Pest management professionals are saying they're getting more and more calls for bed bug infestations in nursing homes, hospitals and doctor's offices, NPR reports.
Nearly 60 percent of pest control professionals have found bed bugs in nursing homes in the past year, according to an industry survey, up from 46 percent in 2013. Bed bug reports in other medical facilities have gone up slightly. Thirty-six percent of exterminators reported seeing them in hospitals, up from 33 percent. Infestations seen in doctors' offices rose from 26 percent to 33 percent in the past two years.
"Nursing homes would be difficult to treat for the simple reason you don't use any pesticides there," Billy Swan, an exterminator who runs a pest-control company in New York City, told NPR. That and the fact that there's a lot more stuff. "Somebody's gotta wash and dry all the linens, you know, and all their personal artifacts and picture frames."
Those personal belongings might help account for the big disparity in infestations between nursing homes and hospitals, according to Dr. Silvia Munoz-Price, an epidemiologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin who studies infection control in health care facilities. "The more things you bring with you, the more likely you're bringing bedbugs, if you have a bedbug problem... and you live in a nursing home, so all your things are there."
By contrast, "When bedbugs are located in a hospital, they're usually confined to a couple of hospital rooms," Munoz-Price says.
And it may be easier for hospital staff to spot bedbugs.
"Hospital cleaning staff, nurses, doctors are extremely vigilant," says Jim Fredericks, chief entomologist for the National Pest Management Association, which conducted the survey along with the University of Kentucky. "[Bedbugs] don't go unnoticed for long."
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Source: NPR