The A.V. Club’s trip to the National Bedbug Summit
Marah Eakin
Pest control conventions are glamorous.
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The A.V. Club learned a lot chitchatting our way through this week’s National Bedbug Summit, held in a presumably louse-free Hyatt in Rosemont. Unfortunately, none of that information alleviated the inevitable panic and itching that set in the second we flopped on our couches and beds later that evening. And that’s because, above all else at the conference, we learned that bedbugs are fucking everywhere.
Not that that’s really a bad thing. Yes, it’s horribly disgusting that bedbugs eat your blood, poop on your bed, and lay eggs all over the place. On the flip side, though, they don’t transmit diseases to humans like mosquitoes or fleas. A lot of people aren’t even allergic to their bites.
That being said, bedbugs are heinously disgusting, and everyone should freak the fuck out about them because they’re going to eat your face while you sleep. Or something like that. That’s what the media would have us believe, at least. Crews from Today, Inside Edition, TIME, Good Morning America, and about a bajillion other sources were busting down the summit’s door on opening morning, surely full of journalistic integrity, and not at all interested in inciting public panic or rabid rashes.
Of course, the bedbug population numbers are way up in recent years. Once a common problem in the U.S., they were virtually eradicated around WWII by DDT and other dubious pesticides. Lately, though, global travel has kicked the buggy baby making into high gear. The things thrive in all types of hotels, from the fancy to the dumpy, and that’s something the bedbug industrial complex is hyper aware of. From BugZip clear plastic luggage bags available in SkyMall, to the intensity with which the reps insist that only ingrates don’t check every single inch of their hotel rooms the second they walk in, there’s little hope that future travel will ever seem footloose and fancy-free again. As if taking off shoes at the airport and worrying about black light tests on hotel comforters weren’t bad enough.
Check out this terrifying fact we heard from a the PackTite salesman at the conference: At this year’s Pest Control National Meeting in Las Vegas, every single exterminator and salesman and whoever knew to check their hotel rooms, and about one in 10 found bedbugs in their room. One in 10. As the rep said, “Well, every hotel has bedbugs, but luckily not every room.”
Fortunately for the layperson, PackTite also makes a helpful iPhone app, Bedbug Identifier. Hokey looking but usable enough, it has icky pictures of the tiny offenders, as well as a map of where you should be checking for the pests at home and in random hotel rooms. Thanks, technology!
Hotels are already doing more than you would think, though. Most wrap their mattresses in zip-locked Protect-A-Bed mattress pads, cloak their bed legs in subtle Bed Bug Barrier tape, and hide BB Alert cardboard—Bedbugs love cardboard. Who knew?—monitors behind the headboards. They might even spray rooms down with pesticides or even bring in bedbug-sniffing dogs from time to time.
Yes, dogs. “Like drug dogs or bomb dogs,” a handler told us. Four sad-looking beagle-y things slept in cages at the conference, and three companies were shilling for their little sniffers. Dogs are considered one of the cheapest professional detection options, actually. BB Solutions’ li’l mutt Scooby lives in DesPlaines, and his wiggly services run from $200 to $400 a room.
Of course, if Scoobs finds something, that’s a whole other can of worms. Most of the afflicted seem to take the slash and burn method, throwing out entire apartments’ worth of furnishings. That’s unnecessary, according to many of the summit’s vendors, who, it should be noted, make their living selling services and products to get rid of said bedbugs. From dissolvable laundry bags for clothes, Bed Moats, scary sounding pesticides like Zythor, and portable heaters, there are ample solutions to itchy problems. Except, of course, for box springs. As one salesman told us, eerily, “They’re the worst. No one should even have one anymore because there are just so many damn places in there for bedbugs to hide.” We’ll sleep well tonight, for sure.
Regarding those heaters, here’s a fun fact: Bedbugs die at temperatures above 120 degrees. Thus, a company from Northern Minnesota is hocking something called the Insect Inferno. At a reasonable $40,000 for a 22-foot trailer, the thing rolls right up to your door, gets loaded full of couches, mattresses, and whatever else, fired up, and a few hours later, your goods are pest free. It’s a furniture sauna, basically, and as the salesman pointed out, “You could roast a pig in there over a few days.” Delicious, just like the whole damn Bedbug Summit.
