The Chemung County Nursing Facility in Elmira is dealing with a first-time problem with bed bugs involving three rooms.
Two of the affected rooms are now bug-free, said Robert Page, nursing facility administrator and county public health director.
“They’re only in basically one room in the facility. It’s not throughout the facility, and we know the source was an upholstered recliner that was brought in from the outside.”
“We haven’t seen any activity on the two rooms on either side, but the one room that was the source room, where the chair that had all the bedbugs in it, that room we are still monitoring,” he said.
That room is still secured, with nobody in it, until they are certain that the bedbugs have been eradicated.
A large number of bedbugs were discovered in the chair on March 3rd, That room and two rooms on either side of it had evidence of bugs, and all three were sprayed.
“We found little traces in the two adjoining rooms, but nowhere else in the facility,” he said. “The two rooms have been bug-free since the spraying.”
The source room will be steam-cleaned a third time before it is reopened.
Bedbugs are a very common problem throughout the country in hospitals, hotels, nursing homes and private homes.
