So yeah, I've been having a 'rash' on my skin for about 10 days now, that looked a lot like bites.
Naturally my partner and I inspected our bed and bed linens for bed bugs, initially we found nothing, so I got all frantic assuming perhaps I'd been having an adverse reaction manifesting in my skin due to changes in dosages, or an allergy to certain vitamins in certain amounts ect, and set off to find out which it was.. After my experimenting came up nil and I still kept getting the 'bites', I checked again, our bed skirt is LOADED with bed bugs, I'm guessing they migrated from another unit in our building.. (Yay, more pest problems, not like we haven't been battling roaches for the last 3 months also..) I phone the landlord, no response. I phone the local public health department, no response, so I email.

MY entire weekend has now been spent on my knees, scrubbing, spraying, purging, dismantling, my entire life, and throwing everything I own in the laundry or steam cleaning.. I love how through complete negligence I end up doing 90% of the exterminator THE LANDLORD IS LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE's job..

Through casual conversation with other tenants, I've also determined this building has a LONG STANDING HISTORY with pest problems, which wasn't disclosed to me upon signing my lease. So.. there's that.

I'm like.. literally shaking, seething, crying, stark raving mad all at once.

I had a bed bug problem overseas at one time.  I wondered what was causing the blood on my sheets.  They were biting me behind the ears while I slept.  Gives me the creeps thinking about it.

OMG! Bed bugs are a real thing??? I always thought don't let the bed bugs bite was just a nursery rhyme. Are they like fleas or lice or what exactly? I knew about kissing bugs from third world places but I didn't think bed bugs were actually a thing. That's awful!

Bed bugs, sometimes written as bedbugs, are real all right, Julia.  Google them and you will find out more than you probably want to know.  In another topic, you mentioned that you have pest controllers around regularly, so you should be okay.

Quote from: Julia1996 on November 06, 2017, 11:20:24 AM
OMG! Bed bugs are a real thing??? I always thought don't let the bed bugs bite was just a nursery rhyme. Are they like fleas or lice or what exactly? I knew about kissing bugs from third world places but I didn't think bed bugs were actually a thing. That's awful!

Oh yes they are very very very disgustingly real. Parasites that feed on blood of mammals to mature while they sleep, nigh impossible to be rid of in a high rise building like mine, and just plain visually disturbing. Fortunately unlike ticks they don't carry disease..

Quote from: MaryT on November 06, 2017, 11:30:25 AM
In another topic, you mentioned that you have pest controllers around regularly, so you should be okay.

Not really the case anymore. They fired my last landlord so from Friday til Monday we're left to fend for ourselves, they tell me now I cant get an exterminator in for another 2 weeks. So all the work I'm doing to clean and store everything is.. essentially pointless..

For many years bed bugs were not a problem because mattresses were treated with a pesticide at the factory. About 15 years or so the EPA declared the pesticide "harmful" and demand it no longer be used to treat mattresses. This was fine for a while but foreign visitor from lesser developed countries brought bedbugs with them on their visit to the US and other countries. They spread through hotels mostly but I have even heard of furniture in airports being infested.

Bed bugs don't like light so they are unlikely to be found on your person but when you return from a trip, leave your luggage in the garage until you have had time to inspect it. The are relatively easy to kill by washing in hot water but once they get establish in a room, they become difficult to eliminate. 

My secret wish is that the people who passed the pesticide regulation get bedbugs. 

Quote from: Dena on November 06, 2017, 03:14:06 PM
For many years bed bugs were not a problem because mattresses were treated with a pesticide at the factory. About 15 years or so the EPA declared the pesticide "harmful" and demand it no longer be used to treat mattresses. This was fine for a while but foreign visitor from lesser developed countries brought bedbugs with them on their visit to the US and other countries. They spread through hotels mostly but I have even heard of furniture in airports being infested.

Bed bugs don't like light so they are unlikely to be found on your person but when you return from a trip, leave your luggage in the garage until you have had time to inspect it. The are relatively easy to kill by washing in hot water but once they get establish in a room, they become difficult to eliminate. 

My secret wish is that the people who passed the pesticide regulation get bedbugs. 

Yeah, if it's between having bugs in my bed and possibly toxic chemicals on my mattress give me the chemicals. I understand the need for safety regulations but I think sometimes they take it too far. Everything can't be dangerous or everyone would have died already. Lol

Quote from: Dena on November 06, 2017, 03:14:06 PM
For many years bed bugs were not a problem because mattresses were treated with a pesticide at the factory. About 15 years or so the EPA declared the pesticide "harmful" and demand it no longer be used to treat mattresses. This was fine for a while but foreign visitor from lesser developed countries brought bedbugs with them on their visit to the US and other countries. They spread through hotels mostly but I have even heard of furniture in airports being infested.

Bed bugs don't like light so they are unlikely to be found on your person but when you return from a trip, leave your luggage in the garage until you have had time to inspect it. The are relatively easy to kill by washing in hot water but once they get establish in a room, they become difficult to eliminate. 

My secret wish is that the people who passed the pesticide regulation get bedbugs. 

Yeah, its pretty ridiculous when you do the research.. In 2008 there were approx 20 or so bed bug problems in our area. Fast forward to 2011, 235 and steadily climbing til now. Like seriously, what changed? (In Canada)
Growth like that is bloody frightening.

Quote from: Julia1996 on November 06, 2017, 03:51:42 PM
Yeah, if it's between having bugs in my bed and possibly toxic chemicals on my mattress give me the chemicals. I understand the need for safety regulations but I think sometimes they take it too far. Everything can't be dangerous or everyone would have died already. Lol

Throwing a bed pad on the bed then putting sheets over that really limits your exposure to any chemicals in the mattress. Millions have slept on treated mattress for years and I have never heard of difficulties because of it.

Quote from: Dena on November 06, 2017, 07:29:18 PM
Throwing a bed pad on the bed then putting sheets over that really limits your exposure to any chemicals in the mattress. Millions have slept on treated mattress for years and I have never heard of difficulties because of it.

It's the same deal with stuff like banning arsenic treated lumber. Real world tests showed that it was scientifically impossible for it to be hazardous to humans unless you did something insane like eat the wood itself. It was something like that arsenic leeched into the soil was only 20% above natural arsenic levels within half an inch of the wood, and no plants when it was in gardens or what not showed increased arsenic content. All it takes is a handful of opinion pieces (not even studies) and public outcry goes nuts leading to unwarranted consumer pressure. (Oh, the Subway yoga mat bread thing too. That one was particularly dumb.)

That sucks I am sorry you are going through that. Bed bugs suck and are hard to get rid of as of 2008 the good chemicals we had here in canada are banned for use as they are know to cause cancers and sterilizations and other problems. So it is harder to kill this suckers.

Quote from: Roll on November 06, 2017, 11:28:41 PM
It's the same deal with stuff like banning arsenic treated lumber. Real world tests showed that it was scientifically impossible for it to be hazardous to humans unless you did something insane like eat the wood itself. It was something like that arsenic leeched into the soil was only 20% above natural arsenic levels within half an inch of the wood, and no plants when it was in gardens or what not showed increased arsenic content. All it takes is a handful of opinion pieces (not even studies) and public outcry goes nuts leading to unwarranted consumer pressure. (Oh, the Subway yoga mat bread thing too. That one was particularly dumb.)

I really don't think all the "safety" restrictions are because companies come from the fears of lawsuits. I see some of the dumbest class action suits on TV. Supposedly if you used one brand of weed killer it causes lymphoma. One brand of talcum powder causes ovarian cancer. Some of these lawsuits are ridiculous. And it seems like every day some medication causes all kinds of horrible side effects. Don't they test these drugs before they start handing them out to people?

Quote from: natalie.ashlyne on November 07, 2017, 12:07:25 AM
That sucks I am sorry you are going through that. Bed bugs suck and are hard to get rid of as of 2008 the good chemicals we had here in canada are banned for use as they are know to cause cancers and sterilizations and other problems. So it is harder to kill this suckers.

Yeah its pretty great. Public Health Dept seems to just wanna pass me off to other people and not do anything.. My gf now has about a half dozen new bites..
Myself, Ive run out if energy and patience.

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Quote from: Julia1996 on November 07, 2017, 05:33:27 AM
I really don't think all the "safety" restrictions are because companies come from the fears of lawsuits. I see some of the dumbest class action suits on TV. Supposedly if you used one brand of weed killer it causes lymphoma. One brand of talcum powder causes ovarian cancer. Some of these lawsuits are ridiculous. And it seems like every day some medication causes all kinds of horrible side effects. Don't they test these drugs before they start handing them out to people?

Not really, because testing products on living things for proper case studies is 'inhumane.'

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Quote from: Julia1996 on November 07, 2017, 05:33:27 AM
I really don't think all the "safety" restrictions are because companies come from the fears of lawsuits. I see some of the dumbest class action suits on TV. Supposedly if you used one brand of weed killer it causes lymphoma. One brand of talcum powder causes ovarian cancer. Some of these lawsuits are ridiculous.

Nuisance lawsuits are a little different than true consumer pressure. The issue there is that companies don't care about anything but their bottom line, and it is cheaper to settle than it is to pay expensive lawyers over the course of months or years of hearings and appeals. (There is a hilarious episode of the show Silicon Valley about this.)

Consumer pressure is more about bad press and bottom line sales with boycotts or simple consumer fickleness. (ie: "Ewww, they make my sandwich out of used yoga mats! Well, I'm not eating there!" Even though of course that wasn't what was happening in the slightest, and it was just a single preservative that found common use in multiple products, one which happened to be food and another which happened to be rubber. It would be sort of like using not eating salt because "That's the stuff they keep roads from icing with! I don't want stuff that was on the road in my food!".

Quote
And it seems like every day some medication causes all kinds of horrible side effects. Don't they test these drugs before they start handing them out to people?

Here's a little secret about listed drug side effects... Ok, so, I'll preface this with we have no idea how 95% of medicines actually work. Someone just says "I have a headache, I took this pill, now I don't" then they replicate the test a few times, and we have a new use for whatever random pill it was. When they go to do a trial, because they don't know what the chemical actually does, they aren't allowed to discount anything that happens during the trial. Essentially, it's not that such and such medicine causes depression as a side effect, it's that one random person in the trial happened to get depressed for what was most likely an entirely unrelated reason during the trial.

Of course that goes the opposite direction as well. A particular medicine may have no effect on every member of the trial group, but when put out in the real world it is immediately evident it is interacting with something else in an unexpected manner due to a factor not present in the controlled trial.

The biggest issue here is there aren't many actual studies, at least not enough to create a complete statistical picture. It would be impossible to do so. So while that arbitrary depression may show up in one study, maybe even two or three, if you ran five hundred studies it would most likely begin to approach the naturally occurring population mean for depression, it's the "law of large numbers"(catchy name, ain't it?). (Well, unless it actually IS a side effect and then you would see consistent results showing a statistical increase over the population mean.) But running 500 or 5000 or 50000 studies when a drug needs to get to market? Well, that's just not cost effective, so won't happen. So now you get commercials talking about how your shampoo may cause lung cancer (seriously, I had a shampoo that actually said that).

In short: medicinal side effects are mostly nonsense, both because they include things that aren't actually side effects and because they often don't include actual side effects.

Quote from: Angela Drakken on November 07, 2017, 05:34:45 AM
Not really, because testing products on living things for proper case studies is 'inhumane.'

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You know whats fun? Trying to get a potentially life saving trial drug for a definitively terminal cancer patient. Partly because they don't want to report someone on their fancy new medicine died, so they cherry pick the patients who need it far, far less.

So here you have a readily available test group for which it is actually inhumane to not give them the drug, but they still don't... God, the medical industry is broken.

Quote from: Angela Drakken on November 06, 2017, 09:07:08 AM
So yeah, I've been having a 'rash' on my skin for about 10 days now, that looked a lot like bites.
Naturally my partner and I inspected our bed and bed linens for bed bugs, initially we found nothing, so I got all frantic assuming perhaps I'd been having an adverse reaction manifesting in my skin due to changes in dosages, or an allergy to certain vitamins in certain amounts ect, and set off to find out which it was.. After my experimenting came up nil and I still kept getting the 'bites', I checked again, our bed skirt is LOADED with bed bugs, I'm guessing they migrated from another unit in our building.. (Yay, more pest problems, not like we haven't been battling roaches for the last 3 months also..) I phone the landlord, no response. I phone the local public health department, no response, so I email.

MY entire weekend has now been spent on my knees, scrubbing, spraying, purging, dismantling, my entire life, and throwing everything I own in the laundry or steam cleaning.. I love how through complete negligence I end up doing 90% of the exterminator THE LANDLORD IS LEGALLY OBLIGATED TO PROVIDE's job..

Through casual conversation with other tenants, I've also determined this building has a LONG STANDING HISTORY with pest problems, which wasn't disclosed to me upon signing my lease. So.. there's that.

I'm like.. literally shaking, seething, crying, stark raving mad all at once.

Completely understand, I had to rip out walls in part of my house to get rid of them a few years ago. If your beds against a wall they'll migrate to under the baseboards. And if your REALLY LUCKY and live in an old house (think built in the early 1890's) you might have a cotton batting type insulation. Yep.

Quote from: Geeker on November 07, 2017, 09:48:31 PM
Completely understand, I had to rip out walls in part of my house to get rid of them a few years ago. If your beds against a wall they'll migrate to under the baseboards. And if your REALLY LUCKY and live in an old house (think built in the early 1890's) you might have a cotton batting type insulation. Yep.

Its a pretty new building. And more recently renovated. Most of the walls are block only the wet walls and utility walls or inner partition walls are steel stud and odds are not insulated at all as theyre not exterior. Most ofnthe insulation on the block walls is .5 to 1 inch styofoam sm.. Fun times.

New building, just a filthy building, in a filthy part of town, full of filthy people..

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Did they ever come sort out the bug problem?

Quote from: Viktor on November 23, 2017, 02:39:30 PM
Did they ever come sort out the bug problem?

Too soon to tell.. I need to chase down the landlord again and determine what day theyre coming back next week for bed bug extermination so we can spend yet another weekend prepping.

The roaches we'll have to remind him about once more and the department health, landlord and tennant board, and bilaw office are still an ongoing battle..

At any rate, I'll likely be stuck here for the duration of my lease working out the details.. Much to my disappointment.

On the brighter side of things my next place I wont have to do the 'drag king' routine getting in the door of the next place because my paperwork will be all stitched up. Not that I have an issue with looking like a very girly Negan from the Walking Dead. (A baggy leather coat covers LOTS.) I just hate the idea of having to lie to have a place to live.

Fingers crossed the next place is clean..

Im considering throwing my dice and purchasing a condo in a building that doesnt exist yet.

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