Bed bugs are back in town - and no one's sure what to do about them.
In the last few years, bed bugs have been making their way into Providence homes, with little official response. But on Jan. 16, the Rhode Island Department of Health ran its first training session about how to handle the pesky critters. More than 100 people were in attendance, including landlords, students and employees at homeless shelters, according to Dhitinut Ratnapradipa, program manager for the Health Department and a Brown clinical assistant professor of community health.
But Ratnapradipa said the Health Department does not have a pest control program and lacks the authority to go to anyone's house to exterminate pests.
"It was clear that there was no concerted, organized group in Rhode Island that would be taking charge of this," said Samantha Marder '09, who attended the training session.
Marder first heard about Providence's problem with bed bugs over the summer when volunteering at Hasbro Children's Hospital at Project HEALTH's Family Help Desk, which assists low-income families with housing, food, employment and other issues affecting their health.
A volunteer at the Family Help Desk since her freshman year, Marder said until this past summer, the organization had encountered many of the problems that come with low-income housing, like cockroaches, rodents and lead poisoning - but not bed bugs.
Marder, now a program co-coordinator for the Family Help Desk, said she had no idea what she could do to help. Still, residents call the Department of Health when their homes have a bed bug infestation since it is a public health concern, Ratnapradipa said.
But according to Rhode Island's "Housing Maintenance and Occupancy Code," the infestation is the tenant's responsibility if it is in one dwelling unit, but the owner's responsibility if it is in more than one dwelling unit.
"I've been doing pest control for 31 years," said Tony DeJesus of New England Pest Control. He said he never had a call about bed bugs in his first 25 years in the profession. "Now people are coming down every day."
Bed bugs 411
Bed bugs are "small wingless insects that feed solely upon the blood of warm-blooded animals," according to the Harvard School of Public Health's Web site. Their bites are painless and look like mosquito bites, said DeJesus, who was a guest speaker in the Department of Health's January training session.
"They don't stay on you," DeJesus said. "They feed for about 15 minutes."
But the short period of time they stay on the body makes them difficult to detect - as do their size and shape. "They're so flat they can hide in a lot of cracks and crevices," DeJesus said, and added that a bed bug is about the size of the period at the end of this sentence.
Bed bugs can also live up to several months without feeding on anyone.
They are not only confined to the area that gives them their name. Bed bugs can be found on nightstands, picture frames and on the baseboards of walls, DeJesus said.
"We've had to take the covers off the electrical outlets," DeJesus said, highlighting the unusual places the bugs can hide in severe infestations.
"Fortunately, every bit of research is not implicating the bed bug at all in the transmission of blood-borne diseases," DeJesus said.
DeJesus said bed bugs are currently a problem in dormitories, hotels, homeless shelters and private homes, but said he believes bed bugs can spread to other places where large amounts of people congregate, like movie theaters and public transportation systems. He called long cross-Atlantic flights the "perfect place for bed bugs."
But much about bed bugs remains a mystery.
"We're just now starting to scratch the surface," DeJesus said.
Bed bugs come to Providence
"The problem is exploding in the city of Providence," DeJesus said.
But he added, "It's a problem that involves the country. Every major city is having a problem with it right now." Bed bugs were nearly eradicated after World War II through the use of pesticides like DDT. But DeJesus attributed their resurgence to the increase in travel since then.
"We've become a global society," he said. He added that travelers can inadvertently carry the pests with them in their baggage or clothing.
"About four years ago we became aware that we had bed bugs in one of our properties," said Michelle Wilcox, senior vice president of housing and facilities at Crossroads Rhode Island, the largest organization in the state that provides services to the homeless.
"I immediately used my network to talk to other shelter programs and other housing providers to find out what they had done," Wilcox said.
During the process of extermination, Wilcox said, everyone's clothing had to be washed in one day. The shelter now treats its rooms for bed bugs routinely.
Because the homeless population is constantly moving, controlling bed bug infestations in shelters is especially difficult. But Wilcox said the shelter has taken other measures to prevent new infestations.
"When a new person arrives, we ask them to launder everything that can be laundered prior to coming into the shelter," she said. "You're tired, you're weary, you're coming into a shelter. But first you have to launder your clothes."
But Crossroads' precautions come with a cost.
"Any dollar that we're having to spend on bed bug extermination doesn't go to something else - social services, whatever it might be," Wilcox said.
Ratnapradipa said bed bugs especially affect low-income families that have less choice of housing because they are limited by what they can afford. He added that mattresses are expensive. "Nobody wants to throw (them) away."
The Department of Health recommends always using professional services to get rid of bed bugs, which, DeJesus pointed out, families with lower incomes will have more difficulty doing.
"Obviously wealthy people do get bedbugs," Marder said. "It's just a matter of having the resources to deal with it before it gets out of control."
What's being done
Ratnapradipa says the goal of the Department of Health's is to educate the public about bed bugs. He is also trying to organize an April meeting for people who are concerned about the issue - representatives from pest control companies, Public Housing Authorities, community health centers, colleges and shelters.
"This is not a Department of Health problem," Ratnapradipa said. "This is a community problem. I think that we all have to do something."
At least one student is. Marder has an idea for a "low-cost team of exterminators," possibly staffed by student volunteers.
The Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management runs a program in extermination that requires only 24 hours of training, Marder said.
Marder said she wants to create an organization that would cover the cost of extermination even if the tenant is not able to immediately pay. The group would wait to be reimbursed after finishing legal proceedings to hold the landlord accountable, recognizing that they might not ever be reimbursed, Marder said.
"At this point there's nothing for low-income people with bed bugs to do before their landlords can get held accountable," Marder said, "and in the meantime it's just going to spread like wildfire."
Marder said most families just move out - only for another family to move into the same, bed bug-infested housing.
"A lot of the landlords have little income themselves and want to help but can't," Marder said.
Marder is speaking with the Department of Health for advice on developing her idea, but said there are many concerns, like liability, that she doesn't know how to manage yet.
"This is all very much an idealistic dream, but it's worth pursuing, I guess. I hope."
