Socioeconomic drivers of urban pest prevalence
Abstract
1. Bed bugs have re-established themselves as a common household pest in the United States and pose significant public health and economic concerns, particularly in urban areas. 2. Documenting the scale of the bed bug resurgence and identifying the underlying predictors of the spatial patterns of their incidence is challenging, largely because available data come from biased self-reporting through local government code enforcement. 3. Here, we make use of a novel source of systematically collected data from periodic inspections of multifamily housing units in Chicago to investigate neighbourhood drivers of bed bug infestation prevalence in Chicago. 4. Bed bug infestations are strongly associated with income, eviction rates and crowding at the neighbourhood level. 5. That bed bug prevalence is higher in lower-income neighbourhoods with higher levels of household crowding and eviction notices provides unique empirical evidence of the disproportionate allocation of public health burdens upon neighbourhoods facing multiple dimensions of disadvantage.
Citation
Sutherland , C , Greenlee , A J & Schneider , D 2020 , ' Socioeconomic drivers of urban pest prevalence ' , People and Nature , vol. 2 , no. 3 , pp. 776-783 . https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10096
Publication
People and Nature
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2575-8314Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2020 The Authors. People and Nature published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Description
Funding: We thank the National Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center (SESYNC) under funding received from the National Science Foundation DBI-1052875, for supporting the workshop series ‘Socio-Spatial Ecology of the Bed Bug and its Control'.Collections
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