Vancouver Bedbugs: Found in Mount Pleasant Library

Library Bedbugs: Parasites Invade Lower Mainland Literature

Bedbugs are making their way into Vancouver, but not by way of your mattress. The bedbugs are using library books to Trojan-Horse their way into your home.

• Bedbug Registry: Crowdsourced Pest Alert
  

Vancouverite Brian King was reading a book he had checked out from the Mount Pleasant branch of the Vancouver Public Library, when a live bedbug crawled onto his hand.

King found more bedbugs in the book, which prompted an apartment-wide search-and-destroy mission familiar to many New Yorkers.

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Vancouver Public Library spokesperson Jean Kavanagh says that the library is "monitoring the situation", but that does not yet include actually searching the libraries for bedbugs. We suggest that the VPL get on that, at least starting with the branch from which the bedbug-infested book was borrowed.

It's not as if bedbugs are new to Vancouver: they've been turning up for a while now. In fact, bookworm-bedbugs are also not unheard of: dead bedbugs were found in library books in New Westminster and Burnaby.

New West's library, at least, took action. Vancouver Public Library should do likewise: if you want to keep circulation up, make sure that people aren't afraid to touch your books. That's, like, Step #1.