A Needless, Nationwide Bed Bug Epidemic

By Alan Caruba

There really is no mystery to solving the nationwide bed bug epidemic. In 1946 the solution was DDT. Today the solution could still be DDT if it hadn’t been banned by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1970s and, since then, any number of other beneficial pesticides.

I know something about this because, as a public relations counselor I have worked with pesticide manufacturers in the past and elements of the pest control industry today.

The problem isn’t so much the bed bugs as the brainwashing of Americans to believe that pesticides are worse than the pests. One of the reasons Americans live in an essentially pest-free environment in their homes, offices, restaurants, hotels, and elsewhere is the widespread use of pesticides, despite decades of effort by environmental organizations to spread and maintain an irrational fear of pesticides.

In the years following World War Two, the pest control industry had eliminated bed bugs to a point where today’s generation of pest control professionals literally had no experience dealing with them when they began to reappear in American homes, hotels, and other structures.

What is the Environmental Protection Agency’s answer? It is to hold bed bug “summits” in which industry and other experts testify to the obvious necessity to authorize the use of existing pesticides and expedite the registration of new formulations to rid the nation of this pest.

Today there is only one pesticide, Propoxur, known to effectively knock down a bed bug infestation, but when Ohio pest control professionals asked the Environmental Protection Agency for permission to use it, it was denied.

In December, Forbes magazine had an article, “America’s Most Bed Bug-Infested Cities.” Is it any surprise that three of Ohio’s cities, Cincinnati, Columbus, and Dayton, were identified as the most infested?

Among the other cities cited as suffering major bed bug infestations were New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.

A January 11th article in The Wall Street Journal, “City’s Problems with Bedbugs Getting Itchier” reported a seven percent increase in complaints about bed bugs. “Nationally,” the article noted, “one out of five Americans has had a bedbug infestation in their home or knows someone who has encountered the pests at home or in a hotel, according to the National Pest Management Association.”

The bed bug epidemic owes more to governmental regulation than to the experience and expertise of pest control professionals, all of whom must be licensed and certified by their respective States. Given the pesticides to address the epidemic, the industry could eliminate it.

It is shameful that America has to endure this epidemic, not just in terms of the physical harm that people encounter from it, but because it is entirely preventable. We are fortunate that bed bugs do not spread disease, despite the discomfort of their bites.

The last EPA bed bug summit heard 34 suggestions that would expand the bureaucracy at every level of government and expand training and licensure requirements. The answer is not more bureaucracy, but less. Not more paperwork, but the application of existing and new pesticides to rid America of the bed bugs.

The answer is more realism, less fear-mongering about pesticides, and the removal of regulatory barriers so that the pest control industry nationwide can do what it does best, eliminate bed bugs and other insect pests that spread disease and destroy property.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

America Goes Buggy Over Bed Bugs

By Alan Caruba

When The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and all other media in America begin to devote lots of space and time to the subject of bed bugs, you know America has a real pest problem.

Uniquely, I know a lot of pest control professionals because I have worked closely with the industry for a quarter century providing public relations services.

So let me say that I have the ANSWER to the nation’s plague of bed bugs.

It’s called PESTICIDES.

Not just any pesticides, but specifically the ones that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has successfully banned or forced pesticide manufacturers to stop registering or manufacturing because of the cost involved.

The truth you will never read elsewhere is that there are pesticides that will rid the nation of this massive bed bug population explosion and they will do so rapidly. Can you imagine an end to the current bed bug infestations just about everywhere in say, a month?

The problem is that the pesticides I have in mind are not available because the EPA has removed them from use by either pest control professionals or consumers. Meanwhile, pest control professionals are doing everything they can with the methods available to them, all the time being called unreliable or worse. The options they have at their disposal are few and usually expensive.

The public keeps being told that bed bugs are resistant to many of the presently available pesticides. That’s true. There is one, however, that does work against them. It’s Propoxur, a carbamate, and pest control professionals and state health officials alike are waiting for an emergency exemption to use it because the label permitting its use is already in existence. A pesticide can only be used against the insect pests for which it has received a label registration.

Propoxur used to be available, but in 1996 the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was passed and changed the rules under which individual pesticides were deemed toxic. Instead of meeting a safety factor rating of, say 100, FQPA demanded a new rating of 1,000. It’s call a “risk cup” and it swallows perfectly good pesticides whole and makes them go away. It was one of those arbitrary and bureaucratic rulings that had no relationship to the actual science or even the risk involved.

That’s how environmentalists who want to end the use of all pesticides work the angles. They find ways to get legislation and regulations passed that effectively eliminate any rational reason for a manufacturer to spend some $300 million to bring a new pesticide to market. Then, after one has been working successfully for fifteen years, the EPA requires that more money be spent to re-register it for use despite ample evidence that it poses no health hazard when properly applied.

That’s a rigged game and, ultimately, it is rigged against Americans who understandably expect and want to be pest-free.

Now, why would environmentalists want to end the use of pesticides? Because, without them, insect and rodent pests spread disease and disease kills people.

If there is one thing that really bothers environmentalists it is the presence of human beings on planet Earth. Scratch a Green and they will tell you there are too many people and they need too much food, too much water, and take up too much space to exist.

The fewer number of pesticides that are permitted for use, the sooner the pests will develop resistance to them. That is one reason the bed bug population is thriving. As a colleague of mine points out, however, “Resistance is the pattern in nature. Plants have an arsenal of pesticides they naturally produce to ward off attack by insects, and they need them, because insects develop resistance to what they are using to defend themselves.”

“If bed bugs were transmitting some sort of deadly disease,” says my colleague, “we wouldn’t be having this conversation. We would get Dursban tomorrow and bed bugs would be gone by the end of the week.”

The problem, however, is that the EPA forced Dow Chemical Company to stop making Dursban available to consumers several years ago. It fell into the “risk cup.”

Why is there a massive bed bug population explosion in the U.S.? Ask the EPA.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Why Billions of Bed Bugs are Biting

By Alan Caruba

After decades during which bed bugs were a rare event, they now make headlines infesting places from the Jersey City Goldman Sacks building to a Victoria’s Secret shop on New York’s Upper East Side, along with dormitories, apartments and homes throughout the nation

The bed bug explosion is more related to the loss of the means to exterminate them than the bugs themselves. The bed bugs are doing what all insect populations do; they are reproducing by the billions.

On August 10, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a “consumer alert” whose sole purpose was to continue its drumbeat of fear regarding any use of pesticides and to imply that pest control professionals could not be trusted to help one rid themselves of this ubiquitous pest.

All pest control professionals are subject to state licensing and annual certification to ensure they receive training in the proper methods of applying pesticides. Many firms conduct in-house training sessions year-round and the profession’s trade associations provide seminars as well. Suffice to say that everything about the provision of pest control services is highly regulated.

Since its founding in 1970, the EPA has dedicated itself to banning as many pesticides as possible. Its first “victory” was the banning of DDT in 1972. The result has been upwards of 90 million deaths from malaria worldwide. The truth is that DDT saved more lives than any chemical in human history until being banned from use in the U.S. and by other nations.

I have worked with the pest control industry for a quarter century and in the 1980s I helped promote an extraordinary pesticide, Ficam, a product that effectively killed a wide range of insect pests and was applied with nothing more dangerous than water!

After years of safe use, the EPA told the manufacturer that it had to re-register the product. Having previously spent around $15 million for the original registration, the British-owned company did the math and concluded it would be too expensive to go through the process again. It is no longer available in America.

The EPA’s action had nothing to do with the efficacy of the pesticide. It had everything to do with its unspoken policy of driving pesticides off the marketplace, whether for use by pest control professionals, for agricultural use, or by the general public.

And that is why America is experiencing a bed bug epidemic.

According to a joint statement on bed bug control from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the EPA, “Though the exact cause is not known, experts suspect the resurgence is associated with increased resistance of bed bugs to available pesticides…” and other causes such as greater international and domestic travel.

One pretty good guess at the “exact cause” is the continued loss of pesticides with which to knock down insect and rodent populations that nature provides in the billions.

In the “Bed Bug Handbook”, a guide for pest control professionals, “People often assume that any EPA-registered product that has bed bug treatment instructions on its label must be effective at controlling bed bugs. But this is not necessarily true. EPA policy is to rely on market forces to ensure that a product does what it claims; the agency does not require efficacy testing.”

The EPA and countless “environmental” organizations have effectively “educated” Americans to be afraid of chemicals in general and pesticides in particular. The claim is that they pose a threat to people’s health and this is true if one drinks them direct from the container. All poisons are based on the “dose”, the amount of exposure and, in the hands of a pest management professional, that factor will be very-low-to-none.

Today’s pest management professionals go about their job using the principles of Integrated Pest Management. High on the list is the least use of pesticides to knock down a pest population.

Ask yourself why, a hundred years before the invention and widespread use of pesticides, was an American’s average life span was about forty years of age? Given the use of pesticides, why do we now live up to eighty years? The answer is that pesticides protect lives and property too.

There is no real logic behind the EPA’s continued efforts to ban pesticides, but there is an illogical, unreasoned, and a lot of very dubious “science” behind the relentless effort to deprive Americans of the protection pesticides provide.

As I frequently remind people, take away the pesticides and all you have left is pests.

In the case of bed bugs, you have a particular pest that is very difficult to eliminate without a lot of intensive effort and the need to return to the scene of the infestation to get at those bed bugs that were hidden away between blood meals and will survive, become active, and lay eggs that become nymphs in a new generation to be exterminated.

It should come as no surprise that the joint CDC-EPA statement was heavy with warnings about “pesticide misuse” and “greater risk of pesticide exposure for those living in a home.”

The advice offered is laughable. It recommends using “monitoring devices” when most people learn about a bed bug infestation when they get bitten!

The statement recommends “removing clutter where bed bugs can hide”, “vacuuming”, and “using non-chemical pesticides (such as diatomaceous earth” and, finally, “judicious use of effective chemical pesticides” as the last choice.

The message is that it is the pesticides that are the problem, not the bed bugs. The reason we have seen a bed bug explosion is that the EPA has eliminated many of the pesticides that were formerly in use, creating the perfect storm, a growing resistance to those still registered for use.

The bed bugs don’t care that a generation or two of Americans have been brainwashed to think pesticides are bad, but you should.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

Killing Pesticides, Not Pests

By Alan Caruba

We are going to go from cotton fields to bedrooms in order to connect the dots on the many ways the Environmental Protection Agency and environmental groups have conspired to deprive Americans of beneficial chemicals that protect crops and humans from insect pests.

Only a scant two percent of the U.S. population engages in the farming that feeds all the rest of us and provides a bounty for export. Farm kids will tell you how they were on a tractor by the age of eight or nine, working the fields from early morning until dusk. When they get older, a lot of them decide to take up another way of making a living because farming is very hard work.

Since the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, not to mention the Department of Agriculture, a life spent farming has become increasingly more difficult thanks to the endless regulations regarding land and water use, what products they can use to fend off the pests and weeds that attack crops, and the manner in which they can be applied.

Why should this matter to you? Ask yourself that question while you are prowling the aisles in your favorite supermarket. Here’s the equation to keep in mind: No farmers. No food. And that includes livestock that depend on feed like hay and grains. If you like a nice cotton shirt or dress, remember that it started in a farmer’s field.

On August 3, the Western Environmental Law Center sent out a news release to brag about that way the 6th Circuit had issued an order denying the pesticide industry’s petition for rehearing in National Cotton Council v. EPA No. 06-4630. The order upheld the Court’s earlier finding that pesticide residuals and biological pesticides constitute pollutants under the Clean Water Act.

Just about everything is a “pollutant” as far as the EPA is concerned, but they really hate pesticides. Now farmers seeking to protect their crops will be required to get a National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit. If their neighbors or just about anyone objects, they won’t get it.

Let me tell you about some of the pests that attack cotton. They include Alfalfa Looper, Boll Weevil Song, Cotton Bollworm, Cutworms, Leafhoppers, Pink Bollworm, Saltmarsh Catapillers, Silverfish Whitefly, Webspinning Spider Mites, and something called Thrips.

Those are just a few of the insect pests that attack a cotton crop and they are just a few of the hundreds of insect species with which farmers of every kind of crop must contend. The invention of pesticides tipped the struggle in their favor, allowing them to protect crops in a fashion that permits them to feed the rest of us.

Now, here’s where it goes beyond just the problems farmers encounter. The rest of us are subject to every kind of disease imaginable because a lot of insect pests transmit them. They did so quite famously during the Black Death that wiped out a third of Europe’s population and, these days, they spread Lyme Disease, West Nile Fever, Rocky Mountain Fever, Dysentery, and all manner of nasty stuff, including the Bubonic plague.

By 1996 the EPA had whipped up everybody’s fears that pesticides were so harmful to children that even more regulation was needed, so Congress obligingly passed the Food Quality Protection Act and it amended the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act.

While it is true that the EPA hasn’t banned a pesticide since DDT, it is equally true that it has found all kinds of ways to eliminate a variety of pesticides from use. Usually they cite “studies” in which some rats are stuffed so full of high doses of a pesticide that it causes them to become ill. Short of drinking a pesticide directly from the bottle, this is not likely to happen to you. Most structural pesticides are so diluted when applied that they are a threat solely to the pests.

All of which means that, while the farmers are encountering difficulty dealing with Mother Nature’s nasty creatures, the rest of us are increasingly vulnerable to them as well. A case in point is the raging population of bed bugs that was the subject of a recent EPA “summit.”

Simply put, if the EPA had not forced Ficam, a bendiocarb applied with water, and chlorpyrifos, formerly known as Dursban off the market, there would be NO bedbug problem because either one of these excellent pesticides would eliminate them.

The EPA’s message to us is that we should learn to love bedbugs because they are difficult and costly to eliminate these days. Fortunately, they do not spread disease.

And you thought the EPA was “protecting” you?

No, they are protecting the “environment.”

The Great Bed Bug Bureaucracy

By Alan Caruba

In mid-April I wrote about the Environmental Protection Agency’s two-day “Bed Bug Summit”, noting that part of the problem for the resurgence of the pest was the fact the EPA had banned some of the pesticides that had been used kill them in the past.

They are a dreadful little critter because they can live a very long time between blood meals, breed extensively like most insect pests, and are so small it is difficult to spot them.

A friend of mine, Rich Kozlovich, prominent in the pest control profession, laid out his thoughts about the Summit calling it “A substitute for accomplishment” and noting that a bill before Congress will allocate $50 million to the problem, but worse, a host of regulations will emerge from the Summit that will do little or nothing to actually address what can and should be done.

Let’s understand that bed bugs, at least at this point, are not known to transmit disease. They bite, it causes a lot of itching, but it’s not like the Mexican flu making its way around the globe and even killing the occasional victim. Despite being declared an epidemic or pandemic, this new strain of flu is not that lethal. People get sick and then they recover.

Bed bugs are a “lifestyle” pest. People associate them with flop houses and bad housing or sanitation. The fact is that bed bugs can live anywhere and are being found in resorts, hotels, dormitories, and people’s homes. They have, as often as not, been imported to these places as the result of foreign travel where they have gotten onto the clothes people packed in their luggage before returning home. Or they come from the many foreign visitors, tourists, who introduce them. Once here, they breed and spread. With the advent of DDT, they had been virtually eliminated as a pest problem in the U.S.

The EPA’s agenda has been to extend its control over pest control and you better believe that this is one profession that is heavily regulated, from the pesticides they are permitted to use to the licensing and annual certifications required to stay in business. Each State has its own environmental protection agency and the nationwide bureaucracy involved employs thousands of people.

The technicians who do the actual work are initially trained and tested to ensure they have learned the basics about the proper use of pesticides and the ability to identify the many species of pests with which they have to contend. They get an education that never ends.

As my friend pointed out about the Summit, “There were 34 suggestions that would expand the bureaucracy at every level, expand training and licensure requirements and potentially mandate IPM (Integrated Pest Management which puts the use of pesticides way down on the list of remedial actions to take.)

Other Summit suggestions included money for public education, ten advocating grant money, “and nine that had some worth. However, no one blamed the EPA.” No one mentioned the fact that the EPA has been systematically banning pesticides since its inception in 1972.

In these times the government is growing into a full-blown monster, spending and wasting money at a billion dollars a day while running up huge deficits. It is getting ready to add 20,000 new jobs at the Pentagon, expanding the enforcement personnel at the Internal Revenue Service, and finding new reasons to hire more people to do things that will just slow down progress and sensible solutions to everything.

As Rich Kozlovich points out, the likelihood of that $50 million being used to fund actual bed bug remediation is small. Instead, a force of “inspectors” will be created for no good reason because that’s what pest control professionals already do! “Taxpayer money will be used for transportation, lodging and meals, training inspectors, and if they choose, they can contract pest controllers for purposes that aren’t really specified.”

You can bet that federal and state health agencies will get in on the act in order to get a piece of that $50 million “which will make them secondary de facto regulators of the pest control industry in their states.” They are already heavily regulated by State environmental protection agencies.

The bottom line is that “inspections will not eliminate bed bugs.” All it does is create more government employees for an ordinary part of the process that can and should be tended to by pest control professionals.

If all this oversight and supervision drives up the liabilities for treatment, you will watch pest control companies begin to refuse to do bed bug extermination. They already pay out lots of money for insurance and legal services to protect them against people eager to sue for any reason.

So you can add bed bugs to the long list of hoaxes that government uses to expand its control over people’s lives and you can be pretty sure, where there’s money to be had, that will not be long in coming.

You can learn more about pest control problems and issues when you visit:
http://paradigmsanddemographics.blogspot.com.