Horror! Panic! Those little red welts that are itching you aren’t mosquito bites. You have bed bugs!

Gross? Icky? Definitely. The end of the world? Probably not. Life may be a little more challenging for a while, but you’ll live through this. We’ll help.

Here’s what to do when bed bugs are bugging you:

1. Call Stern Environmental Group immediately. You can’t get rid of bed bugs by yourself. Do not try using household insect sprays or bug bombs. Bed bugs are resistant to these chemicals and will simply move to another room, infecting more parts of your home. This truly is a job for experienced pest control professionals. Make sure the professional pest exterminator you call knows how to eliminate bed bugs specifically and has satisfied customers who will attest to his success. That’s why you want to call Stern Environmental Group. We are the bed bug experts and will get rid of your bed bug problem — guaranteed! The faster you call in a professional bed bug exterminator, the faster you’ll get rid of the nasty buggers.

2. Look in the mirror and tell yourself, “I am not a dirty person.” Bed bugs are not caused or drawn by filth or dirt. They are insects of convenience that hitch a ride into your house on infected clothing, shoes, cardboard boxes, used furniture, etc. You don’t get bed bugs because you haven’t dusted for a few weeks.

3. Do not move your mattress, sleep in a different room or sleep at a friend’s house. You’ll just spread the little buggers to a new location. Try not to disturb the infected areas until your pest control professional arrives to assess the extent of the infestation.

4. Follow the instructions of your pest control professional. Different firms may use different chemicals. Your pest control professional will tell you what steps you need to take in your home to ensure that the chemicals he uses will have maximum effectiveness. Don’t rush around bagging everything in plastic or throwing it out. You may wind up making things worse instead of better. Take a deep breath, try to remain calm, and wait for instructions from your pest control professional. Then follow his instructions religiously.

5. Take a hot shower. It’ll help wash away that creepy crawly feeling and make you feel better.

Here are some more things you can do to make life more bearable until the the siege is over:

• Thoroughly clean infested rooms, as well as others in the residence. Scrub infested surfaces with a stiff brush to dislodge eggs.
• Vacuum repeatedly using a powerful vacuum to remove bed bugs from cracks and crevices. Dismantle bed frames to expose additional hiding places. Remove drawers from desks and dressers and turn furniture over to inspect and clean all hiding places. Remove baseboards and electrical plates with your vacuum at the ready to suck up any bed bugs. As soon as you turn off the vacuum, immediately double-bag the vacuum bag in plastic and discard in an outside garbage receptacle.
• Reduce clutter throughout your house and in closets to minimize potential hiding places.
• Encase your mattress and box springs in zippered vinyl or allergen mattress bags. After installation, inspect the bags for holes or tears and seal with permanent tape. Any bugs trapped inside will eventually die and new bugs won’t be able to take up residence.
• To prevent bed bugs from crawling onto the bed, pull the frame away from the wall, tuck sheets and blankets so they don’t touch the floor, and place bed legs in dishes of mineral oil.
• Caulk and seal all holes where pipes and wires penetrate walls and floor. Fill wall cracks and cracks around baseboards and moldings to seal off hiding places.
• Wash infected clothing, sheets and bed linens in hot water and dry immediately on the hottest setting to kill the bugs. The steam created while the wet clothes tumble in a hot dryer will kill any eggs not killed by the hot wash water. Continue drying on hot setting at least 20 minutes to 2 hours after clothes are dry to make sure you kill every last one of the buggers.
• Empty your dresser and closet and wash all the contents. Store your clothes and linens in tightly sealed plastic bags until use to prevent reinfection.

A few preventive measures:

• Don’t bring home used furniture you find sitting out on the street. It’s just not worth the risk. Used furniture is one of the easiest ways bed bugs are transported from site to site.
  If you buy used furniture or luggage from a store or neighbor, inspect it carefully for signs of bed bugs. If you see telltale rusty spots or smears or find pea-sized, pearly-white egg globules, take a pass.
• When discarding infected possessions, wash and double-bag them in plastic first before putting them in the outside garbage can or dumpster. If you discard infected furniture, before setting it out on the curb as trash, make sure you put a sign on it warning that it’s infested with bed bugs. Why spread the misery?

Because bed bugs spread through air ducts and along electrical and plumbing conduits, if you live in a multi-tenant dwelling, adjoining apartments on the same floor and directly above and below yours should also be inspected by a pest control professional. For more information on bed bugs, click the post title and visit the Stern Environmental Group website. You’ll sleep well tonight when you get “Stern” with your pests.

Just reading this article made my skin creep and crawl. Written by Meredith May for the San Francisco Chronicle, we found it posted on SFGate.com yesterday, April 8, 2007, and thought it was important enough to share with you. (Click the post title for the source site.) The story may have been written on the West Coast, but the problem is just as dire right here in our own backyard.

Walter has stopped hugging his friends. He is throwing out his clothes and furniture, and he rarely comes out of his Tenderloin hotel room anymore.

He’s not suicidal, but darn near. He has bedbugs.

Nearly eradicated in the United States 50 years ago, resistant strains of “super” bedbugs are infesting mattresses at an alarming rate. In what’s being touted as the biggest mystery in entomology, all 50 states are reporting outbreaks of the blood-sucking nocturnal critters.

Pest control companies nationwide reported a 71 percent increase in bedbug calls between 2000 and 2005. Left alone, a few bedbugs can create a colony of thousands within weeks.

“We never treated bedbugs until 2002. Now we have a dedicated bedbug crew working on this every day,” said Luis Agurto, president of Pestec in San Francisco.

Agurto’s arsenal includes a vacuum, steam heat to cook the bedbug eggs and targeted spraying of insecticides. It takes three, eight-hour visits and about $500 to $750 to exterminate one room. A whole house would cost closer to $5,000.

The bulk of Agurto’s clients live in low-income hotels and shelters in the Tenderloin, but he’s been called to five-star hotels and suburban homes in Walnut Creek.

Bedbugs have been found in moving vans, public transit seat cushions, airplanes, college dorms and even a Bay Area meditation retreat. They spread by hitching a ride on your clothes or in your luggage and crawling off to infest your home or apartment building.

Nearly 300 bedbug infestations were reported to San Francisco health officials in 2006, more than double the number in 2004. Most of the cases involved travelers discovering bedbugs in upscale hotels.

The size and shape of a lentil, bedbugs lay eggs during the day and hide in your bed, clothing and light sockets. At night, they suck your blood, leaving itchy bumps on your skin and little bloody excretions on your sheets. They don’t pass diseases, but they are incredibly difficult to exterminate, even following their blood hosts who move to new apartments trying to get away.

The bedbug resurgence has sparked Web sites like bedbugger.com, where people share extermination tips, bite mark photos and counsel each other through the stigma. There are bedbug symposiums, cover stories in American Entomologist magazine and dozens of videos depicting infestations on YouTube. California just issued its first state bedbug guidelines, and New York lawmakers want to ban the sale of reconditioned mattresses after 4,600 bedbug cases were reported in 2006.

“The Laundromat near my building is packed, the tenants are in there, washing everything they own and giving each other knowing glances,” said Walter, who has been battling bedbugs for five weeks and fears he will be kicked out of his Tenderloin studio and made a pariah if he reveals himself.

Lady Bug, a beagle professionally trained to sniff out bedbugs, makes regular rounds with Agurto’s Pestec crew in San Francisco. On Friday, the dog inspected Tina Blade’s room at the Empress Hotel in the Tenderloin, smelling the bed frame, baseboards and carpet.

To Blade’s relief, Lady Bug deemed the room all clear. Blade is not among the dozen people who have had bedbug infestations in the 90-room Empress, but she has been bitten at other single-room occupancy hotels in the neighborhood.

“I’d always heard that nursery rhyme, ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite,’ but I never knew it was real until I moved to San Francisco,” she said.

Empress manager Roberta Goodman is proactive about bedbugs. She conducts tenant meetings, keeps Pestec on call and has Lady Bug in every month to make sure the bugs are staying at bay.
“I can keep our community educated, but I can’t control the guests who are coming in and out; that’s why we do monthly checks,” she said.

Bedbugs were nearly eradicated after World War II, when exterminators and homeowners used DDT to get rid of the pests.

Experts say bedbugs are making a comeback because of increased global travel and a shift toward less-toxic pest control. As people are backing away from harsh chemicals and indoor spraying, the bugs are becoming increasingly resistant to the pesticides.

“We don’t use as harsh chemicals as we used to, we don’t spray mattresses with insecticide before selling them anymore, and the bugs are getting increasingly resistant to the few chemicals we have left,” said public health biologist Laura Krueger, who wrote the new bedbug guidelines for the California Department of Health Services.

Nearly all exterminators use pyrethroids, which are a synthetic version of pyrethrum, the substance found in chrysanthemum flowers. But last fall, at the University of Kentucky, some of the nation’s best bedbug researchers delivered some sobering news — while they could kill bedbugs born in the lab with pyrethroids, four groups of adult bedbugs brought in from the outside were unaffected.

Because bedbugs are such a new phenomenon, people don’t know what to do about them and are often unwittingly making their problem worse, said Nobugsonme, a New York woman who runs the bedbugger.com Web site to help sufferers cope.

A victim herself who wanted to remain anonymous, Nobugsonme said in a phone interview with The Chronicle that a series of pest control visits is the only way to get rid of the bugs. Moving the mattress, sleeping in the living room, using a bug fogger or moving in with a friend will only relocate the bugs, she said.

“People who throw away all their possessions and battle this for months and spend thousands on pest control only to relocate and have the bugs reappear are really traumatized,” she said. “They are getting only a few hours of sleep at night, they feel itchy all the time, some go to therapy over it.”

Thirty percent of people don’t have skin reactions to bedbug bites, and may not notice an infestation until it has gotten out of control.

Pest control researchers are experimenting with alternatives such as steaming or freezing the bugs to death, and some New Jersey exterminators are gassing them with the termite killer Vikane.

UC Berkeley urban entomologist Vernard Lewis is trying to get grant money to build a baited bedbug trap.

Bedbugs give off a distinctive odor, described as rotting coconuts, and that’s probably how the males and females find each other, he said.

“If we can mimic that funk, that stink, I think we could make baits and monitor them,” Lewis said.

Until the experts figure it out, bedbug sufferers will have to help each other fight back and raise awareness.

When Atlanta filmmaker Kyle Tekiela made a short bedbug film noir and put it on YouTube, he was shocked by how many people contacted him begging for help with bedbug problems.

“Students from all over the country sent me videos of their dorm rooms,” Tekiela said. “This one guy did a 360 where the ceiling meets the walls and there was a three-inch band of bedbugs all the way around.”

If you even THINK you might have bed bugs, call Stern Environmental Group TODAY. The faster you call us, the quicker we can get the problem under control. We are the bed bug E
XPERTS and CAN and WILL get rid of your bed bugs — GUARANTEED! For more information about bed bugs, visit the bed bug page on our website. You’ll sleep well tonight when you get “Stern” with your pests.