Dynamics of bed bug infestations and control under disclosure policies

Abstract

Bed bugs have reemerged in the United States and worldwide over recent decades, presenting a major challenge to both public health practitioners and housing authorities. A number of municipalities have proposed or initiated policies to stem the bed bug epidemic, but little guidance is available to evaluate them. One contentious policy is disclosure, whereby landlords are obligated to notify potential tenants of current or prior bed bug infestations. Aimed to protect tenants from leasing an infested rental unit, disclosure also creates a kind of quarantine, partially and temporarily removing infested units from the market. Here, we develop a mathematical model for the spread of bed bugs in a generalized rental market, calibrate it to parameters of bed bug dispersion and housing turnover, and use it to evaluate the costs and benefits of disclosure policies to landlords. We find disclosure to be an effective control policy to curb infestation prevalence. Over the short term (within 5 years), disclosure policies result in modest increases in cost to landlords, while over the long term, reductions of infestation prevalence lead, on average, to savings. These results are insensitive to different assumptions regarding the prevalence of infestation, rate of introduction of bed bugs from other municipalities, and the strength of the quarantine effect created by disclosure. Beyond its application to bed bugs, our model offers a framework to evaluate policies to curtail the spread of household pests and is appropriate for systems in which spillover effects result in highly nonlinear cost–benefit relationships.

Uncovering the hidden cost of bed bugs

“…The study by Xie et al (19) is not without important caveats. For example, after relaxing the assumption that populations mixed randomly, they found that the costs and burdens became concentrated such that little overall benefit was realized.…”

“…Their study demonstrates-using a mathematical model-that mandatory disclosures of bed bug infestations by landlords can lower economic costs and reduce the overall burden of bed bugs in a relatively short amount of time. The paper by Xie et al (19) sheds light on the significant epidemiological and economical consequences of bed bug infestation and opens many new avenues for future research.…”

“…The potentially large economic cost of bed bug infestation underlies the main conclusion of Xie et al (19) that mandatory disclosure is a highly effective strategy, both in terms of economics and of reducing the prevalence of bed bugs. Although a comprehensive economic analysis remains to be done (7,25), bed bugs are a persistent and costly issue for health care facilities (1, 13), urban environments (6,7,24), hotels (2), and office buildings (26).…”

“…Given the evidence for socioeconomic clustering of bed bug infestation (7,24,28,29), structured population mobility and nonrandom bed bug incidence is a critically important line of research to advance. Second, Xie et al (19) focused on the costs to landlords and did not consider costs and savings to tenants or municipalities. As they note, there could be a considerable increase in net savings if tenants are accounted for.…”

“…Paired with existing research on bed bugs, the Xie et al (19) study raises a number of important questions for future research. First, what is the risk of infectious-disease transmission from bed bugs?…”