Or is it just the media scare du jour?
Are the little buggers really significantly increasing in numbers or are people just talking about it more due to some media interest and then positive feedback kicks in.
The lowly butt-biter has been our fellow traveler since time immemorial. We’re just experiencing a wave of ZOMG (Zealous Overly Mindful Groupthink) about him currently.
It’s getting bad in my area. Hitting mostly apartment complexes. The problem I was reading is due to the outlawing of DDT which takes care of the nasty buggers. They can live for 3 years without food or water!
If you live in an area that is having a Bed Bug epidemic don’t bring home anything from Goodwill. That is where our problem is coming from. They treat the clothes but it doesn’t kill Bed Bugs. Also leave the free couch on the side of the road.
I’d say we have had at least 8 housing complexes in my area affected in the last 2 years. Goodwill is the main culprit.
It was banned in 1972 from what I can see.
Are they on some sort of breading cycle that peaks every decade or so? I know other critters have such peaks and troughs.
Heh Heh, breaded and fried. No, it’s not related to a particular breeding cycle.
They’re just re-surging in the US especially, where they were not eradicated exactly, but so greatly reduced in numbers that no one took precautions any more. I can say in my experience that as a child I never knew “don’t let the bedbugs bite” was a real possibility.
It’s been the increase and ease of international travel, paired with the lack of defenses against them any more, that has caused them to re-populate. I think the biggest “newsworthiness” of them is their bites cause such extreme allergic reactions in so many people. They’re bound to raise a fuss.
Doh!
This meme is getting old. DDT has not been banned except for agricultural use:
Former bedbug researcher (and still a dabbler) here.
The re-emergence is real. Its been going on for about 5-10 years (probably longer, but it is in this time period that we became really aware of it). In certain areas of the country, its a big problem. I think some of the news hype is due to groupthink, but it is a real phenomenon.
And as I have said in several previous threads, DDT banning isn’t the cause of this. The bugs in the USA are extremely RESISTANT to DDT - it has essentially no effect on them. This isn’t due to a DDT ban - it is due likely to indiscriminate use of the chemical in other countries where the bugs have been introduced from. We could blanket the USA in DDT and it’ll have no effect - we need better methods for control.
Our collaborators are beginning to examine the genetics of these bugs to see where they came from (we’re helping a little). My intuition is an asian origin for the emergent strains in the USA, but we’ll see what the data say.
Oh Great, DDT resistant bed bugs! Thanks for the info. This is kind of like MRSA being Penicillin resistant.
I never remember bed bugs being a problem in the US until the last 5 years. I actually knew the nursery rhyme but never thought they were real. My friend Brent went through hell when his building became infested. He eventually moved and left most of his stuff behind.
Timely article: They Crawl, They Bite, They Baffle Scientists
I haven’t heard of any cases here in central Illinois, but back when I was making regular business trips to Manhattan (3-5 years ago) I ended up in hotels with bedbug problems a couple of times. Fortunately they were never in my room, but there were other rooms having exterminators go in and out, the mattresses removed, etc. In one hotel there were dead ones under the face of the clock.
If I never go to Manhattan again it’ll be a-okay with me.
I was doing a lot a reading the other day about this
There is considerable debate over whether or not DDT would help. I would like to see the SD answer the question once and for all are bed bugs actually resistant to DDT.
They’re a big issue here in the Boston area. I think it has a lot to do with the number of students moving in and out, the enormous popularity of Craigslist as a place to get cheap or free furniture, and the high proportion of renters. A friend of mine moved from a crappy shithole of an apartment that had persistent bug problems to a nice duplex, but several months later he got bedbugs anyway. His roommate went psycho and refused to throw out her mattress despite the fact that it was a major source of the infestation. Complete screaming meltdowns, shoving my friend, totally unreasonable because she had “a $1,200 mattress!” (That she’d bought on sale for less than half of that.) In the end, my friend threw away much of what he owned, put the rest into bags that he left in his dad’s garage to freeze over the following winter (which apparently kills the bugs and eggs), moved in with me and my roommates, stopped paying rent on his old place, and helped their landlord evict his old roommate so that she wouldn’t infest the rest of the building.
mozchron, is there anything I can do to prevent a bedbug infestation? I’ve heard a lot of scare stories, but they never bother to provide any actual useful information.
See post #8. In my professional opinion, DDT will not help.
There is a lot you can do to keep yourself from bringing them home. Check your hotel room - I have said in other posts how to do this. I don’t go to movie theaters. if I did, I would strip off and bag my clothes etc… before entering my house and put them in the dryer for 40 minutes on high to kill any hitchhikers. When you buy clothes, put them in the dryer before wearing them.
I get uneasy even going to restaurants etc… I at least do a cursory inspection of the seats.
I get uneasy going to other people’s houses, and having guests over. If I knew someone was having a bedbug problem I wouldn’t allow them in my house.
However, there is much greater chance of getting them from a hotel than from any other source - if you take precautions you should be a low risk (that is if you don’t live in NYC - all bets are off there). The infestation in NYC has reached such a high level that it is spilling out to offices etc… it is estimated that 10% of the households in NYC have bedbugs. This boggles the mind.
My real fear is having my neighbors get them (I live in an attached townhouse). This is out of my control unfortunately.
OK, sound like you guys do have a problem then.
scratch
It’s all Jenny McCarthy’s fault.
I recall seeing reports in the news in the late '90s about the resurgence of bedbugs here in Toronto, but it seemed to be localized to a specific neighbourhood. In the last year or so, I have seen a number of articles about bedbugs widespread in hotels around the US.
We went to Istanbul in July and discovered that we’d managed to sleep with bedbugs for a couple of nights and I fear that we have brought them home with us. We’ve left our luggage in the garage and have been washing and drying our clothes as best we can. I’m not sure how effective we’ve been. Every time I itch I wonder if it’s due to a bedbug.
FWIW, the bites start to react a couple of hours after you get up and look and feel like a mosquito bite. They are often in clusters of 3. The do disappear after a couple of days…but of course you’d have new ones by then.
I predict (read: guess) that in the next decade they’ll be 70% of homes in urban US/Canada.
Chalk me up as another person who didn’t know bedbugs were real until recently. I thought maybe they were supposed to be lice.
Damn, so it was her I picked 'em up from…
I read up on them when I woke up one morning with two little bites on my finger and a couple other bites on my arm. It wasn’t the exact “breakfast, lunch, dinner” pattern but I was concerned.
I read that Neem, diatomaceous earth and heat are supposed to be helpful in killing them. I had some Neem spray so I sprayed all around my mattress and bed. A day or two later I noticed I had ants in my bedroom and I think that’s what bit me. Killed them and haven’t had any more problems.
Anyway, there are other methods of killing bedbugs besides using dangerous chemicals.