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| What spreads faster than bedbugs? |
| What spreads faster than bedbugs? Social stigma
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| UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
, 21-August-2010
8:10:42 AM |
| Jeremy Sparig spent months fighting bedbugs. Now, to some people, he is like a mattress left on the street, something best avoided in these times.
"They don't want to hug you anymore; they don't want you coming over," said Mr Sparig, of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. "You're like a leper."
At the Brooklyn district attorney's office, which recently had a bedbug breakout, defense lawyers are skittish about visiting, and it is not because of the fierce prosecutors.
Even Steven Smollens, a housing lawyer who has helped many tenants with bedbugs, has his guard up. Those clients are barred from his office. "I meet outside," he said. "There's a Starbucks across the street."
Beyond the bites and the itching, the bother and the expense, victims of the nation's most recent plague are finding that an invisible scourge awaits them in the form of bedbug stigma. Friends begin to keep their distance. Invitations are rescinded. For months, one woman said, her mother was afraid to tell her that she had an infestation. When she found out and went to clean her mother's apartment, she said, "Nobody wanted to help me."
Fear and suspicion are creeping into the social fabric wherever bedbugs are turning up, which is almost everywhere: "Public health agencies across the country have been overwhelmed by complaints about bedbugs," said a joint statement this month from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency.
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