Bedbugs and the Buckeye State
Ohio may be losing jobs and losing people. But there’s a counterbalance: the state is gaining bedbugs, and nobody knows why.
The New Neo
A blog about political change, among other things
Ohio may be losing jobs and losing people. But there’s a counterbalance: the state is gaining bedbugs, and nobody knows why.
The bedbugs will leave when taxed enough and/or unionized
As the fed/state/local government asserts ever widening, ever more intrusive control and demands ever bigger budgets, it is unable to handle traditional problems–disaster response, border control, public health, etc–that its predecessors have managed competently with smaller budgets and less technology.
Do they vote? I can see the Dems bringing them in to replace the folks leaving those states.
From the article:
“The main defense against bed bugs is education and awareness because everybody has a role to play in managing bed bugs, and it’s much easier to manage if you catch it early.”
If education and awareness works like it did in stamping out discrimination, the bedbugs will soon have a NAABB. (National Association for the Advancement of Bed Bugs)
People flow across borders, state and federal. People stay in cheap motels. Cheap motels are cleaned by low wage workers. Disperse bed bugs from previous location into sheets. Gather up sheets to the body when stripping the beds for the laundry. Get bed bugs on clothing. Go home or out and about with bed bugs on body. Seed other areas, hotels and homes. Rinse. Repeat.
Somewhere there’s a spreadsheet of bedbug infestations showing spread from the interstates to the inner cities and back.
If evolution teach us something, it is that old problems with any life forms never cease to exist completely. When there were no humans yet to feast upon, these bloodsuckers used to live in caves and feasted on bats. From these caves our ancestors get them to mud huts and log cabins, and, eventualy, to sky-scrapers.
“”The main defense against bed bugs is education and awareness because everybody has a role to play in managing bed bugs””
Then how did the friendly high school drop out bug man keep them in check for virtually all of the 20th century and nobody else had to be aware of s*** ?
SteveH, most of the time this bug man used DDT, the most effective and the least harmful insecticide. This was so sucessful that the problem looked resolved for good. But now we can not use it, and incresed mobility with lack of awareness made return of bedbugs inevitable.
Neo,
Remember Walpin?
An update on that case:
http://hotair.com/archives/2011/01/04/walpin-loses-appeal/
Let’s hope that Walpin shares bedbug tenacity and starts an epidemic of angry reaction like the following commenter on HotAir:
Darrell Issa should hire Walpin as an investigator for his committee, focusing on corrpution and waste at AmeriCorps. That would be a nice little “FU” to the White House!
rockmom on January 4, 2011 at 2:59 PM
Probably the multiplying of county workers in Cleveland under the corrupt Hagan/Mason/Dimora regeime.
Take a heaping helping of this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Insecticide,_Fungicide,_and_Rodenticide_Act
And add a dash of environmental activism, effectively eliminating any pesticide applications in public spaces and reducing the number of pesticides (in this case, insecticides) on the market for specious reasons and you have a recipe for a bedbug infestations.
And this won’t be the last. Next time, the insect involved may be a vector of human disease.
But we can die a noble death knowing that we took DDT off the market.
The blood suckers have left Washington?
Do tell.
Folks, this is bio-warfare.
Typhoid Mary must now be folding sheets.
I’m not sure where I read it, but recently there was a push from enviro group against rat poison due to inner city kids being at risk for poison poisoning, so to speak.
I’m sure everyone would rather have rats and rat-borne diseases instead.
I hate these people….
Any Michigander can tell you why Ohio is attracting bedbugs. It’s because it’s Ohio and their natural habitat.
JuliB:
The enviros want to protect “inner city” kids from rat poison and expose them to rat-borne diseases instead…which are well-known from history to have high mortality rates.
Sorta makes one wonder about their real agenda.
But no, we’re the racists. Right.
As someone who had a bedbug infestation and beat it, I can tell you a few things:
A. DDT does not work. Yes, I used to believe that if only we hadn’t banned DDT…then I found out that other countries in central/south america had been using DDT for years after we banned it, and due to this the little beasties had finally built up an immunity.
B. Want to know how we beat them?
We got rid of beds, anything that might have been infected, the couch, *most of our furniture*, used the few commercial bed bug sprays, put most of the rest of the stuff in storage for six months, had Orkin come in a total of 3 times, put diatamaceous earth down along the walls, used sticky traps (like you’d use to catch normal insects, surprisingly they do catch some bedbugs) and lastly , we let a few cockroaches survive for about a week b/c they were in areas that the bb layed their eggs. CR are actually GOOD for something..they eat bedbugs and their eggs.
Then, after all that, we waited approximately six months before we declared the infestation over.
When I was a kid, our house was constantly getting infected with cock roaches from neighboring houses.
I *hate* those suckers. Bedbugs sound nasty, but I have no experience with them as I did with roaches.
Brad, actually most stories about DDT-resistance are about mosquitoes. Little, if anything, is known about “bed bugs DDT-resistance”: at least, my Google search with this phrase came dry. Genetics of these two species is very different, and even for mosquitoes the situation is very complicated: some of their populations are resistant, some don’t, and different modes of application of insecticide produces different results. In Africa, at least, DDT works fine against malaria even after decades of using it.
PLUG! For Bedbugs of a lighter and less pesky variety, try my kid’s book, “Night of the Bedbugs.” A great gift for kids 4-8 or insomniacs of all ages: http://bedbugsmania.com
rickl wrote “The enviros want to protect “inner city” kids from rat poison and expose them to rat-borne diseases instead…which are well-known from history to have high mortality rates.”
I am currently reading a great book about the Black Death of 1347, the plague that de-populated Europe. It seems the plague was a rat disease that humans got in the way of.
BTW, I recommend the book “The Great Mortality : An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time ” by Kelly.
I can tell you why. Illegal aliens come here from places with bedbugs — or they spend time in crowded stash houses with others who have bedbugs — or they ride in vans long distances to their stolen jobs with others who have bedbugs — or they live in bedbug-infested, overcrowded apartments in order to maximize the $ sent out of the nation. AND they work jobs in HOSPITALITY.
They make the beds and clean the hotel rooms, all the while spreading bedbug eggs, which are hardy little items. The guests unknowingly carry the bedbug eggs home and visitors carry them to their home. You have bedbugs.
Just ANOTHER reason to secure the border.
Sergey:
I think your search was too specific. I merely searched for “DDT” and “bedbugs” and came up with several. Here’s one:
http://www.newsweek.com/2010/09/08/conservatives-blame-environmentalists-for-bedbugs.html
Here’s another from a University of KY website: Says resistance was first reported developing in the 1940’s and was so widespread a decade later that other insecticides were already being recommended:
http://www.ca.uky.edu/agc/news/2006/sep/bedbugs.htm
Brad, your first reference contains some obvious falsehoods, like ascribing declining of bald eagle populations to DDT use. This connection was never demonstrated scientifically, it is just urban legend. And in the second reference there is no single word about DDT, it is all about pyretroids, that are completely different class of pesticides.
Sergey:
I could easily embarrass you. I’ll instead simply suggest you read my second link all the way through. Or, if you want, I can copy the text for you. Or do you wish to concede? Complaining about inaccuracies in the first article for instance, doesn’t change the fact that two experts in that article claim DDT doesn’t work.
There are no direct links to these experts, and google search with their names did not result in any quotes supporting this journalist assertions. I never trust journalists writing about science, being scientific writer myself. Almost everything written by non-specialists contains egregious errors, I always check first-hand sources before publishing my own articles. All I have found on the topic at hand are some 50-years old reports about developing pesticide resistance. This actually tells us nothing about today populations resistance. Everything obtained by natural selection is lost as quickly as obtained after selection factor removed: populations reverse to so-called “wild type”. I do not deny existense of such thing as developing resistance to widely used pesticide, but this did not prevent in the past almost complete eradication of bedbugs by DDT in 1950-s. I see no reasons why this can not be replicated now with the same insecticide.
Sergey:
Ahh, so now you back-peddle a bit. Fair enough. At least you are no longer claiming my second link didn’t have anything about bedbugs in it.
Now as for your idea about “rotating” pesitcides : it’s been tried before, with partial success. What happens is that “second time around” the bedbugs or whatever insect get their immunity back faster as some of the genetic changes that prompted the initial resistance have been kept in the population since.
In other words ASSUMING that it’s been long enough since DDT was reguarly used on bedbugs that they’ve lost a lot of the immunity (an assumption not necessarily in evidence as I believe the current crop hail from Central and South America where they’ve been spraying this stuff relatively recently) we would reintroduce DDT back into our local bug ecosystem where it would quickly lose its effectiveness.
Oh well, We hate Rachael Carson. She was a commie. Isn’t that argument enough that this is a good idea? *sarcasm*
We know now which specific gene mutation produces DDT-resistance in insects, there were lots of studies on this subject. With modern techniques of molecular genetics it is rather simple and cheap to test existing populations for harboring this mutation. But it seems nobody is going even study this question scientifically, everything we have now are speculations. This does not look to me as a serious approach. The problem is politicised, which is always bad, and nobody risks to challenge EPA authority and green mythology.