Bed Bugs Are Back

On a recent afternoon, Manchester Social Workre Stacey Evans visited with Monique Nyabenda.
Nyabenda lives with her four children and husband in a two-bedroom apartment near the millyard area.
Nyabenda, who is from Burundi, tells her story through an interpreter.
NYABENDA & INTERPRETER: She said that last night she couldn't sleep last night because of bed bugs.
EVANS & INTERPRETER: So I definitely have two twin mattressess. I'll see if I can come up with...it would be nice if we could get all the mattresses out at once.
Nyabenda says a few days after she moved into the furnished apartment, her son developed what seemed to be a rash.
He was tested for allergies.
But the rash turned out to be bed bug bites.
Thanks to DDT, bed bugs had pretty much disappeared in the US.
But the EPA banned that pesticide in the 1970s. because of its environmental effects.
And according to Andrew Carace, owner of Pest-End Exterminators, bed bugs have started coming back.
CARACE: About seven, eight years ago we started noticing that we were getting these complaints. And quite honestly in the industry, since no one had been treating it, it was just a new thing. There were very few and limited ways to treat for them, very few chemicals were listed to apply for them, and because of that they started to spread into other areas, and it's just becoming increasingly a problem.
An adult bed bug is about a quarter of an inch long.
They are active at night and feed primarily on human blood.
They live in furniture, mattressess, and walls.
And says Carace, the bugs have shown up in all areas of Manchester.
CARACE: If you're in the center, Elm Street area, where you have a lot of apartments, you tend to find them there because of the high population. Then you go into residential areas where it's just single family homes and students are bringing them back from the colleges.
In Nyabenda's building, the landlord teamed up with exterminators and city health officials to try to get rid of the bugs.
Dick Anagnost heads Metropolis Property Management Group.
ANAGNOST: We vacated the entire building floor by floor and essentially went in and fumigated the entire building one floor at a time by moving the tenants out, moving them into other units, vacating and I mean taking everything out, all of the furniture, everything, cleaning it top to bottom and then fumigating it to try to manage the infestation.
Anagnost figures he spent about $15,000 on fumigation.
But the bugs are back again.
They may have come back in on the furniture that was removed temporarily.
Or, says Anagnost, they could have hidden in the building and waited out the barrage of chemicals.
ANAGNOST: They're about as resilient a creature as I've ever seen, because they can go anywhere.
Tim Soucy, director of the city's health department, says landlords are often frustrated.
SOUCY: .. .it's actually very common that it needs more than one application because the bed bugs are so small and after they feed they can literally hide out for a couple of months.
And Soucy adds, cleanliness is not the issue.
SOUCY: You can find bed bugs in perfectly immaculate apartment or homes or hotels or anywhere else.
The bugs are not a public health threat since they’re not known for carrying disease.
And they don’t spread the way lice do.
There’s more good news.
According to Andrew Carace at Pest-End Exterminators, Manchester does not yet appear to have a strain of the bug found in Worcester, Mass.
That one has proven immune to pesticides.
For NHPR News in Manchester, I'm Ellen Grimm.