| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Bed Bug & Beyond | ||||
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This week, Jon Stewart sent up the New York bedbug epidemic (with a truly freaky-deaky appearance by Isabella Rossellini narrating the horror that is bedbug sex). The bedbug invasion has been lavishly covered in the press; long story short, they used to be commonplace, then people used tons of DDT and they went away, then we realized DDT was a Bad Idea and quit using it, so now they’re back. And unfortunately, these little nocturnal bloodsuckers have invaded two Harpy nests. Join Becky and PhDork as we tell our (not so) harrowing tale in this episode of Bedbug Confidential!
BeckySharper: Besides hanging out at our humble Brooklyn abodes, it turns out there are bedbugs at Elle magazine, Hachette Book Group (which publishes that other bloodsucker spectacular, the Twilight saga), at the Time-Warner offices, at hipster clothing stores in SoHo, at the AMC theater in Times Square. Bedbugs will rule the world!
PhDork: Yeah, this map makes it look like Midtown Manhattan is completely crawling with ‘em. And these are just the places where they’ve been reported.
BeckySharper: I bet that map’s just the tip of the iceberg. You know plenty of folks don’t report them, either because of the social stigma, or because they are flying under the landlord’s radar and don’t want to get kicked out.
PhDork: Considering the horrible feeling of DOOM and TERROR during the first 3-4 days after we figured it out, it hasn’t been too bad. Although it’s extra frustrating that they seem to prefer to feed on women and girls. Assholes.
It’s been hugely inconvenient, mostly. Getting the cats out for hours at a time during/after spraying was a huge PITA, and living out of plastic bags after drying everything in brutal heat in the midst of the summer also sucks, but I didn’t get bit after we sprayed and ditched the box spring.
BeckySharper: I got bitten once or twice, and had the sneaking suspicion that might be bedbugs because this most recent go-round with the little bite-y bastards is my second. Eight years ago when I lived in Queens. I got all these bites on my back that both my primary care doc and dermatologist could not identify. I wound up getting a punch biopsy (ouch!) of the bites and the lab reported they were “unknown arthropod bites”. My bet is that if I showed up with the same symptoms today, the docs would be much more be much more likely to suspect bedbugs, because they’ve become so much more common.
That time, I got rid of the mattress and boxspring and that solved the problem. This time, I hired a bed-bug sniffing dog, a cute little 2-year old beagle bitch. She detected one bedbug hotspot—my boxspring—which was promptly treated and sheathed in a bedbug-proof casing. It was great to have the dog sniff out exactly where the bugs were so I knew I didn’t need to napalm my whole apartment, which is usually what’s recommended by exterminators. No bites since then.
On the plus side...it's an excuse to have beagles visit!
When I started talking about this with neighbors in my building, several freely confessed to having had major to minor bedbug infestations over the past couple years, which made me feel better. I think it’s important to talk about this in a routine way—the social stigma is still huge.
PhDork: Stigma, yes, that’s been a problem, too. We know people who had bugs more than a year ago, and I understand the first “ugh, eep, oy” response. It’s visceral and it’s something you can’t see. But when you stop to think for half a second, and you know that those people are not wallowing in filth. And I sure as shootin’ know I’m not.
So it’s creepy, they’re bloodsuckers, yuck, but you get over it. It’s like any other vermin in a city. Where there are people, there will be narsty little critters. If you live in the country or woods, it’ll be field mice, or snakes or spiders, and if you live in the city, you’re going to find roaches and rats and yes, bedbugs. C’est la vie.
BeckySharper: I was at a party last weekend where one of the guests said she couldn’t bring herself to hug a friend who’d had bedbugs in his apartment this past spring. I mean, really. Get the fuck over it. I might not want that friend to show up dragging a suitcase full of clothes from a freshly infested apartment, but still…a hug freaks you out? The bugs don’t live on your person. They’re not going to pounce on anyone.
PhDork: Something I’ve seen lately that has me ENRAGED—I mean so beyond the hassle of keeping my panties in ziploc bags—is comments to online articles (on crap/generic sites, not on anything BB-specific or in the progressive blogosphere) about this new wave of ‘bugs and how it parallels the waves of migration of various assholes’ least favorite brown people, usually Muslims or Mexicans.
BeckySharper: Yes, and there’s a nasty racist/classist notion that you get bedbugs in cities because of all the dirty non-whites who live there. Presumably, bedbugs don’t bite Real Americans…although a recent top-10 list of the bedbuggiest cities in the US had four Midwestern cities in the top five (to be fair, other news outlets give that dubious honor to NYC). I’ve definitely had people tell me to my face that they’re not surprised I got them because I live in a non-white neighborhood.
The bedbug beagle’s handler told me that they have been to plenty of very fancy (white-owned) Manhattan hotels and co-ops, but they have to bring the dogs in under cover of night in blacked out little carrying kennels in an unmarked van. It’s like a Secret Service mission so the rich people don’t freak out, and so the rest of us can’t gloat. And I just read there’s a bedbug beagle on staff at Bergdorf’s!
What’s funny is that I’ve stayed in some real cheap-ass fleabag hotels overseas and never got bedbugs (or fleas or lice or crabs). I’m sort of amazed, actually.
PhDork: Me too. I am a poor-ass mofo, I nearly always stay in hostels, so if this were a class thing, I would have had them long long ago.
BeckySharper: Agreed. We will have to make sure the Harpy Retirement House is bedbug free. Maybe SarahMC can provide extra beagles.
Are you buggin’ too? Anyone else lived the bedbug nightmare? Feel free to share…
I’ve been following this in NYMag-no fun for anyone. There was a story abuut very fancy expensive buildings on the Upper East Side and on the park and all the stealth measures the families undertook so no one would know. Honestly, so silly.
It’s like head lice-if you go to a public school, sooner or later you’ll probably have to deal with that little adventure. It’s a huge drag (especially if you have long, long hair as our daughter did), but it’s not a reflection on the quality of your soul, for Pete’s sake.
As Eels have said:
“Field mice, head lice, spiders in the kitchen/
Don’t think twice ’bout whatever keeps you itchin/
Ice water flyswatter gonna get you through the day”
Am I the only one who starts itching whenever reading about bedbugs?
@FashionablyEvil: No.
Oh gosh I’m so sorry you two. I hope you solved your problems for good. I have to say I try to be “green” but I am a secret lover of pesticides. I hate bugs. HATE.
That’s really awful. I heard something about this from my American friends on Facebook just yesterday but I didn’t realise it was such a huge problem. I hope you’ve gotten rid of them for good.
I experienced bedbugs once when I was living in the dorms of University College London. For weeks I could not figure out what all the little red marks were on my legs. I assumed it was some sort of allergy. Nasty.
This is the first time I’ve ever heard about bedbug-sniffing beagles. That is just so cool.
Ugh. Sorry you both have to deal with that. In Prague, my friends and I stayed in a cheap motel that apparently was infested. We didn’t know what the rashy-looking bumps were until several weeks after we returned – damn good thing because I probably would’ve had a fucking panic attack. It’s not the bites themselves – they’re not all that uncomfortable – it’s the icky creepy crawly thought of sharing your space with BUGS, letting them wander around your place in and munch on you in the night. I have the same phobia of cockroaches, which we really don’t have in the Northwest. I saw one, then a second, in my place in Nashville and lived in my bedroom with a towel stuffed under the door for a week. If I’d seen a third my ass was headed for the closest hotel. Just the thought makes me shudder.
Best of luck beating the infestation. Once you’ve gotten them taken care of, what can you do to keep them out? Like, what if you’re exposed somewhere else and you inadvertently bring a new group home with you?
@Penny: Once you’ve gotten them taken care of, what can you do to keep them out? Like, what if you’re exposed somewhere else and you inadvertently bring a new group home with you?
I highly recommend bedbug-proof casings for mattresses and boxsprings. I had one on my mattress—got it last year to keep out construction dust during a major renovation—and it saved the mattress from being infested. Now I have one on my boxspring as well. You can buy vinyl ones or for a little more money, get ones that are made of a tight-weave fabric.
I’m also careful about how I unpack luggage, since they can get into luggage in the luggage hold/baggage handling part of the trip. I have always brought my luggage to the kitchen when I get home (on the tile floor, where there are no cracks bedbugs can get into), and then I unpack and wash clothes right away (or stuff them in plastic bags if I’m not going to wash them right away), then vacuum inside and in the pockets. That way if bugs have hitched a ride, I might be able to get them before they infest my place.
I’m not sure how the bugs got into my home to begin with—could be I dragged them in with all my traveling, or that they were in a neighbors apt. and found their way into mine. There’s no real way of telling, and unfortunately there’s no 100% foolproof way to prevent them.
Aaaaaaieeeeee I am terrified of this happening to me. So not kidding. Eeeeeek. As MM said, the lice episode was *terrible* — I was ~11, I think, so my hair had to be like 2 ft. long at the time and it was just sooooo disgusting. I could feel them crawling around…eesh. And apparently bed bugs can just lie dormant for months until they find a new host. Blurgh.
I lived in NYC for 7 years, and my first “grown-up” apartment got bedbugs. I was sooo mortified and annoyed at the roomie (she picked her bed frame up off the street.) The part that got to me the most, was when I put my mattress and boxspring on the street. I covered it in English and Spanish, “no, bugs, don’t take!” with pictures of bugs. It didn’t matter, 15 mins after I dragged it out to get rid of it, people pulled up in a van and took it. I felt so bad thinking they were getting an infested mattress
I haven’t had them since, and my mattress and box spring have been covered since I bought them. It definitely gives me peace of mind.
If you’re allergic to dust mites, the same covers that keep them out of your mattress keep bedbugs out, too.
And if this were remotely due to immigrants, wouldn’t Houston (where I live) and L.A. be overrun? I hate misplaced blame and hate for the sake of hate. It doesn’t solve any problems, for one thing.
ugh, I am less than a week from moving to Boston and am starting to freak the fuck out about this.
I stayed at a hostel here in the states and encountered bedbugs. I didn’t know what they were when I saw them at the hostel, but I decided to look them before I brought all of my things back in to my house. I froze, threw out, or dried-on-high everything. They were in my knitting, and in my book. The seams of my sleeping bag were filled with the little bastards all lined up, one behind the other. And this was all after just one night in that place.
The other thing causing a rise in bedbugs, more recent than giving up DDT, is that we’ve had successful cockroach-eradication campaigns. New York in particular put in a lot of work getting rid of cockroaches. The catch is, cockroaches are predator insects. Besides eating crumbs and soap and plaster, they eat bedbugs. So once the predators were removed, the bedbug population soared.
@Kathmandu: Oy vey, so I can get rid of the bedbugs by having more roaches? Talk about the devil’s bargain.
That’s a really interesting tidbit of info, though, because in my Queens apt, where I first got the bedbugs, there were a whole lotta roaches at one point, too. Maybe the reason the bedbug infestation wasn’t so bad is that the roaches were eating the bedbugs?
::shudder::
I’m pretty sure I had bedbugs when I studied abroad (alone, with a limited social network, in a country where people don’t even know what bedbugs are), and it fucked me up baaaad. I had a mental breakdown.
But um. Am I the only one who thinks Harpy Retirement Home is an AWESOME idea??