Imagine you run a hospital and you get bed bugs in a patient room. Never mind the fact that the risk of spreading disease is very low, Infectious Control is telling you the bugs have to go. You also know you don’t want to deal with the complaints and don’t want to gain the reputation of having bugs. You call your pest management professional and he wants you to throw out the carpeting, the furniture, and quarantine the area for 6 weeks while they work on it with repeated chemical treatments. All you can see is the tens of thousands of dollars lost by not having the space. Does this “professional” know?
This has happened, undoubtedly many times across the country. By using heat, we’ve been able to take a Labor & Delivery Room, Emergency Room, Ambulance, and more sensitive medical areas and put them back in service the next day, without using any chemicals.
Of course Medical environments are sensitive environments, and heat must be used not only effectively but cautiously to not damage equipment, the structure, and to be minimally invasive to the others working around you. You must follow hospital protocols for sub-contractors and good safety practices.
If you have an infested ambulance, hospital or medical facility, contact Adam’s today. We are willing to go beyond our normal service area or perhaps can recommend someone in your area we know and trust.
Loading ...
Todd, what type of preparations did you have to take before heating these medical rooms for bed bugs? You must have had to evaluate the sensitively and specificity of each room (emergency room, surgery, post-op, waiting rooms, medical population types (geriatric vs. children’s ward). I’m sure the work was very impressive.
Have you considered switching over to freezing techniques (Cryonite)? We do not yet do enough bed bug work daily to warrant the cost of either heat or freeze treats, but hopefully that will change.
Regards,
Gerry
It is a good question. Everyone is concerned about what damage the heat can do. We all know that at certain temperatures, bugs die and damage can occur. That is the science of a heat treatment. The art part is controlling your heat to NOT damage things, to get a lethal kill, to not spread the bugs, to get a uniform distribution of heat (if desired), and if not desired, how you control it the way you want. You can just see heat, so it can be a bit abstract.
Maybe that was long winded, but the point is each situation is different and you had better understand what equipment you are using and where things break at. We often ask the customer what the tolerance levels are of the equipment, and often they go to the manufacturer and can get that info. For instance, the ambulance we did we were told it could handle 150 or hotter.
There is something to be said for the artistry of pest control. That is why even if we each offer the same service you can still find very different outcomes.
I think for heat treatments to be consistently successful it needs to be 90% knowledge, 10% artistry. Otherwise, there is too much room for error unless you only send your best technician. Even then, the chance error will occur. I’ve always been a believer in cross-training a large group of pest technicians, so I could move around the parts of an organization. But I can see where these heat treatments could be so tricky that I would stick with a very small and tightly monitored group of techs.
It sounds like an awful lot of work to have the customer go back to their equipment manufacturer to get heat resistance info. That could involve a whole lot of research in a hospital where there is an enormous amount of sensitive equipment.
Thanks for your response.
Best regards for the new year.
Gerry