Bed Bugs, Heat, and Hotel Rooms

No pest has shown greater resilience to extermination than the bed bug. For hundreds of years, infestations were doused, gassed and sprayed with all manner of insecticides. DDT and other chemicals (e.g., malathion, diazinon) provided relief, but the bugs have since returned with a vengeance. To complicate matters, today’s insecticides aren’t performing as well as their predecessors, and companies are becoming apprehensive about the amount of pesticide being applied to beds, couches and other indoor surfaces. Consequently, more firms are looking to non-chemical approaches — like structural heating — to battle infestations. By Michael F. Potter, Alvaro Romero,