“They don’t want to hug you anymore; they don’t want you coming over,” said Mr. Sparig, of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “You’re like a leper.”
At the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which recently had a bedbug breakout, defense lawyers are skittish about visiting, and it is not because of the fierce prosecutors.
Even Steven Smollens, a housing lawyer who has helped many tenants with bedbugs, has his guard up. Those clients are barred from his office. “I meet outside,” he said. “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”
Beyond the bites and the itching, the bother and the expense, victims of the nation’s most recent plague are finding that an invisible scourge awaits them in the form of bedbug stigma. Friends begin to keep their distance. Invitations are rescinded. For months, one woman said, her mother was afraid to tell her that she had an infestation. When she found out and went to clean her mother’s apartment, she said, “Nobody wanted to help me.”
Fear and suspicion are creeping into the social fabric wherever bedbugs are turning up, which is almost everywhere: “Public health agencies across the country have been overwhelmed by complaints about bedbugs,” said a
joint statement this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Some of the fear is rooted in fact: The bugs, while they are not known to transmit disease, can travel on clothing, jump into pocketbooks and lurk in the nooks of furniture. And they do, of course, bite.
Wenay James, a credit card account executive in Chicago, said that last year, a friend who had just had an infestation brought her children over for a visit. “I’m staring at their seat,” she said, “wondering if the cushion is going to run across the room.”
“I haven’t been over to her place in a year,” Ms. James said. “I don’t want the cooties.”
Even in New York, where the roach and the rat are considered members of the melting pot, no one wants to be associated with the minuscule pests that treat sleeping bodies as smorgasbords.
Whole livelihoods are considered in jeopardy. Tutors and music teachers, who go from apartment to apartment, fear losing their clients. An Upper West Side caterer canceled work and dressed in long sleeves and pants during July’s hottest days so no one would see her bites. “Who is going to want me in their private home?” said the woman, who was interviewed on the condition that her name not be disclosed, for obvious reasons.
Businesses are fearing the stigma as well, as reports of infestations multiply. In recent weeks, bedbugs snuggled into the seats at AMC’s movie theater in Times Square, crept around a Victoria’s Secret store on Lexington Avenue and the offices of Elle Magazine and hitchhiked into the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.
“There were attorneys that didn’t want to come to our building,” said an assistant district attorney who would identify herself only as Caroline A. “I don’t blame them; I wouldn’t want to go somewhere where there is known to be bedbugs.”
But those places are becoming increasingly hard to avoid. Bedbugs, once nearly eradicated, have spread across New York City, in part because of the decline in the use of DDT. According to the city’s Department of Housing and Preservation, the number of bedbug violations has gone up 67 percent in the last two years. In the most recent fiscal year, which ended on June 30, the city’s 311 help line recorded 12,768 bedbug complaints, 16 percent more than the previous year and 39 percent above the year before. A New York City
community health survey showed that in 2009, 1 in 15 New Yorkers had bedbugs in their homes, a number that is probably higher now.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that bedbugs’ social cost is rising as well.
The Upper West Side caterer’s best friend was too scared to invite her to come out to the Hamptons this summer. When Hilary Davis, a waitress from Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, had her apartment treated two years ago because of bedbugs, her friends and even her boyfriend refused to take her in. (But they were willing to take care of her cat.) “So I was left in a bug-ridden apartment alone,” Ms. Davis said.
Everyday behaviors are changing, too. “I don’t go to the movies anymore, I’m not sitting in those seats, and don’t sit on wooden benches,” said Gale A. Brewer, a member of the City Council. When she sees a mattress in her path, she said, she crosses the street.
But the panic, certainly, is not widespread. “It’s all part of life,” said Janice Page of the Bronx, who recently thought she had received two bites while traveling in California. (They turned out to be mosquito bites.) “What am I going to do? Walk around with a fumigation can?”
“It’s like terrorism,” said a woman as she ran into the recently sprayed AMC theater. “Just cross your fingers and keep going.”
A bill awaiting Gov. David A. Paterson’s signature would require landlords to disclose to potential tenants whether any apartment in the building has had bedbugs within the previous year. The bill passed the Legislature despite opposition from many landlords, who feared it would stigmatize their buildings.
What Spreads Faster Than Bedbugs? Stigma
Kirsten Luce for The New York Times
Ruby, a bedbug-sniffing beagle for NYBedbugDogs.com, inspected a child’s bedroom in Queens recently.
By EMILY B. HAGER
Published: August 20, 2010
Jeremy Sparig spent months fighting
bedbugs. Now, to some people, he is like a mattress left on the street, something best avoided in these times.
Mr. Sparig fought his landlord in court, representing himself, and recently settled the case for a rare 100 percent rent cut for eight months of the nine that his apartment was infested, as long as he promised to move out. Not surprisingly, he is having trouble finding a new home, doubly stigmatized by having had bedbugs, which he acknowledges to prospective landlords, and by having been in court with his previous one. Now, he said, they “don’t even let me come over” to see an apartment.
Perhaps no one is more tuned into bedbug paranoia than Steven Brodsky, a Midtown psychotherapist. He treats people suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder, and, in that capacity, has attracted a number of bedbug victims.
Patients tell him they feel like they are “sacrificing themselves because they’re literally being eaten as they sleep,” he said.
“It really is like H1N1,” Dr. Brodsky said, using the clinical term for last year’s bugaboo, swine flu. “Everybody is concerned about it, wondering if they’ll be next.”
But Mr. Brodsky himself likes to sleep tight, once the last patient of the day has left. “I do check the chair to see if there’s anything,” he said.
Emma Graves Fitzsimmons and Mathew R. Warren contributed reporting.
Honda/Getty
A glass vial containing live bedbugs. Jeremy Sparig woke up to bloody sheets in his apartment last December, which was only the beginning of his bedbug nightmare.
Jeremy Sparig's bedbug horror story began when he woke up one morning last December and found blood all over his sheets.
The 38-year-old photographer knew he had a problem, but had no idea what kind of Kafkaesque nightmare he was going to endure.
He discovered that the rent-stabilized
East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, building he had been so psyched to get into a year earlier had long been a bedbug breeding ground.
"I called my neighbor downstairs, and she told me the building had problems with this for years," he told the Daily News yesterday. "It was just getting passed around from apartment to apartment."
Sparig's bloodcurdling tale has become an all-too-typical
New York story. A Daily News poll revealed yesterday that more than one in 10 New Yorkers has suffered similarly spine-tingling scourges.
From creaky walkups to the poshest digs - even the
Brooklyn district attorney's office was fumigated this weekend - no one is immune.
Sparig said he called his landlord,
Antonia Ortiz, and she sent the super to spray pesticide, but was unwilling to do more. The toxic treatment didn't make a dent.
"For the next several months, I got into bed every night wrapped up like a Tibetan Sherpa," he said. "But I'd still wake up every few hours with them crawling on my face."
Most nights it was hard for him to sleep at all.
He said things reached a head when one night he slapped at a bug, and, when it burst, blood sprayed into his eye.
Sparig said he hounded Ortiz and she told him to hire an exterminator and take the cost out of his rent, which he'd stopped paying while the problem persisted.
Before an exterminator could get to work, Ortiz slapped him with a suit in Housing Court in March for nonpayment. Her lawyer didn't return calls.
It became clear Sparig was facing an uphill legal battle.
"I was prepared to fight, but when I consulted with lawyers, they said I'd be lucky to get 50% of the back rent waived - if anything at all," he said.
He persisted, and after a crash course in navigating the Byzantine halls of Housing Court, won a settlement giving him a 100% waiver for 81/2 months' rent. There was only one stipulation - that he move out at the end of this month.
Sparig says while this may seem like a victory, counting up the things he had to trash and the cost of cleaning, he was out far more.
Now he's stuck having to replace his $1,100-a-month digs.
He says most landlords aren't even willing to show him an apartment when they hear about his ordeal, and the rest insist he ditch everything he owns.
"Most landlords don't want to deal with me," he said.
lalpert@nydailynews.comBed Bugs Hit Empire State Building, Make People Unpopular
These bed bugs have had enough of their
movie theater and
clothing store infestations. Now, they've taken their terrifying act to the big time, and have settled themselves into the employee changing room at the Empire State Building. But the ESB doesn't seem too worried,
telling the Daily News, "Like so many other buildings in New York City, the Empire State Building had a small incident of bedbugs. The occurrence was specific to a uniform storage area in the basement of the building. The area has been treated and fully cleared." Don't they know the mere whiff of an infestation is enough to turn a beloved city icon into a social pariah?
Speaking of outcasts, the Times interviewed everyone's favorite
bed bug poster boy Jeremy Sparig—because speaking with the Daily News wasn't enough to guarantee he'd never find another apartment in this town. He said of those who know him,
“They don’t want to hug you anymore; they don’t want you coming over. You’re like a leper." But those who haven't been plagued by the pests aren't taking any chances. One Chicago woman said her friend had the critters a year ago, but she still hasn't been to her house. "I don’t want the cooties," she explained.
Though it's causing him problems, Sparig at least has the courtesy to warn people of his bed bug problems. In a
wise move move that puts even more in jeopardy, many of those with bed bugs are hiding it, fearing it could cost them their jobs and relationships. One caterer said she wears long sleeves to hide her bites, arguing, "Who is going to want me in their private home?" As one woman said of the epidemic,
"It’s like terrorism." Scared to go outside? Check. Suspect your neighbors? Check. Invaded a city landmark? Check. Bloomberg's 9/11? We'll see.
Pa. woman sues store over bedbug complaint (66%)
08/20/2010 - NORRISTOWN, Pa.—A Philadelphia-area woman is suing a furniture store claiming it leased her furniture infested with bedbugs and refused to take it back when she complained. The suit filed Thursday by similar results
The Associated Press
In pictures: Vampire animals
