Catherine Saint Louis of The New York Times reports on a bedbug sniffling dog at a library in Wichita, Kansas after a patron complained of being bitten by a bedbug in a lounge chair. As libraries are scrambling to deal with the problem, so are some book borrowers. As Nicole Gustas a regular who borrows three or four books a week, returned several in Ziploc Bags, explaining that a bedbug had crawled out of a copy of True Blood while she was reading it.
John Furman, the owner of Boot-a-Pest, a team of bedbug exterminators based on Long Island, said he has had hundreds of clients buy a portable heater called
PackTite to kill bedbug life, baking any used or borrowed book as a preventive measure before taking it to bed.
The PackTite has become a common weapon in the war against bedbugs in libraries, which sells for about $300. Cincinnati, for example, has 48 for its 41 libraries.
The PackTite was designed to heat-treat luggage. But now, as David James, an owner of Nuvenco, the company that makes the PackTite, noted, libraries across the country, we hear from them on a weekly basis.