and fumigation, either sealing off a building in a plastic tent, E.T.-style (expensive), or removing everything from the building and shoving it into a vacuum-sealed tube for fumigation (not quite as expensive).
The fire method: Bedbugs can’t live at very high temperatures, so exterminators will sometimes bring in high-powered space heaters and push the room temperature up past 120 degrees Fahrenheit for several hours. (A cheaper, slightly less reliable version recommended for travelers returning with plastic bags full of contaminated clothes: seal them up in a car full of summer sunlight for a full day.) But the heat can’t always penetrate to the center of a mattress, where the bedbugs live, and isn’t always effective.
And the earth method: diatomaceous earth, a fine, chalklike dust made of fossilized, hard-shelled algae called diatoms. Diatomaceous earth is abrasive and super-absorbent. People use it for hydroponics, high-drainage soil, cleanup of toxic spills, cat litter, thermal insulation, a blood coagulant, and a mechanical (rather than chemical) insecticide. The fossil dust (33 to 86 percent silica, 5 percent sodium, other percent other stuff) sucks the waxy lipids out of a bedbug’s exoskeleton, turning all that human blood in its guts into a scab and causing it to die of dehydration.
Finding their crispy, desiccated corpses—several people have posted pictures to bedbug internet threads—is very satisfying.
Bedbugs aren’t dangerous. They’re not a vector for disease like mosquitoes and fleas—something of a mystery, as they have all the prerequisites for passing blood-borne disease from one host to another—but they’re annoying and gross and they freak people out. Friends have told me stories about unscrupulous exterminators preying on their hysteria, and bedbug-specific websites are springing up around the world. Maciej Ceglowski runs a civic-minded site based in Romania called Bedbugregistry.com, where people post reports of bedbugs in office buildings, apartment complexes, and hotels. (Some are surprising: the Four
Seasons in San Francisco, Disney’s Old Key West Resort, the unfortunately named “Yosemite Bug Rustic Mountain Resort.”)
Ceglowski started the site after having an unpleasant encounter with bedbugs in San Francisco in 2006. He’d just moved back from Beijing and was staying in “a dingy Travelodge on the corner of Valencia and Market streets. I had a song in my throat, a dream in my heart, and… I was about to discover that I also had a sizable bedbug colony under my mattress.” This discovery led to a lifetime obsession and Bedbugregistry.com, which is not only a place where travelers warn each other about bedbugs but a kind of support group where people post angry rants, pathos-laden cris de coeur, and gallows humor—all the shock, angst, and wry fatalism of the contemporary infested.
Ceglowski’s mother grew up in Lodz, Poland, when bedbugs were just a fact of life. When moving into a new place, Ceglowski wrote, “One of the first things she would do was check behind picture frames and in the cracks in wallpaper for bedbugs. They were quite common but considered a sign of a lower-class place.” In those pre-DDT days, Ceglowski writes, “There were lots of techniques for avoiding bedbugs in infested places. Putting bedstead legs in cans of kerosene or water was common (bedbugs defeat this ploy by climbing onto the ceiling and dropping when they feel the heat of a host below). If things got bad enough, you might sleep in the tub.”
Bedbugregistry.com shows only a few reports in Seattle (including the Green Tortoise Hostel downtown and the Renaissance hotel on Madison, in case you’re wondering—neither of them returned requests for comment), but Ceglowski says he’s getting around 15 reports a day from New York, Toronto, San Francisco, and Vancouver, where people are starting to worry about bedbugs at the Olympics. Canadian newspaper editorials wring their hands about visitors infesting their city—it was a problem for Sydney in 2000—but at the rate Vancouver infestations are going, they should be more concerned about becoming a major export center broadcasting bedbugs across the world.
Bedbugs have been a source of controversy at Seattle Housing Authority (SHA), which provides low-income apartments to over 26,000 Seattle residents. Bedbugs have moved into SHA units—especially the Denny Terrace building and Bell Tower—and some residents feel like the city isn’t responding quickly enough to stanch the infestation. Virginia Felton, who has worked at SHA for 10 years, heard the first reports of bedbugs this year at Denny Terrace. Over a third of its units have been treated for bedbugs so far, with 35 outstanding work orders. The waiting list just to have your apartment inspected is two weeks. (SHA acquired a bedbug-sniffing dog—a young female black lab with the nickname “Bugsy”—to help combat the problem. The dog was adopted by a trainer in Florida about two days before being put down and, according to Felton, cost SHA around $7,000.)
Kenneth Jennings, chair of the resident council for Bell Tower, says the wait is too long—not just for residents, but for the city: “If this problem is not properly addressed soon, Seattle may be in for a wider epidemic of these pests that will impact well beyond the confines of low-income housing.”
Julie Wade, a pro bono attorney for the resident council, thinks those numbers might even be underreported. “People are reluctant to complain,” she says. “They’re worried about losing their housing and worried about retaliation.”
Wade, currently a director of corporate counsel at Starbucks, worked as an attorney for SHA for many years, but now negotiates with SHA on behalf of its clients. “I worked inside the organization for years and have a tremendous amount of respect for what SHA does,” Wade says. “But they make mistakes, and sometimes there’s the attitude that arises—I hate to say it, because it’s not an easy job—but that beggars can’t be choosers. That they should be able to put up with a little inconvenience.”
Wade first came on the bedbug case during a meeting with clients she thought was going to be about some renovations that were disrupting residents. (SHA had been drilling into concrete for three weeks at a time and had cut the water 22 times in the last three months. The construction was, in Wade’s terms, disrupting SHA’s ability to “provide a clean, safe, sanitary environment and provide a quiet enjoyment of the premises.”) She met with residents at Bell Tower to talk about the renovations—she thought—and to get them a break on their rent. But everyone wanted to talk about bedbugs.
“SHA isn’t ignoring the problem, but their response is inadequate,” Wade says. “They send inspectors who don’t seem to know what they’re looking for, and they need to respond quicker than two weeks. There are special challenges with buildings and populations like this, but all I know is people are suffering.”
“If SHA isn’t more aggressive,” Wade says, “these bedbugs may be everywhere.”
That could be. Both Felton at SHA and Thompson of the DPD admit the city doesn’t have the resources to exterminate its bedbugs. “We could spend thousands and thousands of dollars getting rid of the bedbugs in any given place,” Felton says, “and then someone could just bring them back in.”
So what does she propose?
“If we can provide resources for our residents to not be bitten constantly and get a good night’s sleep, then that’s pretty good.”
In other words, bedbugs are now a permanent fact of life for the urban poor in Seattle, just like the old days. And SHA isn’t trying to exterminate the bedbugs, just keep them out of the bed?
“Yes.”
How?
“Provide bed frames for our residents to get their mattresses off the floor, tell them to keep the beds away from the walls and their blankets off the floor,” she says. “And there are these little interceptor disks you put beneath the legs of the bed…”
It seems like I’ve heard about this technology before—the pots of kerosene Ceglowski’s mother used in Soviet-era Poland. 
Have a question about bedbugs? Brendan Kiley and other bug experts will be taking readers’ questions in Questionland!
This article has been updated since its original publication.
What a nightmare.
I lived through a bed bug infestation in Brooklyn (whenever anyone mentions Bushwick, I still shudder). I am, unfortunately, very allergic to their saliva; one bite almost sent me to the hospital because it became so infected (it looked like I had a second kneecap). I tell everyone, regardless of whether they have bedbugs or not, to purchase some plastic mattress protectors. You can get them at any Bed Bath and Beyond for around $19–far cheaper than a new mattress. This prevents the bugs from getting into the seams of your mattress AND (more importantly) prevents them from escaping once you seal them in. We still sleep on our mattress that housed the bed bugs (poor publishing types can’t afford new mattresses) and have yet to get bit again… knock on wood. That said, we did move—I am pretty sure the entire building, let alone all of Bushwick, was infected.
Good luck Seattle.
Sleep tight, Seattle!
Women want me-
Men want to be me…
the Stranger once again scooped: topic first covered by Real Change Oct 29, 2009, Vol: 16, No: 47.
I thought we had bedbugs and used DE to disinfect our new apartment home–we have a cat, dog, young child so it was important for no pesticides to be used. it took too applications but it worked very well.
You can freeze them but it takes several days. Insecticide isn’t always effective because bedbugs live, among other place, inside the walls where the spray won’t get them. It’s also a bad idea to use sprays on or around your bed.
Here’s my suggestion: everybody go right now and caulk every crack and crevice in your bedroom. Caulk around every electrical, phone, cable, smoke detector, light fixture, and any other outlet, and caulk or plug each tiny hole inside each electrical outlet box. Spray diatomaceous earth into each stud space in every wall of the bedroom. That way, if they come, they will only be in the rug, bed, clock, etc. and you might be able to get rid of them on first spray.
that “too” must be in honor of callie lodging the first comment right?
You can’t live anywhere in downtown Vancouver – particularly the east side and the West End – without encountering the talk or threat of bed bugs. It’s referred to here as an epidemic. Most people feel the bedbugs arrived via international (primarily Asian) luggage and clothing, but there are some old, fairly ram-shackled places throughout downtown furnished with used furniture – so, who knows?
I am all itchy now.
What luck to see this on the front page of the stranger today. My girlfriend and I just throw out all the furniture we owned this morning. Getting rid of bedbugs has been one of the worst experiences I’ve ever had to deal with. Get ready for it, because from what read Seattle has a better climate for bed bugs that New York.
Also everyone, please remember that any spray that you might buy at the hardware store or anywhere else for home use is pure bunk.
Please, please call an exterminator (get references and call around) and make sure they use poison, and lots of it. Having lived through a bedbug infestation, USE THE POISON. Make sure they use lots of it, and make sure that they come back two weeks after the first treatement to catch any eggs that may have hatched in the mean time.
Yeah, already been a big problem on the east coast. I live in the Allston neighborhood of Boston and everybody has a story about bedbugs. In fact, I think I have them, but they aren’t giving me bumps. Ha!
I wouldn’t be surprised if the backpacker set played a major role in this epidemic;that would explain why a city of this size – for YEARS – was VERY short on shoestring-budget accomodations(despite the high demand for it!)….Watch out for the couchsurfers!…..DDT,anybody?
YO MAN ITS 311 NOT 331
i am never sleeping anywhere besides my bed ever again. and no one is invited over.
Kray’s girlfriend here (of post 11). The article mentioned one cause of the spread of this infestation being the exchange of used furniture. We are almost POSITIVE this is how we got bedbugs. Almost worse than the actual terror of having bedbugs was knowing that we got them from some b**** who decided at least she’d get $75 out of the deal. Now not only have we broken our lease and have gotten rid of ALL of our furniture, but we are hesitant to buy anything used to re-furnish our new apartment. In short, if you are thinking about buying anything used… I would straight ask the seller if they’ve ever had bedbugs. Either that or just do not buy anything used.
2010 = The year of burning furniture
there are bedbugs in the NP Hotel.
lets not let this happen to all of us, please. bedbugs is not something im ready to except.
accept!
They actually might actually carry a few diseases, including, yikes! leprosy.
My employer operates several homeless shelters and temporary accommodations, and damn but we have been having a hell of a problem with these. They are ridiculously hard to get rid of; we had to abandon one property for a year and a half to starve them out to get rid of them.
I got bit to hell this summer in a hotel room in a not bad hotel. Hotels are dealing with this scourge on a daily basis. They are usually basically cement, which prevents cross room transmission, vacuum incessantly, replace baseboards regularly, and dry the linen at very hot temperatures. And they are still fighting a rearguard action.
Me, I’m ready to whip out the DDT again. Except that they will no doubt eventually acquire immunity to that too. Nasty nasty critters.
Goddamn.
They actually might actually carry a few diseases, including, yikes! leprosy.
My employer operates several homeless shelters and temporary accommodations, and damn but we have been having a hell of a problem with these. They are ridiculously hard to get rid of; we had to abandon one property for a year and a half to starve them out to get rid of them.
I got bit to hell this summer in a hotel room in a not bad hotel. Hotels are dealing with this scourge on a daily basis. They are usually basically cement, which prevents cross room transmission, vacuum incessantly, replace baseboards regularly, and dry the linen at very hot temperatures. And they are still fighting a rearguard action.
Me, I’m ready to whip out the DDT again. Except that they will no doubt eventually acquire immunity to that too. Nasty nasty critters.
Goddamn.
accept
accept
Readers, please try diatomaceous earth. I had bedbugs for a few months, used the d.e., and they were gone within two weeks. That was last April, and I haven’t have one bite since nor seen a single speck of evidence they’re still around. Vanished. (I live in a studio, so if they were anywhere in this apt. they would have found me since then.)
Take apart your bed, make sure it’s clean, sprinkle d.e. in joints and crevices. Sprinkle it on the floor around the legs of your bed. Sprinkle it between your bed and the wall. Sprinkle it around the edges of the room, so even if they have to do that crawl-on-the-ceiling thing, they have to touch it. Make sure they have to cross it to get to you and to get away from you. I used it in conjunction with a spray pesticide I found online that had gotten good reviews, but I have no way of knowing if or how much that made a difference.
Oh, also: How did they get in my apt.? I think it was wicker. At around the same time as the outbreak began, I had bought two wicker chairs (Ikea, I suppose I should mention) and had bought a wicker basket with some items in it from a silent auction. Both the chairs and the basket, I later discovered, had those little black ink-spot feces on them. They could have arrived in one and then moved to the other. At any rate, you may want to be careful about wicker.
Dammit. I shouldn’t have read this while I was wanting to go to bed. Anything about bugs gives me that creepy, crawly, itchy feeling. I hope I’ll be able to sleep.
I worked on both these reports (from Toronto):
http://www.woodgreen.org/Temp/BBresearch…
and
http://www.woodgreen.org/Temp/BB_TenantM…
Hope these are helpful to someone!
Welcome to the new kewl trend.
In my experience, diatomaceous earth (DE) actually works with bedbugs. But it is total war. You have to sprinkle it around your bed like a dust moat, and on your mattress and throughout your bedding. Pay attention to their entry and escape routs.
Don’t use pesticides or exterminators. Bed bugs are social insects that communicate using scents to warn of danger. If they sense pesticides, they will scatter and then return when the threat is over.
The best source of DE is chinchilla dust. It is available at most pet stores. Yes, I know that sounds crazy. But it works. And it is less of a breathing threat than pure DE.
One more reality. You’ll know DE is working when you see dried out dead bugs around your bed. But then the remaining bugs get agitated and start biting even more. Don’t back off. Apply more chinchilla dust.
Don’t think you can move to another location and then return in two weeks. Bed bugs can survive for a year without a bite. They’ll just wait until you return.
The best strategy is to use yourself as bait, and surround yourself with DE. If the bites continue, use even more DE. Create an environment where they have no place to live or to escape.
Felton’s idea that people can avoid being bitten while they sleep does not take into account the fact that bed bugs will bite in the daytime if they need to. A year ago, Bedbugger.com praised the SHA’s efforts to fight bed bugs, when it obtained a bed bug sniffing dog and was exploring the use of cutting-edge thermal treatments. To hear Felton’s latest suggestions is quite horrifying. More detailed response here:
http://bedbugger.com/2010/01/14/seattle-…
I lived in Brooklyn during the bedbug scare of 07. Exterminators did very well.
Any evidence from entomologists or epidemiologists about this supposed outbreak?
When seeking an exterminator, I can highly recommend AGAINST Terminex! They are flaky dopes, who can’t tell a bedbug from a carpet beetle, miss appointments, and inspired zero confidence that they knew what they were doing. I made the mistake of hiring them because I was freaked and they could come out the next day. Not worth it.
@ 22:
I’ve been corresponding with a public-health entomologist at Harvard about this question (Dr. Richard Pollack: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/bedbugs). He says:
“It is certainly odd how fixated folks are to insects that are generally only mildly annoying, but then tend to ignore those that cause the same level of discomfort… but also may transmit things that can kill. People will routinely use insecticides in their homes against the former, but become overly worried about better regulated and measured responses against mosquitoes in their neighborhoods. Go figure. Trying to decipher the priorities of the general public could keep a bevy of psychologists busy for several lives… and beyond.
Bed bugs are not known to transmit any pathogens to people. This includes the agents of leprosy, HIV/AIDS, hepatitis, smallpox, etc. A google search may turn up some archaic (and incorrect) reports and many more misguided statements, however, that claim that bed bugs may serve as vectors. It is a shame (of sorts) that bed bugs don’t seem to be of any significance in the transmission of disease-causing agents. If they were involved, we’d be rolling in grant money. I’m pleased, nonetheless, that bed bugs don’t serve as vectors of real pathogens. With all this said, they do seem quite capable in transmitting hysteria.”
I thought my apartment had bedbugs two years ago, but it turned out to be ‘only’ fleas brought in from outside by my roommate’s dog. At least fleas are easier to exterminate. Flea bites and bedbug bites are very-difficult-to-impossible to distinguish.
Ahem.
IF we had used DDT on bedbugs continuously, it would only have resulted in the faster creation of DDT-immune population. Superbedbugs, if you will. Generally, bedbug populations are already immune to it as it is.
No single chemical can be used effectively for a very long time – so new ones have to be developed. DDT is a myth, spread by disgruntled old school PCOs with minimal understanding of population biology. Strange to see the Stranger contribute to this outdated trope.
BTW did you know that in Norway they still use Penicillin effectively, and have no Superbugs? That is because they are very strict about prescribing antibiotics. More food for thought for the get-out-the-big-guns crowd.
PS
I’d be willing to bet a small sum of money that the ‘recent’ outbreak had been there all along and that what we’re seeing here is a snowball effect due to a rise in awareness. See for example http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/magazi…, for the story about anorexia in Hong Kong. The relevant bit is that there is ‘suddenly’ much more of it. The reason entomologists can’t explain the sudden rise in bedbug infestations is that it is not sudden.
I solved my bedbug problem by literally blocking them from my mind and forgetting they were even there. Worked like a charm! Now reading this, I realize that they have in fact gone away (I think).
Lyon Building, on 3rd – run by Aids Housing Project for years – the whole building was big time infested three years ago. (sixty units)
Old news. Stay very clean, wash and dry all clothes and linens, bleach- you bet, don’t buy used over stuffed furniture and hope they don’t like your blood.
I quit dating the guy, which was the right move anyway.
The dog was adopted by a trainer in Florida about two days before being put down and, according to Felton, cost SHA around $7,000!!! Should have waited another day, prolly could have gotten it for free. Gotta love the Seattle liberals.
Hey Everyone. I live in Vancouver and consider myself a “survivor” of the bed bug epidemic. Here’s how I got rid of them: We had the pest control come in and spray twice, and washed every article of clothing in the apartment. My room mates and I both threw out our mattresses/boxsprings immediately. I caulked EVERY HOLE AND CRACK in my room. It takes a long time, but I promise you it’s worth it… Give them no where to hide and no way to get in from another suite. After that I used diatomaceous earth on all the ledges and nooks and crannies and of course, everywhere under/around my bed.
Having bed bugs is a very special kind of hell but if you go at it full force right off the bat you should be okay. My attitude was PURE WAR and there’s no way I was gonna let those little suckers live in my home. Fight them to the death. Give them no where to run, no where to hide, and cover everything in poison.
I have not had any problems since then, and I live in the West End of Vancouver which is one of the most infested neighbourhoods in the City.
Don’t stay @ The Georgetown Inn. Very bad problem of bedbugs there.
Don’t go see a movie at AMC I hear there are bedbugs all over that place due to high daytime viewing of the matinees by infectees.
Also, DE works extremely well. #42 is absolutely correct–it is a war but entirely winnable with a few days effort.
Yeah this article spent a leeeetle too much time lamenting the passing of DDT. Stuff’s nasty shit and overall we are better off with it gone.
My parents had a bedbug recently. Luckily it was only one, that they apparently picked up when the visited a house that was for sale. But this one bug nevertheless made quite an impression on them! My mom tells the tale of how they killed it- stopped sleeping in bed to draw it out, then squashed it when it went to the bathroom to find water- like it was a battle with a dragon. And they talk about bedbugs in general as if they were the worst thing to happen to America since George W. Bush.
What a complete and well-researched article. Very informative. Hopefully, I won’t have much use for this information anytime soon…
Dream treatment: Diatomaceous earth combined with a yummy (to them) hormonal treatment that makes female bedbugs sterile…
Wow! These are amazing comments. I too used (and recently reapplied, DE to my baseboards. I want to urge readers to be very very cautious using DE. It is harmful, permanently if inhaled as it is finely ground silica. It should only be used where you don’t sleep, walk or “plop” (the sofa?). You do not want to inhale it. It is part of an integrated plan to get rid of bed bugs. When used in conjunction with caulking, heat or chemical treatment, you can get rid of bed bugs in your home. http://www.bedbugsnorthwest.com
oh god, does this mean that I should avoid the Goodwill Bins?
Last month, I had to move out of the BROADWAY FORTUNE APARTMENTS, at James and Broadway, because of a bedbug/cockroach infestation that had taken over the building, from the bottom floor up.
RP management and the building manager were aware of the problem, and repeatedly waited for tenants to come to them once they had already discovered bugs in their bed before affirming that the building had an infestation. I was told by my neighbor that the tenant that lived in my unit beforehand had moved out because of bedbugs.
When I broke my lease, I was told I would need to find a new tenant – that is, I was asked to induce someone to move in to a bed bug infested apartment. Eventually, they let me go without refunding my deposit, but it was a terrible and expensive process and I lost my mattress, couch, chairs, and most of my clothing.
If you have heard of Broadway Fortune Apartments or know of anyone considering living there, please direct them to this post.
I lived in an apartment in the U-District in Seattle several years ago that I had to leave because of bed bugs….the owners, although cool about it in the end, tried to suggest it was me that had brought them to the apartment. This did not fly, because #1 the bites started immediately after I moved in, which I reported thank God, and #2 I had met (and smelled) the prior tenant of my apartment, a dreadlocked Slovenian hippie type girl who I still blame for my three months of horror. She smelled like BO and patchoili and left some furniture for me to use, which I accepted because I didn’t have some key pieces….looking back I should have made a bonfire and torched it all. I sympathize with the person mentioned in the article, I too used to lay awake at night knowing the filthy insects were going to come out of the cracks and feast on my body while I slept, leaving rows and rings of ugly red bumps along my arms and legs. I “bug-bombed” the place 3 times to absolutely no avail. I got the hell out and hope the owners hired professionals to fix the problem, but I still shudder when I think about that apartment, which sucks because it was a lovely place in a great neighborhood.
Gizmodo recently had a post about a very simple bedbug trap you can build for ~$15.
Probably best to use as a detector to determine if you have a problem, not at a “kill em all” trap.