Well, for those of you living with bed bugs, get ready to feel further depressed.
The Village Voice’s blog, Running Scared wrote about a Bedbug Control Seminar held by Pest Control Technology Magazine this month at the Park Central Hotel. According to the blog, the unofficial theme of the seminar was, the bed bug problem’s getting worse and we don’t really know how to deal with it. A note of warning: the entry features a disgusting YouTube video of a bed bug feeding on an arm.
Here’s a few excerpts from the blog entry:
“We have to be in an absolute bed bug state of mind,” warned Dr. Michael Potter, an entomologist at the University of Kentucky and leading expert in the now global bed bug war, with no apologies to Billy Joel. “This problem is not going to go away. I don’t see how the problem is going to get better. It’s going to get chaotic.”
…it appears that even the exterminators’ deadly pesticides are no match for bedbugs…
More horrifying was Potter’s assertion that these tiny vampires are growing increasingly resistant to the arsenal of mostly pyrethroid-based compounds currently approved by the EPA. “We’ve had cases where we’re spraying 200 to 300 times the label dose of toxins and we can’t kill ‘em,” Potter said.
The only solution offered to affected New Yorkers were mattress covers, which to me are not only disgusting but do not put up a substantial defense in your bed bug infestation if the bed bugs are not in your bed, or are in your bed and in other areas of your home. The name bed bug is misleading, because beds are only one of the only many, many places in a person’s home these insects can live.
Notice that the blog mentions “currently approved by the EPA”, hinting that, as many bed bug bloggers have, the long-banned DDT just might be the only hope in combating bed bugs, just as it did half a century ago.
While effective solutions were non-existent at the seminar, one exceptional idea to decrease the spreading of bed bugs was discussed: a hotline that New Yorkers can call to pick up their bug-infested mattresses rather than have them lying around on the sidewalks, or worse, in an apartment hallway.
Long story short: bed bugs growing epidemic, nothing in sight that can stop them, give up hope, find a nice corner to sit in (corners should be easy to find once you throw out your furniture) and cry silently. Or howl like a banchee, whatever works for you.