This entry was posted on Saturday, March 6th, 2010 at 11:26 pm and is filed under Apartment Safety. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
It is a plague that most of us thought was extinct and more than a few of us thought was never real in the first place. Bud bugs have again made their presence known throughout North America and all over the world. Recent studies have shown a huge explosion in the bed bug population after the 2000 Sydney Olympic games, with hotels and tight knit living spaces like apartments suffering the worst. While Dallas apartments may have only a few reported cases, cities like Vancouver, B.C., and Washington D.C., have major bed bug infestations. Here are a few things you can do to keep yourself sane if you find bed bugs in your place.
First off, tell your landlord immediately. Your landlord is required by law to take care of the problem, but showing him or her some red welt-like bites you’ve gotten isn’t going to be enough. You are going to have to capture one of the bugs to show your landlord and the exterminator. To find them, simply take the sheets off of your bed and look between the mattress and the box spring. They are quite large and easy to see if you are looking in the right place.
You will be asked to pack up all of your clothes and you will likely have to toss your mattress and box spring in the garbage. If your neighbor has bed bugs already and you are afraid that you might be next, run out and get a mattress and box spring cover that will seal your things off from the bugs. These covers are very, very affordable and a great way to keep your losses down if you encounter bed bugs.
If you find that you do have bugs, it will likely take several treatments to get them under control. Ask your local pest control expert if there is anything extra you can do to speed about your apartment’s recovery.
March 7th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
The bed bug problem is a growing one and your correctly point out that bed bugs are hard to treat once you have them and that vigilence is the best thing to help prevent infeatations from happenning.
Two corrections:
Bed bugs are difficult to treat because they live and breed in a variety of places in the room. They can primarily be found not just between mattress and boxspring, but along the edges of beds, behind backboards, on side tables, soft furnishings, behind pictures and even in computers and clock radios. Checking the bedding is a great start, but you may have to look in other places near the bed if you can’t find them in their favorite place
I would also disagree with your assessment that “you will likely have to toss your mattress and boxspring on the garbage” if you have an infestation. That did used to be the case, but getting rid of bed bugs the first go around is very difficult, if not impossible, and you may end up throwing out your bedding prior to treatment only to get a new infestation on new bedding later. On the East coast, where bed bug treatments have come a long way in the last two years, pest control companies are treating the mattress and box spring with chemicals or heat and then using a mattress cover — either an encasement (which when properly installed and maintained will fully enclose the entire mattress/boxspring and starve any bed bugs missed in the treatment over the one year or so that adults can live witout a blood meal) or an active liner (a derivative of the bed nets used worldwide, which kill bed bugs left on the bedding and can pick up missed bed bugs from other areas of the room that try to return to he beds. Generally, both types of mattress cover are designed with bed bugs in mind (see Protect-a-bed, Mattress Safe, and National Allergy Elegance) although the newer active liners (ActiveGuard) appear to be easier to install and do have the potential to kill bed bugs being reintroduced to the mattress after treatment is finished.
If detection is important for your case, there are things called Climb Ups that you can put under the legs of your bed that may trap some of the bed bugs trying to get to the bed. They will probably not stop all bed bugs from getting up to you, but all you need for proof is just one bug. I recently saw a home bed bug trap using CO2 being touted on the internet, although I’m not sure how easy it is to do.
Hope that is helpful.