Posted on 05/10/2008 11:04:42 PM PDT by restornu
Bed bugs are present on all countries and in every continent. Though there was a significant lowering of bed bug infestations in the developed world during the second half of the twentieth century, recently that trend has been reversed.
Bed bug infestations can start from various sources. One of the most common forms of infestation is through contacts with infested furniture in hotels, motels, and other places of temporary accommodation. In fact a recent increase in bed bug infestations may have a direct link with the increase in the number of people who travel. Bed bugs are carried around in clothes and the luggage of travelers. However, it is rare to detect bed bugs in the clothes people are actually wearing at any given moment. Clothes that are carried in bags facilitate bed bugs to travel and spread. Another source of bed bug infestation is through the exchange of furniture or garments between people.
Once bed bugs enter a building they will spread throughout it. In buildings where there are multiple housing units, such as apartment blocks or condominiums, all of the units may become infested. This happens through the medium of common areas, as well as through holes and crevices in the walls used by utilities such as plumbing. Material used for separating housing units has a significant impact on the speed at which bed bugs spread through the complex. Buildings that have concrete separators have the least tendency to spread bed bug infestations through them.
Bed bugs feed on blood not on trash. As such, cleanliness does not arrest the spread of infestation directly. The idea that dirt causes bedbugs infestations is a misconception. However cleanliness, by depriving the bed bugs some of their hiding places, does slow down the infestation.
Because bed bugs have flat bodies they can hide in all sorts of unlikely places unseen. It is their ability to hide so completely out of site that has given arise to the second misconception; that bed bugs are so small that they cannot be seen unaided. Bed bugs can in fact be seen since they are about 4 mm in length. Even their eggs, which are about 1 mm in length, can be seen.
In order to stop the spread of bed bugs, infested households should act to eliminate the bugs as comprehensively and as promptly as possible when they are detected. If possible they should take the advice of professional pest control experts for this process. By taking prompt action and by acting as responsible householders and neighbors, bed bug infestations can be managed and controlled, and eventually eliminated.
It was first alert in fancy hotels now they travel the subways and other mass transit across the country!
If they do subways why not Amtrak and other railways?
Heard this on Coast to Coast the coward would only say there are countries that never got rid of them.
But than this worm writes for the NYT...
First hour: Ian will chat with science essayist Carl Zimmer. Then, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times,
sorry for the typos! countries
Unfed bugs are 1/4 to 3/8 inch long. They are brown or red-brown in color and the upper surface of the body appears crinkled. Recently fed, they are engorged with blood, dull red in color.
A bedbug epidemic has exploded in every corner of New York City - striking even upper East Side luxury apartments owned by Gov. Spitzer's father, the Daily News has learned.
The blood-sucking nocturnal creatures have infested a Park Ave. penthouse, an artist's colony in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a $25 million Central Park West duplex and a theater on Broadway, according to victims, exterminators and elected officials.
Once linked to flophouses and fleabags, bedbug outbreaks victimize the rich and poor alike and are spreading panic in some of the city's hottest neighborhoods.
" In the last six months, I've treated maternity wards, five-star hotels, movie theaters, taxi garages, investment banks, private schools, white-shoe law firms, Brooklyn apartments in Greenpoint, DUMBO and Cobble Hill, even the chambers of a federal judge," said Jeff Eisenberg, owner of Pest Away Exterminating on the upper West Side.
The numbers are off the charts: In 2004, New Yorkers placed 537 calls to 311 about bedbugs in their homes; the city slapped 82 landlords with bedbug violations, data show.
In the fiscal year that ended in June, 6,889 infestation complaints were logged and 2,008 building owners were hit with summonses.
They must get rid of the pests within 30 days or face possible action in Housing Court, the city Department of Housing, Preservation & Development says.
The scourge has left no section of the city untouched: Complaints and enforcement actions soared in 57 of the 59 community boards.
In the most bedbug-riddled district, Bushwick in Brooklyn, HPD issued 172 violations this year, up from four in 2004; it responded to 476 complaints, up from 47.
Central Harlem chalked up 269 complaints, up from nine. Williamsburg and Greenpoint, home to the city's hippest galleries, racked up 148, up from 11 in 2004. Astoria and Long Island City saw the tally climb to 345 from 41.
Bedbugs come out of the woodwork at night to feed on human blood, biting people in their sleep and leaving large, itchy skin welts that can be painful. They are not believed to carry or transmit diseases.
A surge in global travel and mobility in all socioeconomic classes, combined with less toxic urban pesticides and the banning of DDT created a perfect storm for reviving the critters, which had been virtually dormant since World War II, experts say.
Prolific reproducers and hardy survivors, they can thrive in penthouses, flophouses or any environment where they can locate warm-blooded hosts, said Louis Sorkin, an entomologist at the Museum of Natural History who keeps a colony of 1,000 bedbugs in his office and lets them feed on his arm. Continued (if you can stomach it) here.
This is amusing. My mother was asked very reluctantly by my father to move to Brooklyn while he was in WWII. Her most prominent memory of NYC was bed bugs and all night movies. When she returned to civilization ( Kentucky )she brought almost nothing but the clothes on her body. And before actually entering her family home she stopped at the drug store near the bus stop to buy the most potent insecticide available . She stripped in her garage and either burned or treated her clothes. Ha Ha Ha. She Heart New York.
Good night. Sleep tight.
Well, you know...
Wow, these bedbug stories seem to keep coming.
Hey NYC we may be a bunch of ‘hicks’ down south but at least we don’t have bedbugs. At least I don’t.
The poor.
THANK YOU RACHEL CARSON!!
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