Ban on Used Mattresses May Not Eliminate Bed Bug Woes, City Says

Clutching a clear plastic bag containing possessions she fears may be infested by bedbugs, a 57-year-old woman shared her story with a City Council committee yesterday.

"This bug doesn't care about clean. It eats your blood. It sucks your blood," the woman, Debbie, who refused to give her last name because she claims her husband vowed to file for divorce if news of the household infestation became public, said.

Debbie — who contributes to the Bedbug Blog — said she's spent thousands of dollars to rid her home of the wingless insects, and she now sleeps on an inflatable mattress because she's so afraid of being bitten.

While saying he was sympathetic to such bedbug victims, a representative of the Bloomberg administration told the committee that one component of a bill aimed at stopping the spread of bedbugs — a ban on refurbished mattresses — could be financially crippling to poor people.

A refurbished mattress priced at $40 might cost almost $100 when purchased new, the legislative director of the Department of Consumer Affairs, Andrew Eiler, said.

At the very least, another witness said, the ban — which would affect the approximately 130 dealers of second-hand mattresses who operate in the state — would be ineffective.

"As long as used mattresses have value, they will remain a commodity despite attempts to regulate their movements," a Harvard University entomologist, Richard Pollack, said. He said the ban would be ineffective because the bedbug, Cimex lectularius, doesn't confine itself to mattresses.

Mr. Eiler said state law requires refurbished mattresses to carry a label stating that they are used, but the law requiring that they be sanitized is toothless because the state never promulgated regulations about how to go about cleaning them.

A spokesman for the New York Department of State said the agency didn't establish mattress sanitation regulations because the sanitation process would have proved prohibitively expensive.

"It's kind of like people don't fix transistor radios," Eamon Moynihan said.

"What we believe is that this is not a core public health issue," the department's director of environmental surveillance and policy, Daniel Kass, said, explaining that bedbugs, while annoying, are do not pose the same problems of insects that transmit disease.

That assessment bothered several of the council members, who pressed the administration to tackle bedbug anguish as a mental health issue.

"Mental health-wise, it's really, really a challenge," the sponsor of the bedbug bill, Council Member Gale Brewer of Manhattan, said. "People are really freaking out."