It turns out bed bugs love living in Northeast Ohio. The area has landed at the top of both Orkin’s and Terminix’s list of most bed bug infested cities this year.
On Orkin’s list, Cleveland came in second place, while Terminix ranked the Cleveland-Akron area at number three.
Experts would like to clear one thing up when it comes to bed bugs, though.
“If you have a bed bug problem, it’s because you’re human,” said Seun Odalipupo, an Assistant Professor of Urban Entomology at the Ohio State University and an expert on bed bugs. Odalipupo said that there tends to be a lot of shame when it comes to bed bugs, which can lead to delays in treatment and reporting.
“People think when you have bed bugs, it's a reflection of how poor you are and how unhygienic things are where you live,” he said. “Neither of those things are true.”
Still, enough Northeast Ohioans called exterminators to land the region near the top of both major bed bug lists. Those lists, according to Orkin Branch Manager Rodger Poindexter, are based on the number of calls they get about bed bugs.
On his company’s list, Cleveland was near the top, but Columbus was not that far behind at number eight, and Cincinnati came in the thirteenth spot.
“Cleveland is kind of a through way from the Midwest to the East Coast,” Poindexter said. “So you've got a lot of people traveling through the area. We do have a larger airport. Most of the cities that are on that list have larger airports. So you've got either people traveling for business or people traveling for leisure.”
Hotels have a bad reputation for spreading bed bugs, and Poindexter recommends always checking your room for the little blood suckers before you settle in. But bed bugs are hitchhikers that can be picked up at lots of places, like doctors’ offices, schools, movie theaters and on public transportation.
If you do spot a bed bug in your home, or perhaps their tell-tale blood stains, time is of the essence because they multiply exponentially. Experts recommend skipping at-home solutions, which tend to control the bed bug population, at best, but don’t get rid of them completely. Professionals can take a couple routes to get rid of bed bugs, but the first step is always to vacuum up as many as possible.
Exterminators can then lay down chemical treatments onto furniture, carpeting, and even spray it as a dust into your walls- anywhere bed bugs might hide.
You can also cook them. Bed bugs and their eggs generally die at 113 degrees Fahrenheit.
Chris Gonda, one of the co-owners of Bed Bug Barbecue, recently let ideastream in on a heat treatment at a tidy Parma home. Industrial strength heaters were positioned outside the home, with large black ducts carrying hot air up to the second floor. Inside, more heaters warmed the space up to between 120 and 150 degrees Fahrenheit, while
large fans made sure the hot air got into every nook and cranny.
The owners of this home opted to get rid of some of their furniture and several mattresses. Some of the mattresses, already bagged and headed for the trash heap, still had live bed bugs crawling on them. They’re about the size of a small apple seed, and when squished they let out blood - human blood they had recently fed on.
“Bedbugs, they don't care about your race, your religion, your sex, your financial ability,” Gonda said. “They will bite anybody. They want humans.”
The good news is that bed bugs don’t spread diseases, but the bad news is that getting rid of them isn’t cheap. While economic inequality isn’t a factor in where bed bugs call home, it can be a factor in who can get rid of them quickly.
“This is not inexpensive,” Gonda said about the heat treatment. “This is probably a $4,000 cost for these people to get rid of bed bugs in their home today.”
Most homeowner’s insurance doesn’t cover bed bugs, and Gonda said there is little government assistance for the issue.
Odalipupo, the bed bug expert at Ohio State University, said they’re also becoming more resistant to certain chemical treatments. He collects bed bug samples from around the state to study them in his lab.
“The first principle in heavy warfare is know thy enemy,” he said. “If you know what you're dealing with then, only then can you now devise a strategy to be able to effectively defeat them.”
Odalipupo hopes his research will lead to new ways to defeat these tiny enemies. He’s found that unlike the much deadlier mosquito, bed bugs aren’t great at smelling. Still, they prefer human hosts to, say, pets. So one thing he’s researching is how bed bugs pick their victims, and it might come down to what’s on our skin.
“We think they might be using microbiome to discriminate between hosts,” he said. “So, our goal is to understand the relationship between bed bugs and those microbiome, even human skin microbiome to see if there are vulnerabilities and say, okay, if this is an integral part of their biology, the need is going to be able to discriminate between hosts. Can we come in there and break the relationship?”
He thinks perhaps one day, studying bed bugs’ preferred microbiomes could lead to new ways to trap and kill them.
