Why are people freaking out about bedbugs?

In My Humble Opinion
61

See…that’s the kind of stuff I’m talking about. That, to me, sounds like your fear of bedbug infestation is interfering with your work and social life…pretty much the working definition of a pathological behavior.

After all, frequent handwashing is good, but handwashing to the degree that you can’t get work done or leave the house on time to get to dinner at Grandma’s is called OCD.

I can absolutely understand how your fear developed, if you’re working with the critters - I didn’t drink from a drinking fountain for *years *after culturing a swab from one in Micro - but it still doesn’t sound all that healthy. It seems to me that all the inconveniencing yourself on a daily basis is expending more time, money and energy then it would to rid yourself of an infestation in the still fairly unlikely event that you get one. Of course, I’m not a psychologist, much less your psychologist, and you’re a grown (wo)man with the right to do that to yourself if you like.

62

oh that is just great.. /google

63

No offense taken, I can totally see that this looks extreme and unhealthy. I know it sounds like I am obsessed reading these boards. I’m not really, its just that this subject comes up often here. I don’t really think about it consciously during my everyday life, just have habits that kick in automatically when circumstances warrant it.

I have been dealing with them more in the last few months because not a week goes by that I don’t get a phone call or email from someone that has them, from the health department, or from various hotels and college campuses. My city, while not as bad a NYC, is having a major upswing in reports and people are just starting to try and deal with it.

I do harp on the hotel check stuff. This should be second nature. Bedbugs spread by contact - you can think of them as a transmissible infection in a theoretical sense (I am actually applying transmissible infectious disease models to the problem). If you can decrease host contact, like all transmissible diseases, you should limit spread.

If people would be diligent about checking their hotel rooms and taking minor precautions upon returning home (don’t bring infested bags into the house and immediately laundering clothing) I think the problem will go away. The other stuff isn;t necessary on a population level.

64

I don’t know any reason why people overreact. I do know that others are
taking advantage of this overreaction to make a lot of money. Just to give
you some idea of this:

(1) In January of 2014 in the Orkin bed bug survey Orkin was reported to
have increased profits of 20% for bed bug remediation.

(2) Batzner has bought trucks! that can contain a roomful of furniture.
Within those trucks the interior is heated to the 120-130 degrees
necessary to kill all the bed bugs in the furniture.

(3) Batzner has incorporated the bed bug remediation service within
the company as ‘Bed Bug Services, LLC’.

(4) Bed bug remediation is the highest overhead pest service of all. Consider
the maintenance cost of:

           (a) the maintenance of bed bug dogs

           (b) the aforementioned trucks above

           (c) the cost of maintaining thermal treatment for bed bugs

    This high cost is due to the fact that the bed bug companies mandate in 
    their view is to kill all bed bugs in your apartment. This is the reason for the
    high cost.  They as the people you are referring to are paranoid about
    all bed bugs. 

    As an example of the high cost, it costs $600 just to have bed bug dogs
    lead through your apartment to determine where the bed bugs are. 
    They use bed bug dogs because 99% of the bed bugs are in hiding.

What is particularly upsetting is the most typical reason that these companies
are called in is because someone cannot handle bed bugs in their bed. There
are reasons for this:

(1) Even though the person may know that there are bed bugs in their bed,
     they don't know that bed bugs live off their blood.

(2) The person does not know that bed bugs are reproducing in their bed

(3) The person in particular does not know that they are reproducing in the 
      headboard of their bed.

(4) The person does not realize that fighting a bed bug problem in their
      bed is futile. This is because most of the bed bugs are hiding in their
      two mattresses, and reproducing there. Neither cleaning nor the 
      use of chemical pesticides can be used to get at them and remove/kill
      them.

The population starts to increase in the bed if you continue to use it without
taking preventive measures.

This is happening repeatedly and in some apartment associations more than once.
The person needs to be informed in the lease about bed bug encasements which
can be used on the mattresses to keep the bed bugs in the bed in, and the bed
bugs outside of the bed out. They also need to be informed that their headboard
needs to be either cleaned thoroughly or needs to be removed and discarded.
Also, they need to be informed to remove all clutter from the vicinity (within the
8 foot sniffing distance for bed bug detection of your presence) and steam cleaned
thoughly to eliminate/kill bed bugs in that area.

You could also get rid of the bed and replacing it as some people do without realizing how bed bugs work and steam cleaning/cleaning/applying pesticides
in the area. Of course, in this case, you need to buy a bed in advance to
replace the one that you are going to throw out.

As an alternative, I have found that if the number of bed bugs total is
reasonable and caught early, that you can close interior doors and use a
cot or hammock in the kitchen to sleep for a year while awaiting the death of
the bed bugs in the bedroom. This is an alternative to the cleaning and
intensive steam cleaning I speak of above. Bed bugs are not in the kitchen
exactly because there are no sofas, lounge chairs or beds in the kitchens,
the places that harbor them. If there is another location like that in your
house (in my case, the dining room would also have worked) you can use that.

The point is not to overeact to every single bed bug, and to relax as you wait
for the bed bugs to die which will eventually occur with this method. Each day I slept in my cot in the kitchen I knew that bed bugs had died from the night before. With the
numbers low in the bed room, no bed bugs came out of the bed room.
Even if they had come out and bit me, the environment I was sleeping in (cot)
is such that no reproduction can occur. That bed bug may live a little bit longer,
but some other bed bug in the bed room was dying.

The point is to gut it out with the cot method (the ‘Wait until they are dead’
method) until all the bed bugs are dead (one year later).