What Spreads Faster Than Bedbugs? Stigma | Hacker News Reader

What Spreads Faster Than Bedbugs? Stigma

nytimes.com

5 pointstimr6 comments

The DDT angle is fantastic news. Bird eggshells trump African kids, but I am pretty sure Upper East side embarrassment trumps eggshells. Quick, someone introduce them to a safe, nonpolluting chemical solution to the bedbugs problem.

Diatomaceous earth (DE) does the job.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Diatomaceous_...

Doesn't seem like diatomaceous earth would help much with bedbugs.

DDT actually wasn't all that bad. The problem was that it was way way way overused (back in the fifties they were literally pouring thousands of gallons into lakes and rivers because they thought it would be a good idea to get rid of the mosquitos).

You know, if you spread a fair amount of DDT inside a bunch of buildings I suspect precious little will escape outside, especially as measured by the putative egg shell problem. We're not talking about massive outdoor spraying to suppress mosquitoes, nor is that the solution for African kids (instead it's twice yearly spraying of dwelling interiors).

It would be nice to see some balance on these sorts of issues, but at the very least I expect that soon enough we'll see some hypocrisy. At the moment it is most delicious to watch, so to speak.

DDT hasn't been effective against bedbugs since the '40s - long before the ban. Use any pesticide long enough and the target will tend to develop a resistance. Now it just agitates bedbugs and makes them more active.

Has this been tested on the current bed bug population?

Such resistance tend to come at a cost that makes the organism otherwise less fit and removal of the selection pressure can change the population. Also, how much of the current population started from ... imports, as it were?

Anyway, as I understand it, the EPA has outlawed the use of all pesticides that really work on bed bugs, so the problem's a lot wider than DDT. It's just that our insane fixation on the eeeevils of DDT make it the iconic pesticide we've managed to ban (at the mere cost of 10s of millions of lives).

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