Bed bugs bugging college students

University of Central Missouri freshman Allie Edwards found the creeping, crawling, blood sucking critters in her dorm room, even on her pillow.  She encased one in plastic to convince school housing officials she really had bed bugs.  “We took it down and showed them and they said it was definitely a bed bug,” said Allie.  The blood sucking critters have already invaded her dorm room twice this semester.  They’re also down the hall, and swarming on the floor below too.

“Whenever you’re going to sleep, there’s like bugs crawling on you,” said UCM student Jordan Reiter.  Adult bed bugs can be the size of an apple seed, but bed bug babies are so small they’re barely visible to the human eye.  The damage they leave, though, is clear to see.

“Really gross,” is how Edwards described the situation which left red bumps all over her legs. “It was bad.” 

“It was all swollen up,” she continued. “It was like welts. It looked like I had hives.”  The nocturnal bed biters were nearly unheard of a few years ago.  However, since the beginning of the last academic year, besides the University of Central Missouri, there have been cases at Northwest Missouri, Missouri State, and 70 cases at Wichita State.

It is a pest unexpected by college administrators.“We didn’t have them until about three years ago,” said Patrick Bradley, director of housing at the University of Central Missouri.  At UCM, since the beginning of the last academic year, Bradley confirmed bed bugs in 32 rooms, treating many of them multiple times.

Some parents and students with infested rooms are angry, not only because those bed bugs keep returning, but because in some cases UCM has failed to fulfill it’s pledge to replace infested beds.  Students say they discovered the discrepancy by marking their beds before officials displaced them to treat the room for bed bugs.  Returning students then looked for their markings when they moved back into their treated rooms. Freshman Lauren Pulse was disturbed with the findings.

“It was the same mattress and the same bed frame,” Pulse said.  “You ask them to do something and they don’t,” says freshman Molley Buckley

The university says it has since instituted tighter controls to ensure facilities employees dispose of bed bugs from infested rooms. “What we’re doing right now is everything we know,” Bradley said.

Traditional poison often doesn’t work against the pests. Nearly unheard of a few years ago, bed bugs are crawling into more beds at more universities nationwide every year.

At the University of Florida, they heat students’ mattresses and other infected items in a makeshift, room-sized oven, heating until it reaches a deadly temperature, 113 degrees, long enough to kill everything inside.  Heat treatments are just one of the options UCM is considering instituting.  “I think we’re going to have to use every possible thing that we can possibly use,” Bradley says. “The heat treatment, steam, the chemicals.”

Exterminators often can’t kill them on the first try using poison alone.  Experts cite government restrictions on more powerful insecticides and increased international travel with creating an explosion of bedbugs nationwide.  “These things are all over the place,” Bradley says. “They’re traveling in from all kinds of ways.”

Researchers predict it will get worse, and schools are warning students to look in the crevices of their beds and inspect their luggage when they travel.  The warnings are little comfort to some students.  “Just the fact that you know you’re going to sleep and you know that you’re about to sleep and have bugs crawling all over you, it’s absolutely disgusting,” Pulse said.