Bedbug infestation is an ongoing issue in many places. There are cities, in metropolitan areas as people travel from overseas and we’re seeing more and more bedbugs cropping up in different areas of the country and this is including hospitals. How do you get rid of bedbugs? We’ve talked about this on the show in the past and I’ve mentioned that after I’ve talked to some pest control professionals, it is a huge issue. If you really want them to assure and remove all the bedbugs from a room, they’ve got to basically clean that room out and open up all the drawers and close that room off for 24 hours while they fumigate it and spray because it’s just not something that they’re going to be able to easily deal with. Well, can you do that in a hospital easily? Can you do without A. do without a room? You know, that room will no longer have a patient in it and the income associated with that patient. So, that can be a problem. How do you section off that room so that the odors from the fumigation don’t get into other sections of the hospital? Do you have to close down the rooms on either side as well? That becomes an issue.
So this is causing a huge problem so there’s a great article I found in the New York Times actually called They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists and they are actually calling bedbugs the international arthropod of mystery. So, interesting; that little article about the different creatures that are involved with this and the way that the EPA and the Centers for Disease Control are looking at bedbugs and issuing statements on bedbug control. Now so far, the Joint Commission has not come out and said one way or another anything about bed bugs in a hospital setting because largely, they just pests, They don’t carry disease so they aren’t a vector for disease. if that changes because bedbugs do ingest blood from the patients, if they became disease carriers, if they became a vector for transmission of disease, that could all change.
So, right now, there’re pests, they’re annoyances, they’re hard to get rid off but but I think that it could be worse. This could be vectors for disease, viruses in similar ways, mosquitoes and other insects are and arthropods are but we could be looking at tick-borne illnesses and things like that. Imagine if we had this massive increase in infestation of ticks in the homes and increase in lime disease and all the challenges that presents. So, in a scheme of things, bedbugs- annoying, but not the worst, but certainly something to pay attention to and I wonder is there something you’ve encountered as a nurse and what have you done about it? So take an opportunity and shoot me an email, tell about what your facility or you area has done, what your encounters with bedbugs have been like and I can share that with the listeners either by putting some portions of your email up as an article in the blog at nursing show.com or just sharing some of them here on the show.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show episode Psychological Assessment Part 2: Defense Mechanisms and Episode 146
