ST. GEORGE - While Dixie Care and Share is open to the homeless, bedbugs have also made themselves right at home.

Kara Coop, executive director of care and share, said she's paid thousands and thousands of dollars in treatments to exterminate the pests.
"They're just not something you can get rid of," she said. "It's a nationwide epidemic right now."
Coop said bedbugs are in motels and shelters. It's just a matter of one person coming from a place that has bedbugs to start the cycle all over again.
"We've been fighting them for a long time - we've had the whole place tented, that was a year ago," she said. "We've bought new mattresses four or five times - we do treatments continuously. The only cure is going to be a new facility."
Since they can't eliminate the bedbugs, they just keep treating the problem as it arises.
"We need a new Dixie Care and Share - once you have a new facility you can take different precautions to keep them out," Coop said.
She added a lot of clients get bit and a lot of clients don't. Jon Patteson from Denver, Colo., was one client who was bitten by the bedbugs.
Patteson said he lost his job and was working his way down to Reno, Nevada.
The week before Christmas Patteson stayed at the Care and Share as he was passing through.
"I was there two days and have been eaten alive by bedbugs," he said. "I'm afraid to go back. Talk about kicking a man when he's down."
Patteson said the attitude toward the bedbugs at the shelter is callous.
"They (shelter management) say there's nothing they can do about it, they say they spray and (they) come back," he said.
While at the shelter, Patteson said around the breakfast table people would joke about the bedbugs.
"They would joke 'how were the bugs for you last night,'" he said.
Chau Ly, new customer specialist at Orkin Inc., said typically people get bedbugs from traveling from different hotels, airplanes or homeless shelters.
He added they're not like ants or cockroaches that travel.
"They (bedbugs) stay where a food source is at so infestations can get really nasty," Ly said. "They're there mainly to feed off of human blood."
He added bedbugs can be found in mattresses, behind headboards and sometimes hide behind picture frames.
"Majority of cases come from hotels and apartments because it's a constant food source," Ly said.
He said people can also bring bedbugs in off their clothes.
Ly said the best way to treat a bedbug infestation is professional pest care.
"The hardest thing is getting rid of the eggs as well," he said.
A lot of times people don't know they've been bitten by a bedbug because the bites are similar to mosquito bites.
Ly described bed bugs as the size of a watermelon seed. They are flat and grayish color, after they feed they're red.

Sorce: BY TIFFANY DE MASTERS

Bed Bugs at FOX NEWS

While grappling with MSNBC and CNN for viewers, Fox News has also been battling a smaller, more insidious enemy closer to home: bed bugs in its Midtown Manhattan newsroom. In an interview on Monday, Warren Vandeveer, senior vice president for operations and engineering at Fox News, said the cable channel had realized it had a problem a few weeks ago, when an employee “caught a bug and showed it to us.” An exterminator determined that the incursion was limited to a “very small area in the newsroom.” But the source of the bugs was not determined until the exterminator inspected the homes of about 20 employees. Mr. Vandeveer said the exterminator later described one employee’s home as having “the worst infestation he had seen in 25 years in the business.” After making large bags available for employees to stash their belongings, and replacing a number of fabric-covered desk chairs, Mr. Vandeveer said that the treatments had ended about a week ago, and that the problem had been contained. “It’s totally eradicated,” he said.


Source By: JACQUES STEINBERG

Weapon Uses Bed Bug's Own Juice

Researchers have enlisted a new weapon against bed bugs: their own chemical signals. It's first time scientists have used any insect's alarm pheromones as a method of control.
While the new technique probably won't single-handedly solve anyone's bed bug woes, experts say, the research may add to our arsenal of tools for fighting what has become a disturbing nuisance for a growing number of people.
"To control bed bugs, there's not going to be one easy solution," said Joshua Benoit, an entomologist at Ohio State University in Columbus. "We are trying to encourage people to find new and creative ways to kill bed bugs."
Bed-bug infestations have been on the rise in recent years, Benoit said, probably because people travel so much. All it takes is one pregnant female hopping a ride in a suitcase for a new crop of insects to invade homes and apartment buildings.
The tiny critters don't spread diseases, but a single person can easily get a few hundred bites in one night. Those chomps cause intense itching and even scarring in some people.

So far, there is no ideal way to get rid of bed bugs. Pesticide treatments can be expensive, invasive, toxic, and often ineffective. Already, the insects have developed resistance to some of the most common chemicals used to fight them.
In an effort to get the upper hand, Benoit experimented with alarm pheromones -- the chemicals that bed bugs release when they're disturbed or in danger. In turn, their comrades get excited and start scurrying around.
Benoit and colleagues mixed synthetic versions of bed-bug alarm pheromones with desiccant dust, a pesticide that works by drying insects out. In order to work, the bugs need to run directly through the dust.
The researchers placed varying concentrations of these mixtures in Petri dishes and in small enclosures that contained hiding places for the insects. Then they added bed bugs.
Their results, published in the Journal of Medical Entomology, showed that mixtures of alarm pheromones and desiccant dust killed up to 50 percent more bed bugs than did desiccant dust alone. The idea is that the pheromones get the bugs to move around more, making them more likely to run through the dust, which is relatively non-toxic and inexpensive.
"This is the first study of its kind to use alarm pheromones in this manner," Benoit said, "for any insect."

It's still way too soon to recommend that people run out and buy alarm pheromones (which are synthesized for other purposes, including as food preservatives). Outside the confines of a plastic dish, getting bed bugs to run around like crazy is not necessarily a good thing, said Michael Potter, an urban entomologist at the University of Kentucky, Lexington. Bed bugs are notoriously good at getting behind baseboards, inside walls, and into other cracks and crevices.
"Some might run into the apartment next door," Potter said. "Some might run into inaccessible areas."
In one recent incident in Columbus, Benoit said, bed bugs had infested 23 out of 24 units in an apartment building. Residents had to leave their homes for a week while the building was fumigated. Even then, there was no guarantee that the treatment killed all the bugs.
The incident illustrates how important it is to continue learning more about the inner workings of these pests.
"Any new work on bed bugs," Potter said, "is interesting work."

Source By: Emily Sohn, Discovery News