Bed bugs on a mattress in a photo from the Westchester Health Dept. web site. A Hard Battle Bloom, also a CUNY adjunct professor of entomology (the study of bugs), said bed bugs are difficult to deal with because they can nest in the tiniest of spaces: smoke detectors, headboards and children’s toys. Fully eliminating the pest might require throwing away personal belongings, and unlike ticks or lice that need a human host to survive, bed bugs can take a nibble of a person and retreat behind a bed until their next meal. Bed bugs’ surreptitious and seemingly invisible presence with obvious physical effects make it both psychologically and financially hard to handle. Bloom said he has heard of elderly people who had to throw away all their furniture and families who had to spend $1,000 to $2,000 on battling the bugs. What was previously viewed as a personal burden only made public through blogs and online message boards, has now transformed into a political issue. Some City Council members have raised the idea of banning the sale of used mattresses, a measure that could advance the state law which requires mattresses be “sanitized” before re-sale, but leaves the definition of “clean” open to interpretation. Munching from mattresses isn’t the only place where bed bugs like to snack, and recent reports of bed bugs in schools has prompted one Queens official to take action. Assemblyman Mike Gianaris (D-Astoria) has proposed a policy that would require schools to notify all parents of a bed bug outbreak, so they can take proper measures to prevent its spread. Currently, only a notice is sent to the parents of the student who has bites, which does not take into account that many children may be bringing the bugs from home into the school. Children should not be singled out if the root of the infestation is hard to pinpoint, Gianaris said. Not A Fair Fight He also acknowledged the difficulty in not only locating a bed bug origin, but getting rid of it, an obstacle Bloom said has been only complicated by politics. “This same group of politicians who say now we have a bed bug problem are the ones who restricted the use of pesticides,” he said. Bloom pointed out that because the City has the strictest rules regarding certain chemicals, exterminating the bugs has been an even greater challenge. He said some of the bans are “not based in science, but in terms of fear,” and he compares the risk of pesticides to the same risk that occurs when taking an antibiotic or vaccine. But Jukilis of Stern Environmental said she believes they have found an effective treatment that applies a combination of three chemicals to a home in two separate visits. Many customers call distraught, and it is Jukilis’ job to assure them their problem can be resolved. “There is a lot of therapy involved in dealing with a customer who has bed bugs,” she said. Jukilis said it was hard to tell a customer, who was also a cancer patient, that she would need to vigorously vacuum her home and take all her clothes and bedding to the cleaner before the exterminators could even step foot in her home. The Mental Battle Bed bugs—even just talking about them—can be psychologically disturbing, a fact Bloom set out to prove during one of his entomology classes after he noticed that at a Museum of Natural History lecture, his audience seemed itchier by the end of his talk. In the class he teaches about bed bugs, he had a group of people sit in the back of the room and count how many times people scratched themselves. “Scratching goes up in that class; it goes up 70 percent,” he said. If just thinking about bed bugs is enough to make people claw at their bodies, sleeping with them must literally become a scratching nightmare.

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