Bedbugs reported in Shelton Hall

Two Shelton Hall residents reported bedbug infestations in their room last week, prompting Boston University officials to call an extermination company and tell the residents to remain silent to avoid spreading panic, the residents said.

Though the university has not confirmed that an insect one student caught in her bed was in fact a bedbug, Shelton fifth-floor roommates Michelle Archambault and Laurie Kalaghan, along with their two other roommates, were ordered to pack their belongings and avoid the room for a six-hour bedbug extermination period.

Kalaghan, a College of Arts and Sciences freshman, discovered a bedbug crawling on her sheets Feb. 13 and captured it in a jar, she said. She brought the jar to the Shelton Office of Residence Life. The Shelton ORL immediately called All-Star Pest Services, the extermination company BU uses to eliminate bedbugs.

The day before, College of Engineering freshman Chris Mattaboni, who lives next door to Kalaghan, revealed bite marks on his skin to her and Archambault, who live in room 505.

Before All-Star sprayed the room, ORL gave the roommates 24 hours to pack their belongings after the incident that afternoon, she said. They told the residents to wash their linens in hot water and move all the furniture away from the wall to prepare for the exterminator's arrival the next day.

"We had to pack everything," Archambault said.

All-Star visited the residents for a consultation the next day and sprayed the rooms Thursday afternoon, Archambault said. She spent the afternoon on a different floor because she could not go into her room for six hours during the spraying.

"[The inconvenience] is better than having bites all over," she said. "[The bedbugs] need to be gotten rid of."

All-Star suggested the bedbugs came from the luggage of a neighbor who traveled to Hong Kong over Winter Break, Archambault said. There is also a possibility the bedbugs traveled from room to room, she said.

Archambault said few people "freaked out" when she told her neighbors about the bedbug incidents, despite BU officials advising her and her roommates to avoid panic by not spreading news about the situation.

People usually spread bedbugs from one building to another through luggage and used furniture, said Boston Inspectional Services Housing Director Dion Irish. The cleanliness of a room has no effect on preventing bedbugs.

ORL did not respond to phone calls and emails from the past several days.

The exterminators will re-spray the room during Spring Break, Archambault said. Exterminators will spray a room twice to eliminate all bedbugs and their eggs, Irish said.

"It really requires a lot of effort from the exterminator," he said. "You can have a lot of success with it, if you do it correctly."

Exterminators need to aggressively spray when eliminating bedbugs because the insects can be difficult to kill, Irish said. The bedbugs can easily spread from one room to another, which may have been the case in Shelton, Archambault said.

Part of the aggressive spraying includes spraying in the rooms above and below the main infestation site, Irish said. All-Star has not done this in Shelton, BU spokesman Colin Riley said.

Despite a bedbug outbreak in the Allston-Brighton area last fall, the BU campus had only experienced one reported bedbug case in the past year before last week, said former ORL Assistant Director Dwight Atherton in a Nov. 3 Daily Free Press article.

Kalaghan's mother paid to have new mattresses installed for her daughter and all of her roommates after Kalaghan said she suspected the bedbugs originated from a rip in her mattress. Most of the 505 residents were not concerned about sleeping in the room after doing more online research and finding bedbugs cannot transfer disease, Archambault said.

Bedbug bites are not particularly harmful to humans, but their effects are mostly psychological, Irish said.

Bedbugs have "not been proven to transmit disease," he said. "They're a nuisance."

While bedbug cases have risen nationally, Boston's education efforts on bedbugs have lowered the number of cases in the city, Irish said. Boston had less than 200 confirmed cases of bedbug infestation last year and approximately 500 over the past four years. During that same four-year time span, New York City had about 4,000 bedbug infestations.

"Collaboratively, we have been able to slow the growth," Irish said. "We are continuing to educate folks."