Residents of the downtown neighbourhood of Spence complained to the city about bed bugs 65 times in 2010 – at a higher rate than any other neighbourhood in Winnipeg.
According to City of Winnipeg records obtained by Global News through the Freedom of Information Act, Winnipeg residents made 642 complaints about bed bugs last year. A further 186 complaints were made to the provincial Ministry of Health by people living outside of downtown Winnipeg, both in the suburbs and elsewhere in the province.
When broken down by neighbourhood and adjusted for the number of households, Spence has the highest rate of complaints – nearly 37 for every 1,000 households in the area. Centennial has the second-highest rate of bed bug complaints, at 27 per 1000 households, followed by Lord Selkirk Park at 21 per 1000.
These records are for complaints only, and do not necessarily mean that bed bug infestations were confirmed in these areas. The City of Winnipeg declined to comment on bed bug prevention strategy.
“The problem is worse than ever before, calls for bed bugs are way up in 2011,” said Lincoln Poulin, Poulin’s Exterminators.
Multi-use complexes have it the worst added Poulin,”People make the mistake of thinking it is connected to the cleanliness of your house, it’s not. I’ve got calls for bed bugs in brand new, multi-million dollar homes.”
Every month St. Josaphat Villa seniors complex, on McGregor Street, pays a pest control company $1,000 to check suites.
It has had one offense in 2010 and none since. The home is in the Dufferin area, where relatively few complaints were filed in 2010 – although the nearby William Whyte neighbourhood, just down the road, has one of the highest rates of complaints in the city.
“We see what’s going on in the area, we are surrounded by buildings that have bed bug problems they can’t eradicate, so checking every suite every month is the way to go,” said John Zacharuk of St. Josaphat Villa.
You can see how many bed bug complaints there were in your neighbourhood by entering your address in the map below.
Full address data was not provided for private homes and apartment buildings, but street names were given. There were 22 complaints regarding addresses on Langside Street in 2010, and 21 complaints on Furby Street.
Top streets for bed bug complaints in Winnipeg
| 1) Langside Street | 22 complaints |
| 2) Furby Street | 21 complaints |
| 3) Sherbrook Street | 17 complaints |
| 4) Spence Street | 15 complaints |
| 5) Young Street | 15 complaints |
| 6) Maryland Street | 14 complaints |
| 7) Mountain Avenue | 14 complaints |
| 8) Redwood Avenue | 14 complaints |
| 9) Agnes Street | 12 complaints |
| 10) Kennedy Street | 12 complaints |
| 11) Talbot Avenue | 12 complaints |
Have you had problems with bed bugs? Tell your story on the Global Winnipeg Facebook page.
To create this map, Global News requested a list of bed bug-related complaints for 2010 from both the City of Winnipeg and Manitoba Health through Freedom of Information legislation. Data arrived from the City organized by neighbourhood, and from the province, organized by the first three letters of the postal code. These two sets of data were combined to create the map.
Complaint rates were calculated by dividing the number of complaints for a given area by the number of households in that area – obtained from 2006 census records. The result was then multiplied by 1000. For this map, all areas with fewer than 10 complaints are coloured white, to avoid displaying extremely high rates for areas that had only a handful of complaints but a very small number of households.
Comments