The title is intended to be a bit inflammatory … but in any case, this article was interesting. During most of my life growing up “bed bugs” were just a joke. I never heard of anyone actually seeing one or a house infected with them — and I grew up in a very poor and rural place. But just in the last few years the number of people I know affected is startling. There were some quite well-off friends of ours who picked them up in a hotel in Wyoming. Then the college student daughter of a friend of ours got them in her house (shared with several other students, of course). Those are the people I know well who were affected, but there are other’s I know of who have had the problem, and all the stories of dealing with them were pretty awful. And it turns out that bed bugs really are back, after being practically eradicated from between WWII and the mid 1990′s.
And for those of you who haven’t talked to someone who has experienced the bed bug resurgence … once you get bed bugs in your house, from any source, they are a seriously nasty infestation and can take forever to get rid of. Because after much, much labor you think you have them beat … and suddenly they’re back again. And it doesn’t matter how fastidious you are — bed bugs don’t go after dirt or filth, they’re there for you. And if you’re extremely clean … you’re just a hygienic eating environment.
Around when bed bugs started their resurgence, Congress passed a major pesticides law in 1996 and the Clinton EPA banned several classes of chemicals that had been effective bed bug killers.
The debate isn’t over long-banned DDT, since modern bed bugs have developed a tolerance for that chemical. But in the pre-1996 regime, experts say, bed bugs were “collateral damage” from broader and more aggressive use of now-banned pesticides like Malathion and Propoxur.
Now …I don’t follow the politics of pesticides, and have no idea what the debate was over these two particular chemicals was about or how serious … but I have read about other chemicals that were eliminated from usage and have caused considerably more harm to humanity from their elimination before there were satisfactory replacement than their existence. Such as when DDT was banned and malaria deaths in Africa skyrocketed. So now we’re sending mosquito nets to Africa to help save lives, but it’s still not as effective as DDT was (and BTW — the DDT link is obviously from a biased organization, but the info is good. And sending mosquito nets to Africa is also a good thing to do and I salute the effort … but there are other steps we could take that would be less politically correct but save more lives).
But that’s the trouble with the extreme “environmentalist” (or so they call themselves) left, as they have plenty of dogma but no common sense. Such as in Germany where they’ve outlawed nuclear power but allowed for no new means of generating power. Or here in the US, where we still use oil/still need oil/will continue to buy oil not matter what the price or source/still require cheap energy to keep our economy going and keep people employed … and the current administration is doing everything they can do keep us from getting more domestic oil from our greatest sources: Alaska and the Gulf. While railing against our usage of foreign oil!
As I have spoken of before, I am a person who cares deeply and personally about the environment. I spend every weekend I can in the great out doors and I know exactly what we are protecting and why. But as humans we still have to live on the Earth, and we need sensible environmental policies that take into account all aspects of human existence, not just an anti-energy/anti-technology dogma that somehow slowing down progress or taking away modern conveniences will make the world better.
[...] In my years of watching the environmental movement, which keeps telling us we shouldn’t drill for more oil locally because we have to develop wind power instead (which won’t power the car that I still have 3 years of payments left on) and that high oil prices are good because they reduce consumption (except I don’t want to be less mobile or be able to spend less on my kids because I’m paying more to get to work everyday) I tend to believe the pro-DDT side. At least we could use DDT here in the US long enough to finish eliminating Malaria, though other “environmental” programs have brought back bedbugs. [...]