Perilous Times
New York: Google building infested by bed bugs
The internet giant's New York headquarters have fallen prey to a
city-wide outbreak of bed bugs
* Ed Pilkington in New York
*
guardian.co.uk, Friday 3 September 2010 18.57 BST
Google in New York Google in New York. Photograph: Mark Lennihan/AP
They are reddish-brown, smaller than an apple seed, have a taste for
human blood and when they bite they itch like hell. And now the onward
march of the common bedbug has extended into cyberspace.
The search engine giant Google confirmed today that its 9th Avenue
offices in Manhattan have been infested with the bugs. Parts of the
headquarters, a futuristic space renowned for having a Lego room and
scooters for staff to move around, have been found to be harbouring the
parasites, prompting the wags at Gawker media group to wonder whether
its possible for them to spread via the internet.
Google is the latest victim of an epidemic that has been rampaging
through New York over the summer and has the city that normally prides
itself on its permanent state of cool in a veritable panic: the blood
suckers have wreaked havoc everywhere from the Empire State building to
hospital wards, the prosecutor's office in Brooklyn and Time Warner's
Manhattan headquarters.
Nobody is immune to the threat, from theatre-goers to dwellers in posh
Manhattan condominiums and shoppers. Hollister, the teen clothing
store, had to close its flagship outlet in SoHo after employees
complained they were being bitten.
The outbreak at Google was disclosed by one of its marketing staff who
posted the news on her Twitter feed. "Jeepers, I am not immune to the
bedbug panic. Bedbugs have been found at work."
The feed has now been taken down.
Across the city, there has been a two-thirds increase in the number of
bedbug cases reported over the past two years, with almost 13,000 calls
to the city's helpline over the past 12 months. Last year, a survey
suggested one in 15 New Yorkers had become victims, a proportion that
is likely to have risen since. Experts put the spread down to the
decline in use of the chemical DDT, which was banned in 1972. The US
environmental protection agency warned last month of an "alarming
resurgence" of bed bugs that was overwhelming public health
authorities.The agency has promised to search for a new generation of
safe pesticides strong enough to eradicate them.