Office Bed Bug Inspections for Workplaces and Workstations

Less than you would expect, and it is worth being straight about that, because the confident claims in this area are not backed by much.

There is one published outbreak investigation in an office. In 2011 the Tennessee Department of Health investigated complaints of itching and bites in an office of 76 workers. Of the 61 interviewed, 39, or 64 per cent, met the case definition. Certified bed bug detection canines were used to inspect the office, and one collected specimen was confirmed as a bed bug by three entomologists. Working in a cubicle where a canine identified bed bugs was associated with symptoms at a relative risk of 1.8, with a confidence interval of 1.3 to 3.6.

That study is useful in two ways. It establishes that offices are a real setting rather than a marketing invention, and it is one of the few places in the literature where canine detection was used in a real investigation and the results tracked against an independent measure of who was actually affected.

What does not exist is a prevalence figure for offices, or any study comparing how readily bed bugs establish in an office against a home. Anyone quoting one has made it up. Our own view is that an office lacks the thing a bedroom provides, which is a person asleep in the same place for hours every night, so the likely pattern is repeated introduction rather than a large established population. That is a view, not a finding.

On people, and specifically on the things people put down. Bags, coats, laptop sleeves and gym kit that were on a bedroom floor at home are on a chair or under a desk by nine the following morning.

This is why an office infestation is a symptom of a residential one somewhere, and why the useful response is not a deep clean. Cleaning does not address the source, which is somebody's home and is nothing an employer can inspect.

It also explains the shape of what gets found. Rather than a concentrated population in one place, an office tends to produce scattered low level activity around the workstations of whoever is carrying them in. Scattered and low level is the situation a visual inspection handles worst, and it is the reason a canine sweep of a whole floor is worth more here than a careful look at the one desk that complained.

The sweep is organised by workstation and by soft furnishing rather than by square footage, because that is where the time goes and where anything would be.

In most offices we inspect, the disruption is already larger than whatever is found. That is not a criticism of the people involved. Somebody has marks on their arms, nobody can prove where they came from, and the absence of a definite answer is what lets it spread through a floor.

The reason for a dated document naming the areas covered is that it ends the ambiguity in a way a reassurance from facilities cannot. Either specific locations were identified and are being treated, or the areas were checked on a specific date and were clear. Both of those are better than an ongoing argument about whether anyone believes the person who reported it.

There is also a real limit worth stating internally. An office inspection cannot rule out that somebody is being bitten at home, and it is not intended to. What it establishes is whether the workplace has detectable activity, which is the only part an employer can actually act on.

There is no bed bug specific provision in the Occupational Health and Safety Act or in its regulations. The relevant duty is the general one at section 25(2)(h), which requires an employer to take every precaution reasonable in the circumstances for the protection of a worker.

A worker may initiate a work refusal under section 43 where they have reason to believe the physical condition of the workplace is likely to endanger them. The test turns on the worker's reasonable belief rather than on proof of danger, but the belief has to be that the condition is likely to endanger. The employer must then investigate immediately, in the presence of a worker member of the joint health and safety committee or a worker representative, and if the matter is unresolved a Ministry of Labour inspector investigates and issues a written decision.

Whether a bed bug infestation meets that test is fact specific, and we are not aware of an Ontario decision on it. Treat anyone who tells you confidently that workers can or cannot refuse over bed bugs as guessing. What is not in doubt is that a documented inspection is how an employer demonstrates it took a reasonable precaution, and that it usually resolves the situation before section 43 comes into it at all. This is general information rather than legal advice.

Evenings and weekends, almost always. Watching a detection dog work a colleague's chair is not something to put in front of a floor of people who are already unsettled, and the sweep is faster without anyone in the way.

We arrive in an unmarked vehicle and handlers do not discuss findings with anyone other than the person who booked us. Where a building has multiple tenants, we work only the floors you control, and we can coordinate with base building facilities if the common areas need covering too.

For an office with a confirmed finding, the sensible follow up is a verification sweep two to three weeks after treatment, which is timed so that any eggs surviving the treatment have hatched and become detectable. Going back sooner produces a clear result that does not mean anything.

A dated written report naming every workstation and area covered, every location the dog alerted on, whether each alert was visually confirmed, and what we recommend. Areas that were clear are recorded as clear, with the date.

It is written to sit in a facilities file and be read later by somebody who was not there, which is what it needs to be if the question ever becomes formal. Because we do not treat, there is no quote attached to a positive result.

Controlled research measured trained detection dogs at 97.5 to 98 per cent detection with no false alerts, sensitive down to a single insect or five viable eggs. Field research found performance varying considerably between individual teams, with certification alone not predicting it.

An open floor of near identical workstations is the hardest environment to work honestly, because a dog running a repetitive line will eventually offer something. So the floor is swept twice from different directions and an alert counts only where she calls the same workstation both times. The handler then checks the chair or the partition by hand.

Alerts and visual evidence are separate lines in the report, and on an office job that distinction does real work. Naming one workstation as an unconfirmed indication is a very different conversation with the person who sits there than reporting it as a confirmed find. She is rewarded only on a confirmed alert.