Socioeconomic drivers of urban pest prevalence

Chris Sutherland,Andrew J Greenlee,Daniel Schneider,Laura Graham

doi:10.1002/pan3.10096

Chris Sutherland, Andrew J Greenlee + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10096

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Abstract

Abstract Bed bugs have re‐established themselves as a common household pest in the United States and pose significant public health and economic concerns, particularly in urban areas. Documenting the scale of the bed bug resurgence and identifying the underlying predictors of the spatial patterns of their incidence is challenging, largely because available data come from biased self‐reporting through local government code enforcement. Here, we make use of a novel source of systematically collected data from periodic inspections of multifamily housing units in Chicago to investigate neighbourhood drivers of bed bug infestation prevalence in Chicago. Bed bug infestations are strongly associated with income, eviction rates and crowding at the neighbourhood level. That bed bug prevalence is higher in lower‐income neighbourhoods with higher levels of household crowding and eviction notices provides unique empirical evidence of the disproportionate allocation of public health burdens upon neighbourhoods facing multiple dimensions of disadvantage. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article.

Highlights

There has been a dramatic resurgence of bed bug infestations in cities across the globe (Biehler & Green, 2014; Boase, 2008; Potter, 2011) and, in the United States, they have re-established as a prevalent urban pest (Potter, Haynes, & Fredericks, 2015)
The systematic inspections span the period over which Chicago enacted one of the most comprehensive ordinances in the nation to combat bed bugs (Schneider, 2019), and our findings are consistent with Chicago's public policy discussion and response
The rapid increase in bed bug prevalence began in 2009, reaching a peak in 2011, a trend that matches the pace of the bed bug infestation in the United States more generally (Potter, 2011; Potter et al, 2015; Schneider, 2019)

Summary

| INTRODUCTION

There has been a dramatic resurgence of bed bug infestations in cities across the globe (Biehler & Green, 2014; Boase, 2008; Potter, 2011) and, in the United States, they have re-established as a prevalent urban pest (Potter, Haynes, & Fredericks, 2015). As with many other urban pests (Biehler & Green, 2014), Eddy and Jones (2011) argue that the burden of infestation is not borne among communities and that bed bug prevalence is dependent upon housing tenure, housing density and quality, education, poverty, immigration status, employment status, occupant age, and city agency regulation and response capacity These putative relationships, themselves emergent properties of interacting individual behaviours determined by social factors, are well-reasoned and evidence to this effect would provide a basis for improved pest management and regulation, as well as public health and education initiatives (Schneider, 2019).

| MATERIALS AND METHODS

| DISCUSSION