PUBLIC SPACES

Public locations are increasingly identified as the sites of infestations because bed bugs, though naturally nocturnal, will adapt and feed on people during the day in some settings, especially when they become agitated or are very hungry making adjustment to non-residential locations increasingly likely. Canadian bed bug expert Sean Rollo says that bed bugs are extremely opportunistic: “If [bed bugs] are hungry for food during the day then they will go and look for food during the day and this is not a problem for them … bed bugs will exploit their food source; if something happens they will change their habits to adapt to this change as well as to their environment.”

Bed bugs can not only infest non-residential sites, but also transfer to a new host there. An Internet survey conducted in Toronto found that 62 of 139 non-profit agencies interviewed had staff who took bed bugs home from their work—often after a client home visit. Other non- residential infestations in schools, daycares, offices, and theatres, and on transit make it possible For individuals to develop a bed bug infestation without any direct contact with an infested home. This accelerates the pace at which bed bugs move from high-risk settings to normally low-risk settings, and broadens the infestation more quickly.

Despite the concrete evidence that bed bugs are infesting non-residential sites including offices and public facilities, virtually no policies exist to address non-residential infestations on anything but a reactive basis. Research located no proactive inspection of public facilities, no significant body of human resource policies addressing the impact of workplace infestations, no consistent policies for compensating staff for infestations at home obtained through work, and no consistent policies for addressing the impact clients with severe bed bug problems have on fellow service users, staff, or facilities.

The well-established incidence of non-residential infestation, its significant impact on the rate of spreading for bed bugs, and the lack of proactive public policy on the matter exposes

communities to accelerating rates of infestation and a dramatic broadening of the types of homes and facilities that will confront infestations.