Bed Bugs in Student Housing Around Kent and Akron

Report it the day you suspect it: residence life if you live on campus, the property owner if you do not. Then leave everything where it is. Bed bugs travel in what you move, so a student who bags up a comforter and heads for a friend's couch has started a second infestation instead of escaping the first.

Why Does Student Housing Get Hit More Than Other Rentals?

Turnover, not housekeeping. The Ohio State University Extension bed bug fact sheet lists the buildings where bed bugs turn up most often, and the thing they share is a high rate of occupant turnover: hotels, motels, hostels, dormitories, shelters, apartment complexes and tenements. The same fact sheet says an infestation is not usually a reflection of poor hygiene or bad housekeeping, which is worth saying out loud to a roommate who has decided this is about whose laundry pile it is.

Student housing stacks turnover higher than almost any other kind of rental. A room changes hands every August and often again in January, and a furnished room keeps the same mattress, frame and desk through all of it. Extension notes that eggs, young and adult bed bugs ride in luggage, clothing, bedding and furniture, which happen to be the four things that move in and out of a residence hall on move-in weekend.

The National Pest Management Association, working with the University of Florida, has surveyed pest control professionals on where they treated bed bugs in the past year. Dormitories are not the top of that list, and the places above them are the reason:

A dorm room sits downstream of every line above it. Students arrive from houses and apartments and pass through hotels on the way, and a furnished room in Kent or Akron that takes a new occupant every August collects those chances year after year.

Who Do You Tell, And How Fast?

The day you notice it, in writing, to whoever is responsible for the building. On campus that is the housing or residence life office, usually through a maintenance request rather than a conversation in a hallway. Off campus it is the property owner or manager, by text or email. Ohio law puts the duty to keep a rental fit and habitable on the landlord, and how a particular lease handles pest treatment is between you and the owner, but the report is yours to make and the date on it is the part that protects you later.

Then tell your roommates, before you tell the group chat. In a shared house the couch, the armchairs and the throw blanket in the living room are common exposure, and a treatment that covers one bedroom while the shared furniture goes untouched is a treatment that gets repeated in six weeks.

Can You Just Sleep Somewhere Else Until It Is Handled?

No, and this is the mistake that turns one room into four. The instinct is to get away from the bed. Bed bugs do not stay behind when you do, because they are in the bag, the backpack and the hoodie that went with you, and the room you fled does not clear itself in the meantime. Ohio State University Extension puts it plainly: a bed bug can survive at least several months without a blood meal. An empty room is a room on pause.

Until an inspection and a treatment are scheduled, the useful thing is to keep everything contained:

• Keep sleeping where you have been sleeping. It is not a pleasant instruction. It keeps the problem in one room.
• Do not carry the mattress, the bedding or the frame out through a shared hallway, stairwell or elevator.
• Do not store clothes or boxes at a friend's apartment, in a car trunk or in a campus storage room.
• Do not buy a fogger. It pushes bed bugs deeper into walls and, in a building, deeper has a direction.
• Do not put anything on the curb before someone has looked at it. Furniture you discard is furniture somebody else picks up.
• Pull the bed a few inches off the wall and keep bedding from touching the floor, which cuts the bridges without moving anything.

What Are The Rules For A Shared Laundry Room?

The dryer does the killing, and the walk to and from the machines is where students reinfest themselves. The Environmental Protection Agency gives the number: a household dryer on high heat for 30 minutes kills bed bugs and their eggs. Washing on its own is not the step that does it.

The EPA also writes out the sequence for shared laundry rooms, which is the part most people skip:

• Carry everything to the laundry room in sealed plastic bags.
• If there is an active infestation, bin that bag once the machine is loaded and use a new one for the trip back.
• Wash, then dry on the high setting for a full 30 minutes.
• Take clean items out of the dryer straight into a clean bag.
• Fold at home. The folding table and the chairs in a shared laundry room belong to the whole building.
• Keep clean items sealed in a bag until the room has been treated.

A basement laundry room in an older house off Main Street in Kent or in a converted single near the University of Akron is doing the same job as a laundromat: it collects soft goods from every unit in the building and hands them back. None of that is an argument for avoiding it, only for bagging what you carry.

How Do You Go Home For Break Without Taking Them Along?

Treat the drive home the way you would treat leaving a hotel room. Fall break, Thanksgiving and the long December gap are all transfer windows, and each one ends with somebody unpacking a duffel onto a bed in a house that had no bed bugs in it that morning.

• Run the laundry sequence above before you pack, and pack into a bag that has been through a hot dryer itself or has been sitting empty in a clean closet.
• Choose the hard-sided suitcase over the duffel if you have both, because it gives you fewer seams and folds to search.
• At your parents' house, the bag goes on a bathtub floor, a tiled entry or a garage floor. Not a bed, not a couch, not a carpeted bedroom.
• Everything that can take heat goes back through a hot dryer for 30 minutes before it reaches a drawer or a closet.
• Tell your family before you arrive rather than after. It is a short awkward conversation instead of a long one in January.
• Do not assume five quiet weeks fixed the room you left. On Extension's survival figures, the population is still in there when you get back, and hungrier.

What Settles It, A Photo In The Group Chat Or An Inspection?

Physical evidence in the room, found by somebody who has seen it before. The same National Pest Management Association research found that only 29 percent of Americans can correctly identify a bed bug, and bites settle nothing on their own: reactions run from nothing at all to welts, and plenty of other things bite.

Ohio State University Extension points an inspection at the mattress, box spring and bed frame first, then the cracks and crevices around them, window and door frames, floor cracks, carpet tack boards, baseboards, electrical boxes, furniture, pictures and wall hangings, drapery pleats, loosened wallpaper, cracks in plaster and ceiling molding. A lofted bed adds bolt holes and joints to that list, and a room with a futon in it adds a second bed nobody thinks of as one. Our bed bug identification guide shows the staining, the shed skins and the eggs, and is worth two minutes with a flashlight before you report anything.

On the health question: the EPA calls bed bugs a public health pest while stating they are not known to transmit disease. What it does list is allergic reactions to bites, secondary infections such as impetigo from scratching, and anxiety and insomnia in people living with an infestation. For a student in the middle of a semester, that last pair is usually the real cost, and it is a reason to report the room rather than wait and see.

When a room is confirmed, heat is our lead method, because it reaches every life stage including the eggs, typically in a single day, and leaves no chemical residue in a room somebody sleeps in. Bed bug jobs do need preparation, so the office talks it through with you before anything is scheduled. Our Akron bed bug heat treatment page covers how the method works for rentals and student housing in Summit County, and our bed bug treatment page covers the bio-chemical option for the rooms where heat is not the right fit.

Getting A Room Looked At

State Termite has worked Northeast Ohio since 1933 out of North Canton and Hartville. There is no Akron storefront and no Kent storefront: crews run into Summit and Portage counties as ordinary work, so a student rental is a normal appointment rather than a special trip. Bed bug inspections are free, and we will tell you plainly if what you found is not a bed bug. See everything we cover around campus on our Kent pest control page, then tell us what you are seeing and when it started: schedule a free inspection or call 330-494-6199.