Apple seeds are no longer just the innocent leftovers of a munch on a lush fruit. Nowadays they’re the shape of dread, as more and more of us anxiously lift our mattresses hunting for seed-sized crawlies.
The unfounded scare at Cineplex this week warns of a possible future where people avoid swank bars with plush sofas, public transit and crowds, and curtail shopping expeditions and clothing store change rooms, not to mention green-friendly second-hand shops.
Given the major potential economic and personal consequences (once you’ve been bugged, say goodbye to friends, dinner party invites and house guests), are governments responding adequately?
Later this month, MPP Mike Colle hosts a Bed Bug Summit aimed at landlords, tenants, public health officials and frontline groups. And while it’s not clear what will come out of the gathering, it will be sadly remiss if it doesn’t offer up a menu of poverty solutions.
The fact is, while everyone is vulnerable, there’s good evidence the parasite invasion is worsened by our city’s growing inequality. Has society’s failure to deal with poverty spawned a six-legged legacy?
I ask this of Australian entomologist Stephen Doggett, author of that country’s Bed Bug Code Of Practice and an expert consulted by Toronto’s social service agencies. He tells me the bug’s tolerance for DDT and other chemicals is related to its current spread but may not be the key factor.
“Pesticide resistance is the trigger,” he says, hypothesizing that bedbugs probably developed a tolerance to chemicals sprayed to kill other insects, possibly in fighting malaria. “But you can’t say that this accounts for the degree of infestation problems.” The critical variable, he says, is poverty.
WoodGreen Community Centre’s 2009 report Bed Bugs Are Back: Are We Ready? is explicit about how low-income people fare in the face of the resurgence. While there is no correlation between poverty and bedbugs, the report is clear that low-income households are most likely to face the problem first.
And then “the challenges vulnerable people face in addressing an initial infestation, due to infirmities, financial, health and mental health disruptions, lack of resources and limited supports can result in the growth of the infestation to hundreds or thousands of bugs,” says the report.
Cathy Crowe of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee agrees. “The more you rely on individuals to cover the costs of infestations, the harder it is to manage this problem,” she says. “People in poverty are more reliant on good-natured landlords to do the right thing, which puts them at an unfair disadvantage.”
Landlords are legally bound to pay for the cleanup of a bedbug infestation, though this isn’t always a straightforward matter. As anyone who has been afflicted knows, the problem can’t be solved by fumigation alone. The expense, psychologically and in dollar terms, is forbidding. Infested belongings, including beds and furniture, need to be trashed and replaced, and treatments often have to be applied more than once to be effective. Even a cheap mattress cover costs $60. Then there are the massive personal resources needed for repeated rigorous cleaning and bagging of articles.
The disastrous erosion of Toronto’s social housing stock is also making things worse. “When housing was downloaded to municipalities, there was a lot less money for capital repairs,” says Crowe. The wearing down of buildings, the prevalence of cracks and holes in walls, and cutbacks in cleaning and maintenance have created infestations-in-waiting.
Are enough resources being devoted to the problem? “Definitely not,” says Rima Zavys, WoodGreen’s director of homelessness and housing help services and co-chair of the Toronto Bed Bug Project.
“People living in social housing don’t have the financial or emotional resources to tackle this issue the way it needs to be tackled,” she says. “It is very intense, it takes a lot of time and it is ongoing.”
The city has three staff members assigned to support those in the throes of an infestation and has coughed up a one-time $75,000 to help low-income people buy new furniture. Toronto Community Housing has had to increase its pest control budget from $1 million total to $2.5 mil just for bedbugs.
At Public Health, spokesperson Susan Sperling says the department is partnering with municipal agencies to access funding to help vulnerable individuals.
But according to Zavys, what’s needed is a provincial and federal strategy. “I don’t think the city of Toronto has the resources to effectively tackle the issue.”
That takes things back to Mike Colle and the September 29 summit. Colle says the meet is modelled on a similar gathering in NYC back in April. “I am trying to bring the whole issue to the attention of everyone at Queen’s Park,” he says.
While social equity issues are not immediately on the agenda, Colle acknowledges that there’s a place for them. “Maybe down the line this could be raised as part of the poverty agenda.” Bedbugs, he admits, are “not just a pesticide problem.”
Says Doggett, if we fail to realize the social inequalities at play, it may be impossible to control the current resurgence, and everyone will be at risk. “The choice is you can pay a little now or a lot later.”3
Matthew Hayes is a sociology professor at St. Thomas University, in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
news@nowtoronto.com
