Creeping straight out of folklore into Madison apartments, a once-eliminated scourge — the bedbug — is back. Infestations of this nocturnal nuisance, rarely seen since the 1970s, have recently been popping up in downtown housing structures.
“Bedbugs are definitely making a comeback in the area,” Professional Pest Control general manager Rick Freye said. “There are probably a dozen to 16 apartments that we’ve done in downtown Madison. And it isn’t one separate building by any means.”
Eradicated decades ago by the effective, albeit environmentally unsafe, pesticide DDT, human bedbugs gradually died out of the national consciousness. “Good night/Sleep tight/Don’t let the bedbugs bite” became only a rhyme recited to heavy-eyed toddlers getting tucked in at night.
Now, for a few unlucky Madison tenants, the verse echoes with cruel clarity.
Although landlords, pest-control experts and city officials are reluctant to disclose specific bedbug infestation locations, multiple reports have pinpointed LaCiel, 515 University Ave., and LaVille, 431 W. Gorham St., as two problem areas. However, the buildings’ landlord, Forward Management, said the pests have been exterminated.
“We had them; we don’t now,” Forward Management president Dan Schmidt said. “I only know of one or two units in LaCiel and one in LaVille. As soon as we found out we had them, we dealt with them, obviously.”
Representatives from other large housing complexes near LaCiel, including The Saxony Apartments, 305 N. Frances St., The Embassy, 505 University Ave., and the Palisade, 535 W. Johnson St., denied the existence of bedbug problems in their units. But residents in all these complexes, including LaCiel, report that bedbug problems still exist.
On campus, University of Wisconsin Housing physical facilities director Mike Kinderman said the dorms have remained bedbug-free.
“I did hear about other places, other apartment complexes, but I have not heard of anything here in the halls,” he said. “That would be something that I would hear about.”
However, Freye said, bedbugs have been biting students living in more than one or two apartment buildings.
“All the problems we have found are in multi-unit student housing,” he said. “It’s more than one building, but we can’t name them.”
Biting again
Glimpsed only rarely for the past 30 years, bedbugs burst back into the city about a year ago, although increased bug reports nationwide have been circulating for the past few years.
“When I first started my career, when I’d get a human bedbug it was such an unusual thing that I’d run out and show it to the secretaries,” UW distinguished faculty associate and entomology expert Phil Pellitteri said. “In the last three to four years it has really taken off, and it’s not just Wisconsin. It was something you never heard about before and now all the sudden it’s popping up in all kinds of places.”
While city Health Department director Kathryn Vedder said her office has not yet received any bedbug complaints, the night nibbler population has the potential to grow if left unchecked. More common overseas, the bugs have most likely been brought back by an increasingly roving population.
“People are getting into places where they have the opportunity to pick them up and bring them back,” Pellitteri said. “Technically, you leave your suitcase next to the bed and they come crawling.”
In Madison, the hefty number of students who relocate once a year heighten the transmission potential. Simply moving an infected bed from one apartment to another can spread the insects, which wiggle into headboards, mattress seams, box springs, floorboards, wall crevices, wall hangings, furniture and other hiding places. They do not cling to the actual human body or transmit human disease.
Given the scientific name cimex lectularius, bedbugs are wingless insects with flattened, oval-shaped, segmented bodies. Thought to have evolved in close association to humans, they are pale brown in color and take on a darker reddish-brown hue after slurping up a human blood meal.
The pest locates its food by tracking body heat and carbon dioxide humans exhale. Vampire-style, they feed only on human blood and only at night. During daylight hours, the bugs seek shelter to digest their nighttime snack.
“They’re most active from probably midnight until about four in the morning,” Pellitteri said. “They’re very messy feeders. One indication of bad bedbugs is you often get little drops of blood on the sheets.”
Another infestation indicator can be a peculiar, almost sweet odor.
“An odor’s hard to describe,” Pellitteri said. “It’s not a rotting-type sensation, but it’s really pungent. It catches your attention; things just don’t smell quite right.”
The most obvious signs, however, are the itchy bedbug bites, although not everyone reacts to the same degree.
“You just feel bites,” said a UW junior who lives in one of the infected LaCiel apartments. Like a few other bedbug sufferers, he wished to remain anonymous. “You get big welts like bee stings and they itch like hell.”
Scratching the itch
The best way to stop the itching is to eradicate the source. Unfortunately, that process can take three to four treatments at intervals of two to three weeks. After each treatment, the residents must stay out of the area for four hours.
“It’s very difficult to be patient with something like this, but people have to understand there is no magic wand,” Freye said. “You can’t just walk in there and boom, they’re gone as soon as the pest control people leave. They don’t make materials like DDT any more that work fast and hard.”
In decades past, pesticide use was more widespread and frequent apartment treatments were the norm.
“Once a month someone would come in and spray the apartment or the house,” Pellitteri said. “People have gotten away from that, and that’s one of the explanations why [bedbugs] might be getting worse. One of the big changes in the last 10 years in particular is you only treat when you’ve got a problem.”
When treating an infestation, Pellitteri said thoroughness is of prime importance. A few overlooked bedbugs can reignite an infestation.
“You could treat everything correctly, overlook one spot and all the sudden three or four months later you’re right back into bedbugs,” he said.
Additionally, unsuccessful treatments may be a sign that the insects are developing genetic resistance to the standard pesticides. An alternative, specific to Wisconsin and other frigid climates, is to kill the bugs with cold.
“They’re very wimpy,” Freye said. “In the winter time we can use Mother Nature — put [furniture] outside for a couple of days or maybe a week to freeze them out.”
Responsibility wrestling
Bedbugs’ re-emergence has added another fillip to the often already strained tenant-landlord relationships in Madison. With pest problems, it can be hard to determine where the fault lies. Sometimes it’s not anyone’s fault.
“It’s not something we brought in,” Schmidt said, “but we have to deal with it. When we get any type of bug it usually comes from the residents.”
However, tenants could unknowingly move into an already affected apartment. Schmidt said lack of reporting worsened LaCiel’s infestation and that responsible disclosure is the key to preventing future bedbug problems.
“It’s like if someone had an STD and said the heck with it and just went on,” he said. “It just would mushroom if someone was irresponsible.”
An unresponsive landlord could also cause problems, and sometimes tenants choose to break a lease instead of sleeping with creepy crawlies. Legally, though, tenants are limited by the terms of their rental agreement.
“It’s going to be controlled by what the individual lease says,” city attorney Larry O’Brien said. “Most standard leases have exclusions in them; if it burns down or becomes uninhabitable you can break a lease. If it’s really bad you could argue it was uninhabitable, but it’s going to depend on the degree.”
Looking further out on the legal horizons, potential problems could arise if landlords begin denying leases to tenants who have lived in bedbug-infested buildings. However, disclosure regarding pest issues is largely unexplored legal terrain. Still, if the bedbugs prove resistant and they multiply and settle in, anything could happen.
“We don’t really have any alternatives in the pesticide world,” Pellitteri said. “The concern among entomologists is that … this truly is resistance, and we’re going to have some problems here.”
