Dear Umbra,
I desperately need your help. My house has become infested with bedbugs! I'm trying to find an environmentally friendly way to get rid of them. I've tried a thorough cleaning and tried using diatomaceous earth (fossil shell flour) to no avail. The local exterminator is looking more and more appealing. Please stop me before I do something rash like resorting to him and the nasty chemicals he'll be using.
Ofer
Pasadena, Calif.
Dearest Ofer,
Yipes. Would it help to know that you are not alone, or is that cold comfort? Can I distract you by offering scintillating scientific information about this blood-sucking, night-feeding parasite, Cimex lectularius? For example, the female bedbug possesses a secondary copulatory aperture -- a notch, or invagination, in her body wall -- known as the Ribaga's organ. During mating, the male actually pierces her exoskeleton with a dagger-like, spermatozoa-carrying organ in a process known as traumatic insemination.
Don't let the bedbugs bite.
But back to the reality at hand: Bedbugs were largely eliminated from the U.S. during the DDT years but remained fairly common overseas. Now they're reappearing with a vengeance, showing up in apartment buildings, hotels, dorms, and other places across the country. They are quite wee (the adults are described as lentil-sized) and very flat. They're hard to spot, fit easily inside tiny crevices all about your home, and happily travel between apartments through wiring holes -- or as stowaways in luggage, clothing, bedding, and such. Their enticingly named "blood meals" can result in very itchy and persistent red welts. Bedbugs can go a year without eating, so starvation by abandonment is not an option.
The upshot of all this is: The exterminator is likely your best hope. Let me clearly state that we're all environmentalists here, and we wish to avoid using pesticides. But we also have a social responsibility to the greater Public Health, and this responsibility requires us to kill those bedbugs dead and spare our neighbors, coworkers, fellow bus riders, and world-at-large from the resurgent scourge. The little critters are so wily -- and so resistant to and/or hidden from steam, vacuuming, cleaning, squishing, and other methods -- that a professional is often the only one with enough training, patience, and skill sets to get rid of them. The most helpful information I found about managing an infestation was from the Harvard School of Public Health and from the University of Kentucky. Read these documents if you suspect bedbugs are biting you and yours; I cannot do justice to the detailed instructions here.
If you are a tenant with bedbugs, call your landlord immediately and work with him/her to make an eradication plan. As you already know, Ofer, it's also important to clean and declutter your dwelling, tightly bag up all your garments and bedding, and vacuum every crevice of the house (don't forget to discard the vacuum contents within a tightly sealed bag).
These steps should be taken in preparation for having a licensed, recommended professional with a thorough Integrated Pest Management plan come to debug your home. The responsible pest controller will not put pesticides on your bed, and will use a combination of physical controls (e.g., more vacuuming), and pesticides to fix you up like new. Hopefully.
Be extremely cautious with your infested possessions, including those that you need to throw out. Keep everything isolated, encased in plastic -- or even defaced, to make sure a dumpster diver doesn't take it home (again, see Harvard's detailed instructions).
Don't let infested furniture fall into the hands of an innocent thrift store shopper, or leave them out on the curb as freebies. That would be cruel and unusual charity.
Unfortunately,
Umbra
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Comments
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sindark Posted 1:25 am
08 Sep 2008
Having taken the materials back into my normal rotation, I can say that it worked for me.
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dmarley Posted 1:28 am
08 Sep 2008
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Erik Hoffner Posted 2:11 am
08 Sep 2008
In a hotel these days you should never leave your luggage on the floor/on the bed/near the bed, if you want to avoid a very costly, time consuming, and toxic extermination of your own home. Luggage is best kept off the floor in a closet, atop the garment rack, or best of all, in the bathroom.
Erik
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gwood Posted 7:53 am
08 Sep 2008
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nicolaluna Posted 7:03 am
09 Sep 2008
warning, long post. i've been through this, and come out the other end bedbug free so maybe i can offer some helpful advice too. freezing works- if you're willing to buy an incredibly large freezer and put everything in there for a year, because that's how long a bedbug can potentially survive cryogenics. what i did: very arduous but avoided much spray: baked large quantities of my things in sealed foil in an oven at 200 degrees for two hours. when they were baked, sealed them immediately in thick plastic bags and moved them to storage.
how did i learn about the baking? there is a very expensive technique that seals your home and sends in blasts of heat for an extended period of time to bake the bugs literally out of the very walls. i'm a renter so this was not an option, but their method informed my attack plan. if you can afford this, you can probably avoid the pesticides altogether, as this treatment has proven very successful. if i were a landlord or a property owner, this is what i would use. here is the site i used- apparently it is still active two years later! http://www.thermapure.com/bedbugs.php
why this works? bedbugs and their eggs (very important to remember the eggs) die at extreme temperatures. but obviously some things can't be baked and these you either inspect thoroughly (for and period-sized eggs) or throw them out. another thing that can kill them is boiling water.
these three techniques put together are almost completely effective but unfortunately i found that there is no complete way to get away from the pesticides in this way, only lessen them immensely. because you can't bake and boil everything. you can, however, research the permethrin and pyrethrin concentrations that professionals use and purchase a raid brand spray yourself to be in control of and thus limit the spraying! professionals of course will not recommend this. but if you are like me and you have to deal with a landlord who is your only "legal" recourse to the bugs due to tenant laws, and his "professionals" are clearly not professional at all, or you can't afford the service, you would *not *be foolish to take this measure. i can attest to the effectiveness of this substitution. the moral? do your own research on the bugs. you can learn a lot and evade a lot of really bad advice by informing yourself, and hopefully spare yourself a lot of grief in the process.
more info.: bedbugs will migrate to any minute corner of your apartment or belongings where you do not spray, so if you choose to go without pesticide in the way i described, it's imperative to move the stuff you have treated out of your space when you've checked them thoroughly. they don't just live in beds. they live in toys, cracks in the flooring, even computer keypads, anything they can get into. once i went through my baking, inspecting, boiling process and moved sealed stuff out, that was when i sprayed in the corners of the apartment. if you use a storage facility, check to make sure they exterminate on a regular basis and keep your stuff sealed, the double-protection should effectively keep you from spreading the bugs. i also sprayed the few furniture items i felt i could not dispose of; the good news being that i later washed them thoroughly, wearing a mask to avoid breathing the 'cide in. the bad news: doing it this way took two long months of living ridiculously sparingly just to get through the process.
the important thing is that i used a minimum of pesticide and managed to move into a new apartment without taking any living bugs or eggs with me. after six months, i started taking those things out of those sealed plastic bags (three months being the incubation period of the eggs.) after a year i considered myself bedbug free. after two years, i'm still bug free and i hope i never have to go through this again. a friend in another city had the bugs and she had to exterminate her home three times before they were completely gone, and still gave up much furniture in the process. i lost furniture, but i only did it once.
post again here if you have any questions about all the methods described- i know it's complicated!
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