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With news that bed bug complaints soared in 2008 and the City Council poised to vote on bed bug legislation this Tuesday, the NY Times spoke to entomologist Louis Sorkin, who works at the American Museum of Natural History. His descriptions are fascinating, if creepy: "Around 1989, someone brought in our first bed bug. Most entomologists had never seen a live infestation before. Now, infestations may be approaching the levels of 50 years ago, before DDT was used." Referring to how the bloodsuckers are becoming more immune to toxins: "That’s why pest control companies do all sorts of things besides using chemicals: heating, freezing, steaming, vacuuming. The hardest part of controlling bed bugs is finding them. Most of the literature out there talks about a quarter-inch-long reddish-brown insect, but a bed bug is a millimeter long when it’s born, about the thickness of a credit card." Sorkin added, "A pest-control company once brought in slippers from an infested apartment. You could see all the eggs that had been plastered onto the soles and all the bugs that were hiding." Blergh.
Bed Bug Expert Discusses The Critters
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that's why i threw out everything i owned when i decided to flee my infestation
DDT.
Now we're talking...
Imagine that person who now doesn't have slippers to walk in.
i recall reading a great article, or maybe it was an op-ed piece- in the NY Times about how the total ban on DDT is like most total bans: misguided. The thesis was that the vast majority of negative effects from DDT came from large-scale agricultural use. The benefits of controlled use by professionals in urban settings, where it is by FAR the most effective pesticide, vastly outweigh the bad.
Ah yes, here it is
Yet DDT, the very insecticide that eradicated malaria in developed nations, has been essentially deactivated as a malaria-control tool today. The paradox is that sprayed in tiny quantities inside houses -- the only way anyone proposes to use it today -- DDT is most likely not harmful to people or the environment. Certainly, the possible harm from DDT is vastly outweighed by its ability to save children's lives.