Bed Bug Sunday News Spread

Happy New Year, everyone!

I did a lot of drinking, dancing and eating for New Year's Eve and was too busy preparing for the festivities to read last Sunday's New York Daily News, despite the fact that I had bought it. I finally got a chance to go through it today and in it was a two-page spread about bed bugs in New York City. Obviously it's too late to buy the Sunday Daily News if you haven't already, but you can still read the online version of that story. The article includes two personal accounts from New Yorkers living with bed bugs, including that of Caitlin Heller, a fellow bed bug blogger who has been reading my blog since its inception two years ago. Caitlin is also the founder and moderator of the Yahoo! bed bug support group, Bedbugger. Here's a brief excerpt of her bed bug woes:

"I was getting 15 to 20 bites a night, and it was driving me crazy," said Heller, who runs Yahoo's Bedbug Support Group where sufferers commiserate. "I suffered mentally. I couldn't sleep at night, and I couldn't focus during the day because I had itchy, painful welts all over my body."

Scary.

The article emphasizes the fact that New York City's poorest and wealthiest dwellings are equally vulnerable to bed bugs, listing recent breakouts of bed bug infestations in such locales as Ralph Lauren's design studio, the Thomas Jefferson Housing Projects, the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel, and the Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft law firm.

Check it out; it's a pretty good read, and check out Bedbugger as well.

Later.

"Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite"

Hoo boy. If you're like me and have perused the web endlessly for news on bed bugs, you've no doubt read "Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite" ad nauseam by clueless reporters who no doubt assume they are the first to ever use this adage in an article involving bed bugs. I am quite sick of hearing this saying in news stories about bed bugs, and I have no doubt in my mind that 2008 will be full of news stories that contain "Don't Let the Bed Bugs Bite" in the lead paragraph if not the headline.

I came upon a news story about colonial America that actually tells from where this notorious adage originates. It's from the Norwell Mariner/Patriot Ledger in Marshfield, Massachusetts. The article focuses on MA state Senator Robert Hedlund, who accompanied a class of fifth graders on their field trip to a New England colonial museum. Apparently Marshfield is a microscopically sleepy town or this article was the byproduct of an extraordinarily slow news day. In any case, the origin of the phrase is revealed in the following quote:

It was later learned that colonists often had to cope with bed bugs because mattresses were made of straw; bed supports were tightened with a special device: hence the expression, “sleep tight and don’t let the bed bugs bite.”-Mary Ford, "Oldest Fifth-grader Joins School Field Trip"

The fact offers some perspective when you consider all the technological advancements made since the Pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620, and despite all these advancements we still itch for the same reason the Pilgrims did. The bed bugs must've annoyed the hell out of the Native Americans.

Happy New Year, by the way. Next month will be the second birthday of Bugged Out.

Speaking of New Year, do any native New Yorkers actually go to Times Square anymore to watch the ball drop? It was all the rage when I was a kid, and by the time I was old enough to go by myself (since no adult I knew was interested in going), the whole hanging out at Times Square got real lame, especially after 9/11 when security was beefed up and everything from liquid containers (no booze?!?) to backpacks were banned from the area during the New Year's Party.

As far as I know, most New Yorkers attend private New Year's parties where they are free to eat, drink, smoke, snort, inject and swallow whatever the hell they want without being hassled by the fuzz. Times Square at New Year's is for squares, a.k.a. tourists. Let them be herded like cattle into a potential terrorist target area.

So be sure to stock on the alcohol tomorrow, especially if you have bed bugs. And for those who don't have bed bugs, you are cordially invited to my house for a slumber party! Then you can go home and watch your furniture and your sanity disappear.

Cheers.

On the Bright Side of Bedbugs

My mother always told me to look on the bright side of things, especially when those things aren't so great. Well, bed bugs aren't so great, are they? But here's some reasons to be thankful for bed bugs. I know I'm grasping at straws here, but play along.

1. For those ladies living with their man, bed bugs will make him think twice about leaving his socks or underwear on the floor.
2. For those men not living with their significant other, bed bugs like to bite women more, as discussed in a past post, so this should encourage you to invite your girlfriend to sleep over more often.
   
3. If you're really into the minimalist thing, bed bugs should not be that much of a problem for you. In fact, if you really believe less is more, than watch your living space grow and grow exponentially as your over infested bed and other furniture disappear.
   
4. With bed bugs seeming to explode in numbers in cities across the world, I can't imagine that homeless people are feeling as bad about their living situation as they used to.

Not too many good things to say about bed bugs, are there? I believe that if you don't have anything nice to say about bed bugs, then pour yourself, a stiff drink. If you can think of some offbeat positive results of living with bed bugs, please drop me a comment so you can share with the rest of the class.

Merry Christmas!

It's Been A While...

About a month to be exact.

I do apologize for the unexplained delay. I have the unbelievably bad luck of becoming physically ill around finals time. For those of you who have been paying attention, I am in my last semester of college and am completing my undergrad degree.

In the first week of December I developed a severe pain in my right lower wisdom tooth and it had to be extracted. The pain was so unbearable I lost sleep, and my personal self-prescription consisting on Tylenol and herbal anesthesia was simply not strong enough to dull the pain. At the same time I had acquired the flu (despite the fact that I had received a flu shot October 25) and was basically sick in bed with a sore throat hocking up my body weight in phlegm and sleeping for about 12-14 hours a day. This was of course on days when I didn’t have to show up for my new job or class.

A week later my left lower wisdom tooth began giving me a similar pain and I had to wait four days for my dentist to be able to take it out. I'm over the flu but still have a sore throat
and just finished my finals. I promise I will post something soon.

Sniff, Sniff

Hi,

I must be really desensitized to the disgusting concept of bed bugs as I am blogging while eating a sandwich of leftover turkey. Are bed bugs a good source of protein?

Came across this article in the Knox News Sentinel in Tennessee that describes the odor that bed bugs emit as smelling like coriander. For those who don't know what coriander is, it is an herb more commonly (at least in the U.S.) as cilantro. The article claims to have gotten this and other bed bug factoids from bedbugresource.com and the University of Tennessee, but I couldn't find any mention of a coriander-scented odor coming from bed bugs on either website.

I personally think the odor that bed bugs emit are like a musk, the scent created by an animal's (deer musk is used in many fragrances) stink gland between their stomach and their genitals.

My question is, if the smell is in fact a musk, and deer musk and pig pheromones have been used in perfumes for thousands of years, could the bed bug odor be bottled as a perfume? Could those of us living with bed bugs be sitting on a gold mine?

Probably not.

My other question is, what do you think the bed bugs' distinctive odors smells like? Please participate in the new poll located in the sidebar. I've already asked six friends and family members and no one has given the same answer. Their responses as well as mine are listed as poll responses, but feel free to select "Other" on the poll if you don't agree with any of us and then write in the comment area of this post what you think the bed bug odor smells like to you.

Happy Thanksgiving by the way.

Later.

Time For a Stiff Drink

Sorry for the delay. Thanksgiving is just around the corner, and all my professors felt that loading me down with pointless busywork to complete over the four-day weekend was a great idea. Spent much of the past weekend working on it while looking for more work. Thank God I'm graduating this semester. Man, I hate college. Finals are coming up and I am not my usual cheerful self. If things weren't depressing enough, check out the crap I scooped up off the Web.

The first item of discussion is an article from 7 Online New Jersey's Department of Health investigating a bed bug infestation in an apartment complex. The story itself isn't that noteworthy, but here comes the kicker. One tenant's infestation in her family's bedrooms was so bad she moved their mattresses out to the hallway (presumably a hall in the apartment and not the hallway on the other side of her apartment door) because they were too scared to sleep in their bedrooms.

Is this lady a complete idiot, or am I losing my mind? What part of BED bug does she not understand? They're not called bedroom bugs; they're called bed bugs, and for a pretty damn good reason. It's because they love beds, and if you have a bed bug infestation, chances are the bugs have first settled inside the bed, namely the mattress. So this mental midget basically dragged her mattress and the mattresses of her two children out to the hallway, along with all the bed bugs inside the mattresses. Soon, the hallway will be full of bed bugs and so will the living room with its comfy sofas. Smooth move, ex-lax.

Speaking of stupid, 7 Online made two embarrassing grammatical errors in their article. I understand this was probably a script that ran off a teleprompter for the on-air people (a.k.a., news puppets) to read aloud on camera, so maybe I'm just nitpicking.

I also want to rant about a good number of the insecticides out there on the market (mostly in aerosol spray form) that are allegedly good to use on bed bugs. These spray cans are never exclusively intended for killing bed bugs, but rather for a host of insects as well such as mites, roaches, spiders, water bugs, termites, etc. I, like many of you, have purchased one or two of these bug sprays if for no other reason than to satisfy my personal curiosity. These sprays usually offer mixed results, which make me wonder if they're effective against bed bugs at all.

What really bothers me about these sprays is their inclusiveness, the fact that their labels claim they can be used to kill an array of pests including bed bugs. But we've been told over and over and over again (and some of us have learned through trial and error) that the pesticides that kill other insects do not really work on bed bugs. Therefore, the claim made by these sprays are an outright lie to me and gives me the impression that the spray was originally intended for those other pests but the spray's manufacturer added bed bugs to the label regardless of whether or not the spray is effective in killing bed bugs. It's 5am, so I'm not sure if what I'm saying is 100% coherent. Maybe the spray's claims do make sense, and I'm the one who's lost touch with reality.

Belated Warmup Wednesday

Hi all,

This weekend I will be blogging about one New Jersey woman who has literally been driven out of her bedroom by bed bug and the infestation in the building in which she lives. I'll also express my myriad disappointments of the pest control industry. If I don't think that's enough, I'll add something else.

Happy belated Veterans' Day, for my American readers.

later.

Bugged Out on MySpace

In an effort to further promote Bugged Out, I decided to create a MySpace page. All the Presidential candidates have a MySpace page, and so do various companies and organizations to compliment their primary web sites. I figured, why the hell not? It won’t cost me anything to try.

So if you have your own MySpace page, or are considering creating a MySpace account, feel free to add Bugged Out to your friends list.

http://www.myspace.com/buggedoutnyc

In The News

Hi,

I couldn't decide which news item to write about, so I figured I'd write about both. First up, a New York Times article from November 2005. It illustrates the dramatic increase of numbers of bedbug reports in New York City.

Last year (2004) the city logged 377 bedbug violations, up from just 2 in 2002 and 16 in 2003. Since July (2005), there have been 449. "It's definitely a fast-emerging problem," said Carol Abrams, spokeswoman for the city housing agency.

wow is all I can say.

In other news, Cincinnati, Ohio's Department of Health has accomplished something New York Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) could not, despite all the token gestures made and lame duck hearings held by the New York City Council last year: form a bed bug task force.

According to WLWT Cincinnati and WCPO Cincinnati, the Ohio State Legislature formed the Bed Bug Task Force after Cincinnati's Council On Aging logged 500 different clients in one month who had complained about a bed bug infestation in their homes. The task force held their first public meeting last Monday with residents, politicians and exterminators to discuss the city's bed bug problem. The task force has already lobbied members of the Ohio state legislature for stricter guidelines in a bed bug eradication strategy.

So Cincinnati has their act together, but what about New York? Well, there's this quote from the 2005 New York Times article to keep our spirits up:

"People come in here and cry on my shoulder," said Andy Linares, the owner of Bug Off Pest Control, in Washington Heights. "They feel ashamed, even traumatized, to have these invisible vampires living in their home. Rats, even V.D., is more socially acceptable than bedbugs."

Warmup Wednesday 11/7

I can't really decide whether to blog about a 2005 New York Times article that illustrates the lightning-quick emergence of bed bugs or a public initiative to address bed bugs in Ohio which should've been implemented in New York a long time ago.

Maybe I'll blog about both. Who knows.