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Discomfort has mounted for the past month in Lathrop House, given the recent spread of bedbugs—tiny insects of the family cimicidae—throughout the second and third floors of the dormitory. The bugs have been a disturbance to students and faculty alike, and many—including the Lathrop House Advisor Batia Epelbaum, the Office of Residential Life, Buildings and Grounds, and Craig Thomas Pest Control, Inc.—have been involved in efforts to abate the infestation.
One week into the Fall 2009 semester, two Lathrop residents, living on the second and third floors, reported that they noticed raised red marks on their arms, legs and necks. Daniel Lempert ’13, one of the students whose room was infested, initially refused to definitively accept bedbugs as the source of the bumps. “I didn’t really want to believe it because of what it would entail,” said Lempert.
Although Lempert switched mattresses—per instructions from nurses at Baldwin Health Center—he continued to wake up with bites, prompting him to “send nasty e-mails to anyone with Res [for Residential Life] in their title,” explained Lempert. Since the first week of school, Lempert has had four mattress replacements and has done laundry frequently. It was not until recently, however, when Lempert discovered that the pests had been crawling through cracks in the wall near his headboard, that he repositioned his bed and has since avoided attacks.
Lathrop House President Alessandra Schmidt ’12 could not comment on the specifics of the situation because until recently she was uninformed. “It had seemed like an individual incident,” Schmidt said. “I was hearing about it from a person-to-person basis; we realized later this week that it had gotten pretty intense.”
The infestation was brought to the attention of all of Lathrop’s residents in a dorm-wide e-mail sent by Epelbaum on Sept. 22. “Over the past couple of weeks there have been reported cases of bedbugs in Lathrop House,” wrote Epelbaum. “This is a situation we and almost every other residential college deals with on a regular basis. We have been working with Buildings and Grounds and Craig Thomas Pest Control to address each incident in an effort to contain the spread of bedbugs.”
The treatment for the Lathrop bedbugs—which began after Buildings and Grounds contacted Craig Thomas Pest Control, a Hudson Valley-based company, for an evaluation—was by no means simple.
Bedbugs are a quarter-inch long, with flat, oval bodies, and they stow themselves in tiny cracks in walls, bed frames, bed springs, mattresses or fabrics during the day. At night, they emerge to feed on human blood.
Their deep burrowing in a room’s narrowest recesses necessitates a thorough treatment process. A Craig Thomas worker explained the process, saying that treatments are administered three times in each room with two weeks between treatments. The process that Craig Thomas uses employs steam and a product called Mother Earth D, a natural poison that is harmless to humans but can stay on a surface forever, killing bedbugs.
Treated rooms are furnished with bed encasements and Climbup Interceptors, bowl-like traps that are placed under the legs of the bed in order to trap bedbugs as the climb along the bed’s legs.
Craig Thomas Pest Control continues to service Lathrop, working to ensure that, in addition to infected rooms, neighboring rooms are secure. For this reason, multiple rooms on infected halves of the second and third floors were given a preventative treatment on Sept. 24.
The source of the infestation, it seems, has been pinpointed to a room on the second floor. This room has been deemed “unfit to live in” for the first semester. Before the room was quarantined, students recall finding hundreds of bugs dead on the radiator. Nesting in this room, the bugs have since traveled through the ceiling and walls to other parts of the dorm.
Although the issue is being resolved, bedbugs—known to survive for up to one year without food—are extremely difficult to get rid of and can very easily spread. In addition, they have been known to survive washing machines and can actually transfer themselves to someone else’s laundry. Symptoms from the pests can vary by case, but physical signs can include large, itchy red welts—usually in lines of two or three—appearing on areas of the skin exposed while sleeping. Those concerned about a possible case of bedbugs can contact Coordinator of the Residential Operations Center AnnaBelle Jones.
“I still love Lathrop,” assures Lempert, “but this has been my extracurricular activity for the past month.” Lempert and other residents hope, though, that with the continuing efforts of the Office of Residential Life and Craig Thomas Pest Control, the bedbugs will be exterminated completely in due time.
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