Bedbugs Creep Into Southland (Blood Sucking Night Bugs Are Baaack Alert)

Los Angeles Times ^ | 08/13/2007 | Leslie Earnest

[goldstategop]

Common Bedbug

They're really BAACK in Southern California. Just looking at the pint-sized little monster gives one the heebie-jeebies. Now y'all know the saying your parents told you as a child: "don't let the bedbugs bite."

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[GovernmentIsTheProblem]

how do you kill them in luggage if you travel overseas

[fieldmarshaldj]

Better that in your bed...

...than this.

[singfreedom]

I wonder if they are hitching rides on our uninvited “guest” aliens from down south? Is that a possibility? I’ve never had any experience with the little devils, but my dad used to tell me how awful they were. (He had experience with them overseas.)

[SoDak]

Bring back DDT.

[Ditter]

I haven’t heard of any bedbugs in the Houston area and we certainly have our share of visitors from south of the border. Maybe people who have them don’t talk about it. I am going to ask my exterminator.

[Ditter]

Now that I think about it, my dad told me that just before I was born in 1940 they rented a furnished house on Galveston Bay and the mattress and springs were infested with bedbugs. So bedbugs in this country are not new.

[Sockdologer]

Or this!

[AnotherUnixGeek]

He's not optimistic about the future, given current restrictions on powerful chemicals and the bugs' knack for adapting to them. "Our arsenal is depleted of effective products," he said, and there's no "silver bullet in the wings."

Yes there is. It's called DDT, and it will return. "Restrictions on powerful chemicals" are tolerated by people when they see no harm in such restrictions. When the majority of people in this country wake up with bedbug bites, and when a sizable number contract blood-born maladies from them, the environmentalists' objections to DDT will mean about as much the bedbugs' objections to DDT.

Reports on how many people world-wide have died because of malaria due to the ban on DDT make for appalling reading.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

By the way, hotels are an excellent place to experience this slice of life from the past. I recently stayed at an expensive hotel on the Strip in Vegas and woke up with bites all over my legs. When I complained to housekeeping, I was told other guests had made similar complaints.

[Ditter]

Would you tell us the name of the hotel?

[dighton]

“Rats on the west side, bedbugs uptown, why does Jagger get the girls and not me?”

[Sockdologer]

*Laugh* Now that IS a good question. *Shudder* Jagger. I had nightmares after I viewed the first photograph of him I ever saw.

[AnotherUnixGeek]

Would you tell us the name of the hotel?

Put it this way - south end of the Strip, great hotel in every other aspect, and one of the last places I'd have expected to see something like this. This bedbug problem isn't something confined to the run-down places anymore.

[ReignOfError]

Banning DDT outright was a mistake. Don't get me wrong -- its very nasty stuff, and it was definitely overused in the past. But the rational response would have been to draw up limits and guidelines, not an outright global ban.

My analogy is that DDT is like a handgun. If people are shooting shoplifters and kids who TP their trees with wild abandon, clarify the law, prosecute those people and make that stop; don't prohibit shooting folks who intend to kill or rape them.

Along the same lines, you shouldn't be hosing down your yard with DDT to stop junebugs from nibbling your prize roses. But if DDT can -- and it can -- save millions of lives from malaria, fire at will.

What does this have to do with bedbugs? They're certainly not a danger on the same order as malaria-carrying mosquitos, but if we allow endemic blood-suckers, eventually some blood-borne pathogen will evolve to take advantage. It doesn't seem to this non-expert to be a more remote possibility than the avian flu mutation that we're all worried about.

I honestly don't know whether DDT is the only pesticide that can knock out a bedbug infestation, but whatever works, rather than saying "no" altogether, let's figure out how to use it safely, vent it, and go on with our lives.

[honolulugal]

[river rat]

If you google Las Vegas bed bugs - you will find SEVERAL hotels listed.....

Too many!

[Caipirabob]

There are frequent complaints about this at Walt Disney World now. Every time we go we check for brown or bloody dots on the bedframe, mattress and sheets before we accept a room. The dots are telltale of a bedbug infestation.

Disney has so many frequent guests from 3rd world nations they are constantly dealing with pestilence like this.

[goldstategop]

They're nest parasites. They like to stay as close to the host as possible. They differ from fleas in that they don't live on the host itself. Bedbugs are very hardy: they can go a year without feeding.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Riley]

A few years ago I slept on a disused couch at a friend’s house in Southern California- and got the hell bitten out of my legs in the night. The couch was in a sort of converted anteroom that led out to the garage. I wondered what had done it at the time- I had no idea.

Nasty things. I’d have slept with a ball peen hammer, if I’d known.