This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Feast on turkey and stuffing with the relatives this Thanksgiving, but don't let the bedbugs come home to feast on you.
Holiday travel gives the blood-sucking insects a chance to hijack your suitcase and clothes. By January, they may be a menace that's almost impossible to ignore.
After several years of skyrocketing bedbug complaints, numbers have reached a plateau, according to data from the Salt Lake Valley Health Department. But that doesn't mean bedbugs, which feed while humans are in deep sleep, are on the decline.
"At this point we are all going to have a baseline level of infestation," said Diane Keay, environmental health supervisor at the health department. "They're not going away."
Every community — though not every house — will struggle with the hungry bugs, and cleanup costs and logistics may make it hard for some people to ever get rid of them.
In 2004, bedbugs were almost unheard of. The health department received a single complaint that year. By 2008, the number had exploded to 99 complaints, primarily by tenants of rental properties or hotels, which the health department regulates. As of this year, the number rose to 121 complaints, similar to numbers in the past few years.
This does not include the hundreds of phone calls the health department receives annually from homeowners looking for advice about an infestation.
"We've always said it's not a respecter of economic or social, ethnic background of any sort," said Keay, who receives a bed bug call almost every day. "What we are realizing now, however, is that the truly poor are going to have a hard time getting rid of them."
Some of her standard advice to anxious callers includes isolating the bed, adding a dustmite-proof mattress cover and regularly running the bed clothes in a hot dryer. A clean tuna fish can with half an inch of mineral oil should be put under each leg of the bed to essentially suffocate the bedbugs.
But everything from buying the mattress cover to having laundry access can impede an impoverished person from handling the outbreak. Elderly or disabled people may not be able to repeatedly dry their sheets and remake the bed.
The good news is that despite the headlines about infestations in New York City and other cities worldwide, no definitive link has been made between bedbugs and disease. In other words, they might be supremely annoying, but they don't make you sick.
When staying at a hotel, Keay and other inspectors take precautions. They begin by placing their luggage in the bathtub before checking behind the headboard and under the mattress, particularly at the head of the bed.
Some people wrap their suitcases in a plastic bag to create a barrier. Everything should be laundered with hot water and dried on high once you return home.
But in some cases, bedbugs may be in your home before you are.
A few weeks after Christine Van Damme and her family moved into a five-bedroom rental house in West Valley City last spring, her husband and brother-in-law noticed red, itchy bites on their arms and legs. The brother-in-law, staying in the guest bedroom, seemed to be suffering the most.
"For some reason they loved to snack on him," she said.
At first, the family thought spiders were the culprit. When a friend spotted a bug on the guest bed, they searched online and realized bedbugs were probably to blame.
"I was horrified," Van Damme remembered. "I'm, like, thinking — how did we get these? We're super clean."
Bugged Out Pest Control came out twice to the rental house to treat the bugs, and they haven't returned.
The secretive bugs rely on human blood to survive and can follow a carbon dioxide "trail" throughout an apartment building searching for food.
Depending on where someone lives in Utah, some health departments will assist tenants in identifying and eradicating the infestation.
One heavily hit apartment visited by the Weber-Morgan Health Department had a distinctive maple syrup smell from the digestion of blood, recalled Frank Carlsen, an environmental health scientist.
"We have had a few calls from schools where kids have gone to school and [people have] seen them crawling on their backpacks," he said, about students bringing an unwelcome passenger from home.
Weber-Morgan has seen its complaints decline this year, totaling only about five in the past six months compared with two or three times that number the year before. Increased public awareness about how to eliminate the bugs may be the explanation.
"We wish we could get rid of them," Carlsen said. "The more people, the more chance for victims."
To read more on bed bugs:
Go to http://www.cdc.gov/parasites/bedbugs. To make a complaint in Salt Lake County, call 385-468-3835.