Posted on 08/13/2007 12:21:29 AM PDT by goldstategop
Bed feeling a little crowded? Maybe you have company.
The Cimex lectularius, better known and despised as the common bedbug, is snuggling into households across Southern California, giving people the heebie- jeebies. The blood-sucking, heat-seeking, pint-size parasites aren't believed by the experts to transmit disease, but they do have a way of cranking up stress levels.
"It was just horrendous," said a West Hollywood middle-school teacher, who, like others who have been horrified to have lived with the uninvited guests, asked that she not be identified. "Think of how you wouldn't sleep at night if you had roaches, and this is even worse," she said. "These roaches feed on you."
They used to be associated with cramped and dirty living quarters, grimy motels and high-rise living in places like New York. For much of the second part of the last century the liberal use of the eventually banned pesticide DDT seemed to all but do away with them. Now bedbugs have moved into single-family homes with a vengeance and taken up lodging in schools, hospitals and college dormitories too. The wide-open spaces of the West are no defense.
"Bedbugs are just going ballistic everywhere," said Michael Potter, a professor of entomology at the University of Kentucky. "It is going to really rock this country. I'm not trying to sound sensationalist."
Bedbugs hitchhike on humans or in luggage and burrow into bedding, books, sofas and just about any cozy place, even picture frames. Once they establish squatter's rights, evicting them isn't easy. Or cheap. Casting them out of the average house in Southern California can cost thousands of dollars and require multiple visits.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
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
how do you kill them in luggage if you travel overseas
...than this.
Bring back DDT.
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.
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.
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.
Would you tell us the name of the hotel?
“Rats on the west side, bedbugs uptown, why does Jagger get the girls and not me?”
*Laugh* Now that IS a good question. *Shudder* Jagger. I had nightmares after I viewed the first photograph of him I ever saw.
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.
If you google Las Vegas bed bugs - you will find SEVERAL hotels listed.....
Too many!
Disney has so many frequent guests from 3rd world nations they are constantly dealing with pestilence like this.
"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
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.
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