Bedbugs: Are Unwanted Guests In Your Hotel Bed?

FRANKLIN COUNTY—They’re creepy. They’re crawly. Chances are … they’re in your hotel or motel bed.

NBC 4’s Mike Bowersock GETS ANSWERS on why it’s happening and what’s being done about it.

It may be tough to sleep tight and not let the bedbugs bite after the Franklin County Board of Health predicted 70 percent of all Franklin County hotels and motels are (or have been) home to the blood-sucking insects.

Hotels don’t want to talk about them, and getting rid of bedbugs has become more difficult.

Gerry Wegner is with Varment Guard. He’s in the business of figuring out better ways to kill bedbugs.

Wegner lets the insects feed on him so he can keep them alive and perform experiments.

Wegner told NBC 4 the bedbug population has been growing because there are fewer allowable methods to kill the insects.

“The practices of our industry—the pest-management industry—we’ve been encouraged over the last few decades to be minimalists in our application of pesticides and to not do the kind of broadcast treatment indoors and outdoors that we used to do decades ago. So there was a degree of protection from those broadcast treatments although they may not have been environmentally or ecologically sound,“ Wegner said.

Bedbugs are adaptable, too. The insects shoot a numbing solution into the skin before biting so the sleeping person doesn’t feel the pinch.

Wegner said returning back to some of the old ways of bug extermination could be the most effective.

“There was more volume of pesticide/residual insecticides used decades ago that we’ve been weaned away from by the EPA and the desires of the general public,“ Wegner said.

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