Don't let the bedbugs bite

We all know that our furry, four-legged friends are good for a lot more than companionship (which they're certainly very good at). They bark when someone tries to break into your home. They serve as guides for the blind. They do search and rescue. They ride on fire trucks (at least in parades). They sniff out drugs. On nights like tonight, when the temperature if hovering around zero (and that's zero Fahrenheit, not Celsius), I'd certainly welcome a big old mutt who wanted to lie across the foot of my bed like a big old furry foot warmer.

Well, according to an article in yesterday's Boston Globe, dogs are also used in the hotel industry to sniff out bedbugs.

Jurys in Boston is an upscale hotel housed in the old Boston Police Headquarters. (There's another hotel in Boston built in part in the old Charles Street Jail. I can't think of the name of this hotel, but it has a bar called "Clink.")

So I'm guessing that, historically speaking, these places are no strangers to bedbugs.

But, while Jurys has never discovered any bedbugs  in their beds, nor have they heard from any itching and scratching guests about such, they do use bedbug-sniffing dogs to check their rooms out for infestation. The dogs provide an early warning system, and the one time they did start barking up a storm

...after detecting the suspicious scent of the itch-inducing insects or their eggs, the hotel fumigated two rooms and burned the mattresses.

Like a lot of other bad things - think smallpox, think polio - bedbugs had been pretty much wiped out in this country, and have been for quite a while. So, while many of us may still use the offhand term "fleabag hotel", we don't actually mean it literally. And I'm guessing most of us don't even think about what the word fleabag actually means. (Don't let those bedbugs bite.)

Apparently, there's been a resurgence of bedbug infestation that will give renewed meaning to the notion of staying in a fleabag.

The suspected culprits: "the proliferation of international travel and the dwindling potency of insecticides."

Apparently, bedbugs are relatively harmless - you won't catch bad things from them - but who wants an encounter with them? And who wants to spread them to their own home bedding?

I've had only one first-hand encounter with bedbugs, and that was in the sleeping car of an overnight train in Spain. Not that my roommate and I slept. Not realizing that the conductor was expecting a bribe to put us in a nice and harmless car, he assigned us to sleeping quarters in a six- (or was it eight-?) berth cabin occupied by four (or was it six?) young Spanish men, guest workers coming home from guest working in Germany.

We didn't speak much Spanish, but there is a universal language out there, and these muchachos were under the impression that young American girls wearing jeans were somewhat akin to prostitutes - in that we'd pretty much have at it with any one - and generous to a crowd pleasing fault in that we wouldn't charge for it.

The night was spent in eternal vigilance.

The next few days were spent itching and scratching.

A couple of months later, Joyce and I checked into a hotel in Turkey that one would have definitely suspected of fleabagism.  The lights were naked, forty watt bulbs hanging on wires. The toilet - one per floor - was one of those porcelain holes in the ground jobs you still find occasionally in Europe - I think I encountered one in Paris a few years back. At 10 o'clock each night they turned the water off, and the hole filled up pretty quickly, what with everyone on the floor.

The beds were cots, more or less, with cleanish but threadbare sheets and brick-like pillows. Fortunately, from having done little hoteling and a lot of hosteling and camping, we were equipped with both sleeping bags and something called a sleeping sack (basically, heavy sheet-like material that looked like a body bag with a slot for slipping in a pillow). Sleeping sacks were used when staying in a hostel - I guess to keep the hostel mattresses safe from, well, bedbugs that guests might be expected to carry.

In any case, sleeping in our sacks, we did not get bedbugs in our fifty-cent a night hotel in Izmir.

But there probably aren't too many people spending fifty-cents a night for a hotel room in America these days. For the hotel prices people pay, ain't nobody wants to wake up with fleas.

And so we have the bedbug sniffing dogs who so uncannily determine whether there are bedbugs - or just bedbug eggs - in hotel mattresses, allowing the exterminators to come in and do their thing. Perhaps it is all their historic experience with fleas that makes dogs so good at this job, although, what with flea and tick sprays and flea collars, "my dog has fleas" doesn't have quite the resonance that I'm sure it once did - in the "that hotel's a real fleabag era."

Is the bedbug problem really getting bigger, or are we just more finicky?

According to Orkin, they're doing more bedbug business - eradicating 25% more bedbugs in Greater Boston per month, on average, in 2007 than in 2006.

Still, there's not all that much to be worried about:

...the American Hotel & Lodging Association estimates the percentage of guests who encounter bedbugs is minuscule, given that 4 million people sleep in lodging establishments nightly.

...Judith Black, technical director at Steritech Group Inc., a pest-control company that serves the hospitality industry, found only 0.6 percent of the almost 76,000 rooms the company inspected between November 2002 and April 2006 needed to be treated for bedbugs

That's the good news.

The bad news?

...those infestations were spread across 24.4 percent of the nearly 700 US hotels it studied.

And, given whose bringing in the dogs in Boston, it's not exactly the dumps that have a problem.

So, if you've got the travel bug there is some chance that you'll encounter the travel bedbug, however remote.

Me? I'm not too worried - although I may check and see whether I still have the sleeping sack from my hosteling days of yore.

Good night. Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite.