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Title: Everything You Need to Know About Bedbugs but Were Afraid to Ask
Source:
NYT
URL Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/15/r ... ef=realestate&pagewanted=print
Published: Oct 15, 2006
Author: SEWELL CHAN
Post Date: 2006-10-15 03:01:32 by Morgana le Fay
Keywords: None
Views: 32
TYPICALLY, the problem starts with the bites: itchy, reddish welts that leave their victims wondering if they have a rash or have had an allergic reaction to something. Often, the next step is a visit to the doctor, followed by calls to the landlord, the superintendent and the exterminator. The cause is the bedbug, the nocturnal, blood-sucking insect that is making a comeback in urban housing across North America. Complaints about bedbugs in rental apartments in New York City more than doubled last year and are on target to reach a record this year. Managers and owners of co-op and condominium apartments in the city report similar trends, although the city tracks complaints only in rentals. The pests have infested every type of housing, from run-down single-room-occupancy hotels to elegant condominiums. “We’re in a very nice building in a very nice block,” said Caroline Greenberg, 70, who found bedbugs this spring in her two-bedroom co-op on the Upper West Side. “I haven’t had a roach ever here, but the bedbugs — there they are, and God knows where they came from.” Bedbugs have raised a thicket a questions for tenants, landlords and homeowners. Some renters have gone to court to compel their landlords to exterminate the pests. Co-op and condo owners are typically responsible for infestations in their apartments. And bedbugs can move easily from one apartment to another. Getting rid of them can be extremely difficult. Michael F. Potter, an urban entomologist at the University of Kentucky and an authority on bedbugs, said they were poised to join the ranks of cockroaches and rats as the pre-eminent household pests in the country. “This is one serious issue,” he said. “This will be the pest of the 21st century — no question about it.” Those who have endured a bedbug infestation describe the experience as uniquely frightening. “It’s terrible just to think that you have to go to sleep and you’re going to get bitten,” said Aida Delgado, 53, who pays $588 a month for a two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in Brooklyn that she shares with her son, Joseph, a 26-year-old college student. In August, she noticed bites on her back, arms and legs; her son had bites on his back and arms. Ms. Delgado has lived in the apartment, on Fifth Avenue in Sunset Park, for 20 years. She had a bedbug problem once before, several years ago. That time, she threw out her son’s mattress. In August, when she discovered that the bedbugs were back, she tossed out two lamp tables, placed plastic covers over her bed, cleaned her apartment with ammonia and bleach and bought bottles of insecticide spray and even a flea-control product from a pet store. Ms. Delgado also took her landlord to housing court, with the help of Jane M. Landry-Reyes, a lawyer at South Brooklyn Legal Services, a nonprofit group. On Sept. 14, an inspector from the Department of Housing Preservation and Development reported bedbugs “in the entire apartment,” among other code violations. Worried that she might be accused of exaggerating, one night Ms. Delgado started to preserve the evidence. “I was sleeping, and I felt something,” she said. “I got up, and I saw one in the bed. I took it and put it in the jar.” The jar has about a dozen specimens now. In a consent order ratified by a judge on Oct. 3, the building owner, Migdalia Gonzalez, agreed to exterminate the bedbugs and address the other code violations. (Ms. Gonzalez’s lawyer, Harriet L. Thompson, said she could not discuss the case.) At 165 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side, it appears that bedbugs moved easily among apartments. Peter H. Young lived in the building from 2002 to 2005, paying $1,025 for a studio with a sleeping loft. In May 2003, about a year after moving in, he started to get bitten. “I remember waking up one night,” recalled Mr. Young, 43, a waiter and musician. “Something was crawling on my shoulder, irritating me. I turned on the light. It was the size of a tick. It was off me and on the mattress, running away.” The next month, according to a lawsuit that Mr. Young filed, the landlord posted a notice directing the tenants to remove their sheets and pillowcases, place dirty clothing in bags and remove bookshelves and fixtures from the walls in preparation for a visit by exterminators. “You reach a point when you have to sleep, and you realize that you’re surrendering,” Mr. Young said, recalling his bite-filled nights. “I found that one existentially interesting.” But the problem persisted until the beginning of 2004, Mr. Young said. Meanwhile, he slept on an inflatable mattress and, later, a metal cot with a wire-mesh covering. (Bedbugs have a tough time crawling up slick metal or glass surfaces.) Mr. Young, who is nearly six feet tall, is taller than the cot was long. Mr. Young stopped paying rent, and his landlord took him to court. With help from a lawyer, Steven M. De Castro, Mr. Young fought the suit and won, in an important case that could provide some hope for other bedbug-besieged renters in the city. In June 2004, Judge Cyril K. Bedford of New York City Civil Court found the infestation so harmful to Mr. Young’s “health, safety and welfare” that it violated the implied warranty of habitability — a landlord’s minimal obligation to provide the essential functions of a residence. “In this case, the bedbugs did not constitute mere annoyance, but constituted an intolerable condition, notwithstanding the landlord’s efforts to exterminate them,” wrote Judge Bedford, who granted Mr. Young a 45 percent rent abatement. (Mr. Young’s landlord, Eric Margules, did not respond to a request for comment.) Timothy M. Wenk, a lawyer who represents landlords and property owners in negligence suits and has written about bedbugs, said the decision could be a landmark case, because it appeared to overturn a widely cited 1908 case, Jacobs v. Morand. That case held that tenants are not relieved of their obligation to pay rent even when their apartments are overrun with vermin. Judge Bedford himself noted that the most recent bedbug cases he found “come from the early 1900’s and predate warrant of habitability.” “The court is mindful that with time the prevalence of cases in which bedbugs are involved is sure to increase to an epidemic,” he wrote, “as the foothold the bedbugs have obtained in the urban setting of the City of New York grows every larger.” Mr. Young now shares a three-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, with two roommates. He has been sleeping on a futon. “Psychologically, I’m afraid of beds,” he said. “I feel traumatized.” Vito Mustaciuolo, the associate commissioner for enforcement services at the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, oversees 425 inspectors who focus on code violations, mostly in rental housing. They respond to complaints made through the city’s 311 telephone line and also conduct court-ordered inspections. Typically, bedbugs are listed as a Class B violation, which gives the owner 30 days to correct the problem. (Class C violations, for emergency conditions like no electricity or hot water, must be corrected within 24 hours. The least severe violations, Class A, have to be fixed within 90 days.) “Unfortunately, one thing that we can’t use is, for instance, when a tenant shows us a bite mark,” Mr. Mustaciuolo said of the inspections. “We have to find evidence of bedbug activity — on bedding, behind headboards, underneath floorboards, in the cracks and crevices.” Co-op and condo owners in New York City are generally responsible for handling bedbug problems themselves, but the building could be responsible if, for example, bedbugs have affected multiple apartments and their source is not readily traceable. Most buildings require owners to notify the managing agent or board if they have a problem like bedbugs that could affect their neighbors. If an owner failed to take action, he or she could be held responsible. “We would advise that the board of directors or the managing agent send an immediate notice to the unit holder to rectify the problem — at their expense,” said Gil Feder, a partner in the law firm of Reed Smith who represents Manhattan co-op and condo boards. Another lawyer, Arthur I. Weinstein, a vice president of the Council of New York Cooperatives and Condominiums, recalled that in the spring, one of his clients, the board of a 1920’s co-op building in Brooklyn, learned that a wealthy elderly resident had bedbugs in his apartment. “There was total concern and panic that the infestation would spread to other apartments,” Mr. Weinstein said. The board quickly located a lawyer and a friend of the resident — who was not in good health — and reached an agreement “that we would do everything and then bill them,” Mr. Weinstein recalled. In May, the resident moved into a hotel for 10 days while workers removed carpeting and furniture and “bagged all of his personal possessions,” Mr. Weinstein said. “We rented a storeroom for him. We let him back in with very select pieces of furniture — but not all, and only after the exterminator advised us that those pieces were clean.” The cost of the work, which included a second round of exterminating in August, came to $16,146.38, Mr. Weinstein said. Mrs. Greenberg, the Upper West Side co-op owner who found bedbugs this spring, located an exterminator, Pest Away Exterminating, through the phone book and the Web site of the Better Business Bureau of New York. Then she notified the building’s managers, who sent their own exterminator to take a look around. Pest Away treated the two bedrooms in the apartment during three visits in August and September. “Every book and thing had to be taken out of every drawer and every bookcase, and then vacuumed,” said Mrs. Greenberg, a retired book editor who lives with her husband. “It was just mind-boggling.” Mrs. Greenberg said the bedbugs have not returned: “I definitely pray that they’re gone.” Experts say that major misconceptions about bedbugs are common. Perhaps the most harmful one is that bedbugs are a sign of a dirty or unkempt household. “People are afraid to admit they have bedbugs, because they feel it means that they haven’t had proper cleaning or hygiene in their apartment,” said Louis N. Sorkin, an entomologist at the American Museum of Natural History. (He keeps a small colony of bedbugs in a glass jar at his office and lets them feed on his arm.) The common bedbug — Cimex lectularius — is a reddish-brown, flattened, oval, wingless insect that can grow to three-sixteenths of an inch. Females live as long as a year in colder temperatures and several months in temperate climates. Males don’t live quite as long; the population is evenly divided between the sexes. The female bedbug can lay up to five eggs a day, and several hundred over its lifetime. At room temperature, the sticky clumps of eggs hatch in 7 to 14 days into tiny nymphs no bigger than a speck of dust. The nymphs go through five life stages, taking a blood meal each time, before molting one last time into adulthood. Bedbugs are mostly active at night, with peak activity around 3 or 4 a.m. Drawn by warmth and carbon dioxide, they pierce the skin and withdraw blood for about 5 minutes before retreating to a hiding place. They typically feed every 7 to 10 days, although some have survived for more than a year without a meal. They are not known to transmit disease. Suitcases and used furnishings are thought to be key vehicles for introducing bedbugs into a building; once inside, they are quite mobile. Although they are known to emit a sweet, musty odor, it is nearly impossible for humans to detect bedbugs by sniffing for them. “I have never, ever been in an infestation where you can smell them,” said Richard Cooper, the technical director at Cooper Pest Solutions in Lawrenceville, N.J. Another misconception is that bedbugs can be identified by looking for dark red blood spots on sheets, pillowcases and mattress covers. Instead, exterminators look for tiny tar-black speckles — fecal droppings made up mostly of digested blood. While bedbugs are sensitive to sudden variations in temperature, applying heat with a hair dryer is useless in killing them. Vacuuming, a strategy recommended for pet owners trying to control fleas, might suck up some bedbugs, but a vacuum cleaner is unlikely to get into the hard-to-find crevices where bedbugs hide. Often, people searching for bedbugs do not know to look along the seams of mattresses, under box springs, behind headboards and picture frames, and even inside alarm clocks and telephones, according to Steven Garber, the manager of the Orkin branch in Ozone Park, Queens. Getting rid of mattresses is not always necessary when dealing with bedbugs. Christopher N. Arne, the technical director at the J. C. Ehrlich Company, a pest control company in Reading, Pa., said that in most instances, a mattress can be used after a safe chemical treatment or fumigation. The resurgence of bedbugs has been laid to everything from increased international travel to tougher federal restrictions on the use of indoor pesticides. Dr. Potter, the University of Kentucky entomologist, said that pesticides were an essential tool in controlling bedbugs, but he added, “We have a very, very limited arsenal of insecticides that are effective.” That arsenal has partly been depleted because many powerful pesticides have been banned or restricted for safety reasons, as DDT was in 1972. Nearly all exterminators fighting bedbugs use insecticides known as pyrethroids, synthetic chemicals similar to pyrethrum, a natural substance found in chrysanthemum flowers. Pyrethroids are considered fairly safe — most are over-the-counter sprays — but they should be used with caution. When dealing with an infestation, Mr. Cooper, the pest-control technical director, recommends that washable fabrics be laundered in a home machine on the hot cycle, in 140-degree water. Other clothes and linens can be dry-cleaned. Multiple exterminations are often required, at intervals of several weeks to several months, and even then success is not guaranteed — particularly if an exterminator has not thoroughly searched every nook and cranny. Richard J. Pollack, an expert in parasitic insects at the Harvard School of Public Health, said he was concerned that too many people were trying to combat bedbugs on their own. “In many cases, if the product is meant for crack and crevice application, it doesn’t matter which pest you’re targeting — it’s the manner of application,” he said. “This is lost on most people, which is why it makes infinitely more sense to get a knowledgeable and licensed applicator.” Not everyone agrees. “I think in some cases people do a better job than the pest-control operator in exterminating the bedbugs from their home,” said Mr. Sorkin, the entomologist. “They may pay more attention to detail.” But he added a couple of caveats: people may not follow directions properly and do not have the training that exterminators do. Some experts recommend plastic mattress encasements, which are widely used by people with dust allergies, and can often contain but not eradicate bedbugs. Researchers are examining the use of trained dogs to detect bedbugs by smell, as well as nonchemical techniques, like heat treatments, which have been used to combat mold by raising the temperature throughout a building. But these innovations will probably be more costly than the existing pesticide treatments. Fredrick J. Kurtzman, 60, said he paid more than $4,000 to get rid of the bedbugs in the five-bedroom house in East Hills, in Nassau County, that he shares with his wife, Helaine. That total included $1,500 for a service contract with Suburban Magic Termite Control of Smithtown, N.Y., as well as a new mattress, dry-cleaning costs and a hotel stay. Mr. Kurtzman, who runs a tutoring company, recalled the moment he first realized he had been bitten. “It was fascinating that these tiny bugs could make so many marks on me,” he said. “It was almost, but not quite, laughable.”
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