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Bed bug warnings
By onelith on Thu, 09/02/2010 - 1:37pm
On trash collection day on East Broadway in South Boston.
Pasted on various items of trash including mattresses, desks and a wooden door was this notice.
The City of Boston working hard to stop the spread of bed bugs from trash pickers.
Neighborhoods:
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Free tagging:
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Comments
Bedbugs?
Those are what the beautiful people call "pseudoscorpions".
How embarrassing!
Gosh, guess I won't put out a mattress on trash night. The neighbors might talk!
Is it safe to assume they're
Is it safe to assume they're not actually looking for bedbugs, and just putting the warnings on everything?
Yes
The biggest source of bedbug infections is used bedding/furniture. The problem is that once they're in, they'll get into everything before you know it.
The public health crews go around and mark everything that bedbugs like to live in (sofas, mattresses, bed springs, etc) in the hopes that if you heed the warning anything that is infected will get trashed and anything that isn't will get trashed anyways.
Putting a bandaid on a corpse, or something
How about if Boston took some steps to teach people to donate or give away perfectly usable items instead of this "toss perfectly usable stuff to the curb" mindset? The city could start by doing what a lot of places do and not taking this stuff for trash collection. Then people would need to call charities to pick it up. No, charities aren't free of bedbugs by any means, but why not have this stuff transported directly from residences to facilities where it can be properly sanitized and reused? Drives me CRAZY that the city condones filling landfills with perfectly usable stuff, then tells me they're all out of furniture vouchers and donated furniture for families who are moving into their first stable home.
Bedbug tagging for many years in Allston-Brighton
City inspectors -- along with volunteers from the community and community organization(s) -- have been going around tagging furniture and mattresses on sidewalks for a number of years here in Allston-Brighton. Items are tagged with this label so that nobody trash picks them before the garbage trucks can collect the furniture.
I think the Allston Brighton CDC's bedbug initiative initially led the charge and the city has found it to work well. Hence why it's seen in South Boston, too.
Boston's been far more proactive on bedbugs over the past five years than NYC...