Brooklyn Bed Bug Registry Infestation Maps, Residential and Hotel

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Youve heard the horror stories. The unsuspecting tourist whose souvenir of his trip came in the form of small red welts up and down his leg. The mom from the playground who tells a trusted friend about her problem and how she had to toss out her daughters entire collection of American Girl dolls (she whispers, fearful the other moms will hear and forbid their children to play with hers). The young couple excited to close on their first apartment only to find out that their neighbors had an infestation.

The culprit: bedbugs.

These parasitic insects have emerged as a serious issue, not just in big cities like New York but in small towns across the country. What can be done about them? Are they really a problem or are we all just overreacting?

Louis N. Sorkin, an entomologist and arachnologist, has worked at the American Museum of Natural History since 1978.

Extensive infestations of bedbugs in homes, especially city dwellings like apartments, condos and co-ops, can easily spread throughout an entire building, especially when infested apartments are treated in isolation. Thats why its crucial for people and government agencies to understand the issues and work together.

Bedbugs are adept hitchhikers and harbor on and in furniture and other objects. They also live within walls, floors and ceilings where pipes and wiring become their highways. Health care workers, home care personnel, cable TV installers, plumbers and electricians, to name a few, can easily and unknowingly provide easy access to crawling bugs or transfer bedbugs from one client to another. People living in infested homes can unwittingly infest their workplaces. Unfortunately, most people are misinformed about this bugs basic characteristics.

For one, bedbug is a misleading name: the common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, is not restricted to beds. The typical description wingless, reddish brown, and up to quarter-inch long is also inaccurate, and youll easily overlook infestations if youre looking for insects that fit that bill. Immature bedbugs are much smaller and pale, though theyll become plump, turn red and then darker after feasting on and digesting blood. Adults have vestigial wings.

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The females lay tiny, pale eggs in crevices, and not just in furniture, box springs, and mattresses. Electric clocks, stereos, window encasements, curtains the list for possible bedbug harborages goes on and on. Females produce hundreds of eggs during their lifetime, and they must feed on blood to stay fertile and reproduce. Tiny, pale nymphs 1/32 inch or about as long as a credit card is thick hatch from these eggs. In order to grow to adulthood, they go through five immature stages each requiring at least one meal of blood.

Since many people confuse the bugs with other insects like cockroaches, and because bite reactions are sometimes misdiagnosed, infestations arent always reported. Others become used to living with bedbugs. Then there are people who are reluctant to report infestations because they incorrectly equate bedbug infestation with unclean conditions. But recognizing bedbugs is the first step in effective pest control for you, and your neighbors.

Susan C. Jones is an associate professor in the department of entomology at Ohio State University. She is the O.S.U. Extension state specialist on household and structural insect pests and serves on two bedbug task forces in Ohio.

An increase in bedbug infestations is not just a problem in New York City, it is an unfortunate phenomenon occurring all over the U.S. and the world. Many factors are involved in the increased incidence of bedbugs. A major factor is the publics lack of knowledge about them and how these parasitic insects are spread and how they should be controlled.

People simply dont take measures to protect themselves from these tiny hitchhikers, especially when they travel. People often do not recognize that they have bedbugs in their homes until an infestation is well entrenched, and the bugs become much more difficult to control.

A related factor is the unnecessary social stigma connected to bedbugs: They are NOT associated with filth or economic status. The failure to acknowledge and discuss bedbug problems furthers the spread of them. Indeed, it is unwise to place infested items on the curb as others often scavenge these items and spread the bedbugs to new households.

People typically dont understand that bedbug control requires considerable effort, attention to detail and coordination by multiple parties including residents, pest management personnel and property managers. In multifamily dwellings, the practice of treating an infested unit in isolation rather than inspecting (and potentially treating) all interconnected units is a practice that allows bedbugs to spread quickly to adjacent units and is not cost-effective.

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Bedbugs require multiple control tactics and there is no magic bullet pesticides alone are not the solution. For example, reducing clutter is very important.

Bedbug control is expensive and time-consuming, and with the current recession, many people lack the financial resources to hire an experienced professional. Do-it-yourself insecticide sprays tend to work on contact and, therefore, seldom provide control of bedbugs since the insects hide in many inaccessible locations. Bedbugs also have developed resistance to many commonly available pesticides.

Unfortunately, many public health officials have failed to recognize or to address, in a timely manner, the significance of bedbugs as a public health threat. Thats a huge problem.

Michael F. Potter is a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky, where he specializes in pests infesting buildings, people and property.

On the matter of bed bugs, history is repeating itself. Just as we saw in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, bedbugs are moving beyond urban centers and seaport towns into less populated areas.

Its safe to say that probably every state has a bedbug problem. And as history has shown, were not talking only about infestations among the poor, were talking about the middle class and the wealthy. Youll find bedbugs not just in hotels, but in apartment buildings, offices, summer camps, movie theaters, college dormitories, buses, even waiting rooms in major hospitals.

So what should we do? For starters, we need to improve public awareness. People dont tend to think about bed bugs until theyve been affected by them even doctors have been known to misdiagnose the bites. People should inspect their beds (especially near the headboard area), not just at home, but wherever they sleep on vacation or at college. Dont even think of picking up used items left on the curb. The public needs to put the prospect of bed bugs on their radar screen.

Landlords should inform tenants about the growing problem with bed bugs and also put up information sheets in their buildings. Preventive inspection by tenants and pest control firms would go a long way toward curbing the problem and isolating a possible infestation.

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Second, public health departments and other government agencies need to take the problem seriously. Because bed bugs are not deemed disease transmitters like cockroaches, rodents or flies, they tend to be ignored in health budgets. This needs to change. While they might not carry disease, they are a huge emotional and economic nuisance and can lead to allergic reactions and infections.

And finally, we may need the Environmental Protection Agency and state regulatory groups to allow emergency use of certain older insecticides and, more important, we need to encourage chemical companies to invest in research and development of new insecticides. Almost everyone in the pest control industry will tell you that better insecticides are needed to effectively and economically combat the global resurgence of this pest, used in concert with other non-chemical approaches.

In the 1940s 50s and 6OS, DDT was responsible for the virtual eradication of bed bugs. Im not advocating for DDT research indicates that todays bed bugs have developed a resistance to it anyway but I do think chemical companies, if there were incentives, could develop affordable, 21st century versions to help win this battle. Otherwise, we are in for quite a ride.

Bonnie Friedman is the author of Writing Past Dark: Envy, Fear, Distraction and Other Dilemmas in the Writers Life and The Thief of Happiness. She is a professor of creative writing at The University of North Texas.

When I lived in New York, bedbugs invaded my Brooklyn brownstone apartment and I became obsessed with them. Every crack in the plaster, every split in the ancient floorboards, every infinitesimal gap around light switches and radiator pipes became the object of anxiety. Insecticide and caulk never sated my suspicion that bedbugs were still lurking.

A little O.C.D. is good for beating the bedbugs, advised the president of the extermination company.

Compulsive? The effective approach is to be compulsive? I can do that! For months, I sprayed, laundered, vacuumed, hauled to the curb and lived on the verge of tears.

To go to sleep knowing that bugs might emerge and bloat themselves on your blood or your partners blood during the night, to know from the online photos that the bugs release tiny revolting versions of themselves, to understand that you arent safe despite the Vaseline gobbed on the bedlegs, the special clothes you sleep in, coaxes you to the verge of a kind of madness. One feels kootified, horrified, nostalgic for the days of DDT, Ill choose cancer over bedbugs is the crazed idea and yet.

One day, given enough labor and money, it is over. You are one of the regular, normal people again. You feel oceans of wellbeing without ever feeling quite as you did before.

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Now there is a new awareness and avoidance of secondhand clothes, tag sales, the odiferous man on the subway scratching his ankle. Post affliction, you are with all itchy humanity, your awareness and compassion heightened. For better or worse you know, in the end, that the mind itself will never quite be free of bedbugs.

Richard J. Pollack, a public health entomologist at the Harvard School of Public Health, is the author of the educational resource on the biology and management of bedbugs.

Whether country manors or urban efficiencies, our homes are our castles, and few folks are willing to share their abodes with vermin of any kind. Despite this, bedbugs have become resurgent in communities throughout the nation, but they have not spread as quickly as misinformation and hysteria about these reviled pests.

Bedbugs may not be as prevalent as is generally perceived. Every home is endowed with fairly innocuous insects, and these are often misconstrued to be bedbugs. The discovery of a bug on or near the bed doesnt qualify it as a bedbug. The mere presence of bites or a positive response from a bug-sniffing dog may be suggestive, but these are far less useful in solving the mystery than is capturing and identifying the real culprit. Treating the home without such an objective basis is unjustified, wastes money and may constitute a gross misuse of insecticide.

Nary a day passes without tearful homeowners, tenants or building owners complaining they have, or believe they have, bedbugs. At best, the elimination of bedbugs may command a tidy sum and considerable time and effort in fighting them. At worst, reactions to their bites will cause a few people to seek care in the emergency room. For most, the reactions to the bites are mildly or incredibly irritating, and they may continue to offer insult long after the actual injury. Bedbugs are a medical problem for those who are affected, but the level of concern is generally far less than that of a serious illness.

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Few people complain as much when a mosquito is singing in their ear, yet mosquitoes feed on blood, leave similarly itchy reminders behind and sometimes transmit agents of disease and death. On the bright side, bedbugs are not known to spread disease-causing microbes to people. In an odd twist of logic, many residents readily spread insecticides throughout their homes to battle bedbugs, but then eschew the use of similar products aimed to reduce a mosquito borne public health threat in the community.

Last, but not least, the finding of bedbugs stimulates the blame game. Tenants accuse the landlord or previous tenants, and landlords impugn the tenants. Only the bugs know for sure from whence they came, and it generally doesnt matter in the grand scheme of things. Rather than targeting the bugs, hostilities tend to escalate and lawyers are retained. Regardless of which side prevails in court, the lawyers profit from the proceedings, and the injured parties continue to suffer from the bugs.

In the challenge against bedbugs, emotion and fear tend to prevail over rationality and caution. Until new effective products and methods become available, the bedbugs will remain uninvited guests in many of our homes.

Read more:
Bedbugs (Itch, Itch, Scratch, Scratch)! - The New York Times

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 2nd, 2017 at 5:46 am and is filed under Brooklyn Bed Bugs.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.