Bedbug Numbers Increase In London

9/15/2011 Bedbug Numbers Increase In London: Home Owners Now Dealing With Increase

They’re creepy little biters and they’re everywhere – London, Bayfield, Exeter, Sarnia and Goderich.

Bed bugs are hitchhiking into hotels, apartments and houses more and more every year.

“It’s definitely increasing and it’s been increasing substantially over the last six to seven years in the London area,” said Ryan Sawyer, owner of Sawyer Pest Management.

“People don’t understand where it’s going. It appears to be getting worse every year.”

While bed bugs once were found mostly in hotels or highdensity housing, Sawyer said he receives many more calls from residents of single-family homes, townhouses and condos about them.

He has seen infestations so bad people were sleeping in their bathtubs and balconies to get away from the bugs.

“When you go into some place and people are sleeping on their balconies . . . you really have to feel for people,” he said.

Last month, a Sarnia police office responding to a call to assist a man in medical distress found bed bugs crawling on him.

This month, Lambton County council passed a motion to hold a public meeting on the growing problem. A staff report is expected next month.

Five years ago, Sawyer received one call a month from someone fearing they had bed bugs. Now, he gets two or three a day.

The story is the same at the Middlesex London Health Unit, where calls about bed bugs have doubled in two years.

Four years ago, the London Middlesex Housing Corp., pest control budget was $25,000.

Now, it’s more than $300,000 – all because of bed bugs.

“It’ll be like that for the foreseeable future,” said Derek Grater, the corporation’s acting chief executive.

The city-owned corporation has 3,000 units and the bed bug issue is “multiplying significantly,”

Grater said.

“This is a major issue for hotels and landlords,” he said.

One tenant, who asked her name not be used, said her unit has been sprayed four times for bed bugs, but the problem persists because a neighbouring unit that has bed bugs refuses to allow pest management to spray.

The woman said she and her young children have been forced to keep their belongings in garbage bags and huddle in one room to sleep. Her request to be moved has been denied, the woman said.

“I’m paying rent for all my stuff to be in garbage bags to keep away the bed bugs,” she said.

Grater said residents sometimes refuse to allow pest management in, but under Ontario law, landlords must treat a pest issue if they find one or risk being taken to court by other residents.

“To treat the unit for bed bugs is a very invasive process,” Grater said.

Professionals place finely crushed seashells, called diatomaceous earth, in the baseboards where bed bugs hide during the day.

When the bugs walk across the powder, it scratches the underside of their bodies and dehydrates them.

Another, more expensive way, to kill the bugs is through heat. Techni- cians use special equipment to quickly increase the heat in units to about 45 C for three hours, killing the bugs.

Though effective, Grater said the technique is also expensive, about quadruple the cost of diatomaceous earth.

But before any of that is done, Grater said, the largest stumbling block is preparing the unit for treatment. People have to move furniture from walls, empty dressers, launder clothing and place it all in plastic bags.

“It’s a very big process,” he said, adding some people are unable to do the preparation work.

Sawyer called the expansion of the bed bug problem “troublesome.

“The (bed bug) population’s continuing to grow and expand and hasn’t peaked out yet.”

While there’s no “magic bullet”

for treating bed bugs, Sawyer said there does need to be more education on proper pest control to cope with the problem.

Residents or homeowners need to deal with it at the first sign of a problem or if they suspect they have bed bugs to call a professional to confirm the finding.

“The quicker you can control it, the better, because their production is so high,” said Sawyer.

Females can lay between three and five eggs a day and adult bed bugs can go 13 months without a blood feeding. Younger bugs can go three months without a meal.

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Bedbugs Force UK Woman To Sleep In Bathtub

9/6/2011 Bedbugs Force UK Woman To Sleep In Bathtub: Infestation So Bad She’s Forced To Wear Pants To Sleep

Single mum Kirsty Shaw says she is forced to sleep in her bath to escape bed bugs that have infested her rented flat in Bradford.

The 19-year-old said she has begged managers at social housing group Incommunities to help but her repeated pleas had fallen on deaf ears for weeks.

She has had to move her four-year-old son out to stay with his grandmother and is worried he will not be able to start school because he also has bite marks.

Miss Shaw said the infestation at the property at Underwood House in North Wing, Barkerend, is so bad even friends will not come to visit and she feels a social outcast.

She said: “It’s embarrassing. People have stopped coming round because they get bitten. I feel dirty but it’s not my fault.

“All I want is Incommunities to come and do a proper job of getting rid of them so I can get my life and my son back.”

Incommunities did get a pest controller to spray Miss Shaw’s bed but the bugs have not gone.

Miss Shaw said: “It’s just got worse. They are everywhere. I’ve been catching as many as I can. Some are as big as ladybirds but that’s because they’ve been biting me.

“I’ve had bites all over the top of my back, my arms and elbows. I had been sleeping with trousers on tucked into my socks but now I’m sleeping in the bath. I can’t use the duvet because they might be on that so I’m just using towels to try to get as comfortable as I can but it’s impossible.

“My son’s had them on his face so now he can’t sleep here. It’s horrid.”

Miss Shaw’s mother, Amanda Shaw, said: “We’ve been on and on at Incommunities and they say if she wants the pest controller out again she’ll have to pay for it but she’s 19 a single-mum on tax credits, she can’t afford it. All the furniture is Incommunities’ anyway.”

An Incommunities’ spokesman said: “Although Incommunities is not responsible for the treatment of pest infestation in residents’ homes, as a caring and responsible landlord we have assisted Miss Shaw with the treatment of bed bugs in her home.”

An Incommunities official visited Miss Shaw yesterday after inquiries by the Telegraph & Argus.

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Bedbug Repellent Discovered

 

4/1/2011 Bedbug Repellent Discovered: Researchers Discover Unlikely Bedbug Repellent

Swedish researchers are hoping they have found a smell so disgusting that even bedbugs are repelled.

It’s the smell of an alarmed adolescent bedbug.

And if their study bears out, and if they can synthesize, bottle and deploy the smell sufficiently, they may have found a useful weapon to add to the growing artillery against these blood-sucking pests.

The researchers, from Lund University in Sweden, were trying to determine the similarities between the common bed bug and the tropical bed bug.

The study appears in this week’s issue of the Public Library of Science One, or PLoS One.

The tropical bedbug, once confined to warmer, humid climates, has been branching into more extreme latitudes, such as Florida, the United Kingdom and Australia. Researchers are only just beginning to study them.

The Swedish scientists wanted to see how similar the two species’ pheromone, or smell, repertoires were.

And while they were doing this, they discovered not only do adult bedbugs hate the smell of adolescents, adolescents hate the smells of each other, too.

The researchers surmised that if you could bottle the nymph – or adolescent – essence, exterminators could use it to flush bugs out of their hiding places, and then kill them with other means, such as heat.

“(We) showed that the nymph blend elicited a stronger reaction in adults than the adult blend did,” wrote the authors in their study. “With increased infestation rates in mind, our findings have important implications for the development of an alarm pheromone-based pest control method that could target both species of bedbug.”

Gail Getty, a UC Berkeley entomologist who was not involved in the research, agreed.

“The research posed here provides valuable clues into the complexity of bedbug biology and hopefully provides a piece of information that will aid us in our bedbug battles,” she said.

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