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It's official: Cimex lectularius, better known as the lowly bedbug, has achieved the status of a national epidemic. And starting Tuesday, federal agencies will convene a major summit to address the itchy critter once thought of as little more than a scourge of third-rate motels. The 2011 National Bedbug Summit will be held this week in Washington, and according to a statement Monday by the Environmental Protection Agency, a half-dozen governmental agencies will send representatives in response to "consumer concern about the rising incidence of bed bugs in the United States." The meeting will be held at the (presumably bedbug-free)...

VIDEO HERE.

Global warming, Vaccines v. Autism, DDT, Saccharine, Alar . . . Aside from the fact that these claims always begin with a dubious “scientific” study and then escalate as other “scientists” climb on the funding bandwagon, the other element is always the role that the mainstream media plays in keeping the fraud alive until the sheer weight of evidence makes it impossible to do so. Ultimately, this destroys the trust we normally accord to legitimate scientists, exhausting our ability and willingness to embrace the science that has prolonged and protected the lives of millions.

U.S. customs officials said on Wednesday they had found a beetle considered one of the world's most dangerous agricultural pests in a shipment of rice arriving at Los Angeles International Airport. Agricultural specialists with U.S. Customs and Border Protection found an adult khapra beetle, eight larvae and a shed skin in a shipment of Indian rice from Saudi Arabia ... Earlier this year, border protection officials in Detroit found a khapra beetle in a shipment of tile from China.

ROSEMONT, Ill.- The first-ever North American Bed Bug Summit, which opened Tuesday near Chicago, attracted a sellout crowd to hear experts on the tiny biters, organizers said. That appears to be one more sign that bed bugs, once almost routed in the United States by pesticides, are back in a big way, the Arlington Heights (Ill.) Daily Herald reported. "Ten years ago we got about one call about bed bugs a year, and now we get at least one call a day," Melaney Arnold, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Department of Public Health, told the newspaper. Organizers of the two-day...

Nike’s tourist-friendly flagship store here is closed down because of bedbugs... Nike is the latest big retailer in Manhattan to get bit by the bedbug infestation. Abercrombie & Fitch also was shut down the bed bug infestation that is ravaging New York, as well as one Times Square theater.

By Paul Driessen Saturday, September 11, 2010 We will eradicate malaria by 2010, stricken families were promised a few years ago. Well, 2010 is nearly gone and, instead of eradication, we have more malaria than before … and a new target date: 2015. Unless malaria control policies change, that date too will come and go. Billions will still be at risk of getting malaria. Hundreds of millions will continue getting the disease. Millions will die or become permanently brain-damaged. And poverty and misery will continue ravaging Third World communities.

Reports of bedbug infestations are on the rise, news that strikes fear into the hearts of frequent travelers. While hotels and motels aren't the only places where these insects can hitch a ride on clothes or other belongings -- after all, you can pick one up just by visiting a friend's home, and recent findings in movie theaters and offices prove how easily these bugs get around -- the high-traffic buildings are some of the highest-risk places to encounter these tiny insects that live by feasting on human blood while we're sleeping. By knowing what to look for and taking...

I wish I had a shilling for every time someone told me spraying homes with DDT to prevent malaria is like using Africans in evil experiments. I would be a rich woman. That claim is a blatant falsehood. Even worse, it hides the many ways poor Africans really are being used in environmental experiments that cause increased poverty, disease and death. If any people were ever used in DDT experiments, it was Americans and Europeans. During World War II, this insecticide and mosquito repellant was sprayed on tents and around camps to keep American and British soldiers from getting malaria....

Bedbugs can be found in mattresses, furniture and clothing, and they feed off animal and human blood. Insect scientists say bedbugs are appearing on a scale not seen since before World War II. High-traffic areas such as hotels, airplanes and cruise ships are especially prone to infestations. Ohio has three cities in the top 10 — Cincinnati is fourth, Columbus is seventh and Dayton is eighth.

Sleep tight. Don't let the bedbugs bite. Unfortunately for residents of many urban areas such as New York and Philadelphia, the bedbugs are not only biting but spreading at an alarming rate. Despite this outbreak, the mainstream media has until recently kept insisting that bedbugs developed a resistance to DDT so any emergency lifting of the EPA ban on that pesticide is unnecessary. However, your humble correspondent has speculated that the MSM would eventually have to change its position on the DDT ban due to the fact that so many of its members are being assaulted by bedbug attacks which...

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Jeremy Sparig spent months fighting bedbugs. Now, to some people, he is like a mattress left on the street, something best avoided in these times. “They don’t want to hug you anymore; they don’t want you coming over,” said Mr. Sparig, of East Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “You’re like a leper.” At the Brooklyn district attorney’s office, which recently had a bedbug breakout, defense lawyers are skittish about visiting, and it is not because of the fierce prosecutors. Even Steven Smollens, a housing lawyer who has helped many tenants with bedbugs, has his guard up. Those clients are barred from his office....

Let's hear it for the lowly bedbug. It's poised to team up with cash-starved Democrats to save millions of lives. "Bedbugs — nocturnal, bloodsucking monsters that are itching up beds all over the city — have hopped the Jitney and landed in the Hamptons, where the little beasts are causing war among neighbors over who invited them in," New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser wrote last week. "Be afraid." Politicians in general rely on lavish campaign contributions from folks who work and play in places like the Hamptons, and Demo- crats in particular are worried about their declining fortunes in...

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirms that for the first time in more than 65 years, dengue fever has returned the continental United States, The New York Times is reporting this week: The upsurge is not unexpected. Experts say more than half the world's population will be at risk by 2085 because of greater urbanization, global travel and climate change. Over the past 30 years, a global outcry against using the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, or DDT, has led to the resurgence of the mosquito, a voracious consumer of human blood and carrier of infectious disease....

At first May thought that her husband had heat rash. “We were staying at a smart hotel in Cape Cod. Then I developed these hive-like welts on my back and legs.” May (not her real name; she is terrified of giving me that) is middle class, in her late fifties and lives on the Upper West Side, New York, in a well-maintained four-room apartment. When she and her husband returned to the city, one doctor prescribed antihistamines, surmising the couple had reacted to shellfish. She called a dermatologist. “He took one look and said, ‘You both have bedbug bites’. My...

... Earth Day founder Gaylord Nelson, a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, was a leading opponent of the insecticide DDT, which remains the cheapest and most effective way to combat malarial mosquitoes. Rachel Carson's 1962 book, "Silent Spring," misleadingly linked pesticides to cancer and is generally credited with popularizing environmental awareness. But other leading greens of the period, including Nelson, biologist Paul Ehrlich and ecologist Garrett Hardin, were also animated by a belief that growth in human populations was harming the environment. "The same powerful forces which create the crisis of air pollution also are threatening our freshwater resources, our woods,...

It is hard to think of a more embarrassing endorsement of President Obama’s health care reform bill than that offered this week by the United Nations. The UN, probably the most corrupt and ineffective multilateral body on the face of the earth, which devotes much of its time trying to undermine American global power, has officially given its blessing to Barack Obama’s hugely controversial and unpopular legislation. The United Nations is increasingly disliked in the eyes of the American public, and continues to empower some of the most odious anti- American tyrannies across the world. World Health Organisation Director Margaret...

Who is the worst killer in the long, ugly history of war and extermination? Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? Not even close. A single book called Silent Spring killed far more people than all those fiends put together. Published in 1962, Silent Spring used manipulated data and wildly exaggerated claims (sound familiar?) to push for a worldwide ban on the pesticide known as DDT – which is, to this day, the most effective weapon against malarial mosquitoes. The resulting explosion of mosquito-borne malaria in Africa has claimed over sixty million lives.

Inconvenient Truths Allie Winegar Duzett, October 27, 2009 Ann McElhinney was not always a conservative; in fact, she was once quite liberal. She told the story of her conversion at Accuracy in Media’s 40th Anniversary Conference on October 23, 2009. McElhinney was a journalist called to cover a story about a Canadian mining company in Romania. “What was really bizarre about this,” McElhinney said, “was that the BBC, CNN, the New York Times covered this story of this evil mining company; evil Canadians were going to destroy Transylvania and bring nothing but bad things, and two heroic, wonderful women—two environmentalists…were...