Ah, Spring! Oh-Oh, Pests!

Yikes! Termites!

By Alan Caruba

Poets never seem to run out of words to describe spring. Alfred Lord Tennyson said a young man’s thoughts turn to love when spring arrives. Gardeners especially welcome it to put their little part of the world in perfect order, and many thrill to the sound of “Play ball!”

Spring, for me, is an annual reminder of the sheer power of nature to regenerate itself. Wherever you live, the trees burst into bloom along with the fecund life cycles of every species. In a world shaking loose the icy grip of winter, spring is full of the promise of warmer days, blue skies, and the real greening that nature provides.

Along with other species, spring signals the emergence of insect and rodent pests. America has been suffering a plague of bed bugs these days because there is only one pesticide registered to kill them and the Environmental Protection Agency has been notoriously slow to permit its use. All manner of other non-chemical techniques are used, but the bed bugs survive and thrive.

I know a lot about pests because in the 1980s I began to provide public relations services for my home state’s pest control association. These days both the national and state associations have renamed themselves “pest management” groups, but the only thing you want to “manage” with insect and rodent pests is to kill them as fast as possible.

So, yes, when spring arrives, I know that a lot of pest control professionals are gearing up to do battle with cockroaches, termites, ants, spiders, ticks, bed bugs, wasps, and the many permutations of their various species. The profession had its beginnings in the Middle Ages when men called “ratcatchers” plied their trade. Even English royalty employed them to keep their castles rat-free.

At the time, few made any connection between rats, fleas, and the Bubonic plague that raged through Europe from 1347 for the next five years, but that didn’t stop the plague from killing off a quarter of the population of Europe, some 25 million! Try to imagine what life would be like without pest control professionals today?

Spring, for example, marks the arrival of Lyme disease in many parts of the nation where there are large deer populations. The northeast is particularly vulnerable to this disease that is spread by the black-legged deer tick.

For homeowners and others with property, spring signals the presence of termites when their winged alates show up on window panes, attracted by the sunlight. What most do not know is that their home has likely been infested for several years until the colony reaches a point of sending the alates out to establish new colonies. Annually termites do more damage to homes throughout the United States than the combined effects of storms, fires, and earthquakes. Termite damage is frequently not covered by homeowner’s insurance. It is estimated they cause $5 billion in damage every year.

Termites aren’t the only insect that can inflict property damage, a colony of Carpenter ants, often several thousands in numbers, can enter a home overnight and begin to dine on its wooden elements.

Pest management professionals always urge consumers to have their homes and workplaces regularly inspected for signs of insect or rodent pests. The tendency, however, is to wait until there are signs of an infestation before people call for help. I’d rather know my home or business was pest-free.

For example, there are a variety of cockroach species indigenous to the United States. They include the American, German, and Oriental cockroach. A cockroach infestation can number in the hundreds of thousands. A single, female German cockroach can, statistically, produce more than 400,000 descendents in a single year. The young of German cockroaches mature in 36 days, while American cockroaches take up to 160 days. If you see one, particularly in a restaurant, it means there are thousands you can’t see.

Rodents, mice and rats, breed prodigiously as well. Rats have a life span of approximately nine months and are ready to breed within three months. Their gestation period is 22 days and they have an average litter of eight. A female rat can produce 20 offspring. Statistically, a single pair of rats has the potential, mathematically, of producing 359 million descendents in three year’s time.

I hope this hasn’t reduced all those warm, fuzzy feelings you have about the return of spring to those of dread, but in truth Mother Nature doesn’t care how you feel about spring or bed bugs or any of the many other creatures who are too busy reproducing to be concerned about your welfare and health.

Remember that the next time the EPA bans another pesticide or some environmentalist tells you that the biggest threat to your life is carbon dioxide, a gas you exhale all the time.

Mark Twain put these words in Tom Sawyer’s mouth: “It's spring fever. That is what the name of it is. And when you've got it, you want -- oh, you don't quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!”

© Alan Caruba, 2012

Greener Than Thou

By Alan Caruba

The most obnoxious and hypocritical people are those who are always preaching a “greener” way of life, insisting that anything that constitutes our modern lifestyles is destroying the Earth and depleting its natural resources. Never mind that we depend upon oil, natural gas, coal, and a host of minerals and chemicals for that lifestyle, the absence of which caused people in earlier eras to live shorter, far more unpleasant lives.

Oil, other than ust an energy source is also a component in countless products, starting with plastic, and is so vital to modern life that its value goes far beyond just being able to drive our cars to visit grandma.

Greener than thou has replaced holier than thou ever since Rachel Carson penned her pernicious and seriously flawed attack on DDT and other chemicals, fertilizers and pesticides in 1962. The result has been the needless deaths of millions from malaria in Africa and subtropical nations after the U.S. banned DDT and other nations followed suit. If there was a comparable pesticide available today, the U.S. would not be suffering a biblical plague of bed bugs.

A bone fide environmentalist, David Owen, has written a book that quite literally filets environmentalism, “The Conundrum: How Scientific Innovation, Increased Efficiency, and Good Intentions can Make Our Energy and Climate Problems Worse.” ($14.00, Riverhead Press, softcover).

Owen, who has authored 14 previous books, examines the way environmentalism frequently makes no sense at all. This is not to be confused with conservation, the earlier movement that led to the preservation of some of the nation’s natural wonders.

To live an environmentally acceptable way of life is the same as striving to be a saint, avoiding “sin” in order to secure a place in heaven. It is not only virtually impossible, but to be human is to consume what Nature provides. If you think about, all of Earth's creatures are consumers, depending on where they are on the food chain.

For example, when environmentalists convinced Congress to reduce the amount of water in toilet tanks, the only thing they accomplished was to require that the newer, smaller tanks had be flushed twice to rid he toilet of feces and urine, i.e., more use of water, not less. The EPA has just issued a ruling they claim is necessary to reduce mercury emissions despite the fact that your average volcanic eruption puts more into the atmosphere than any human imposed restrictions could ever achieve. Congress, however, passed a law banning 100-watt incandescent light bulbs, thus requiring people to purchase mercury-filled ones that, if broken, require a hazmat team to clean up after.

Environmentalism is essentially irrational.

It believes that humans actually have anything to do with “saving the Earth” when the natural forces of the Earth are so far beyond any “control” that it routinely reminds us of this fact. We have zero impact on the climate and, as for carbon dioxide, the villain of all “global warming” claims, humans exhale about six pounds of it every day. And there are seven billion of us. Even so, it constitutes barely 0.033 percent of the atmosphere.

Owen begins by posing the question, “How do we truly begin to think about less—less fossil fuel, less carbon, less water, less waste, less habitat destruction, less population stress—when our sense of economic, cultural, and personal well-being is based on more?”

The real question at the heart of all environmentalism is what do we do when there are seven billion humans using the resources of the Earth and the real answer for environmentalists is how do we reduce the Earth’s population and how do they grow rich in the process? That is what lies at the heart of all the “solutions” put forth by the United Nations environmental program; an enemy of the human race if there ever was one.

What environmentalists want is “a vast, unprecedented transformation of human behavior in our relationship with energy and consumption.” The next time you hear anyone call for a “transformation” know also that they are a charlatan seeking control over your life.

The environmental assumption is that the Earth is running out of the sources of energy and that consumption is bad. Both are equally wrong because the Earth is not running out of the sources of energy and consumption is what humans and all other species on Earth do every day.

Owen believes that humans are “the world’s main emitter of manmade greenhouse gases” and this is utterly false. The so-called greenhouse gases are the ones in the atmosphere that not only keep the Sun from turning the Earth into a desiccated version of Mars or the Moon, but in the case of carbon dioxide, it is responsible for every single element of vegetation upon which all life depends.

Owen and many environmentalists would prefer that all of humanity live packed side-by-side in crowded cities, using mass transit or bicycling to work to save the Earth, but anyone who gives two thoughts to the amount of energy consumed to maintain a city knows this too is yet another idiotic environmental conceit.

Indeed, Owen notes that “There are many downsides to density, including the fact that squeezing people and their destinations close together makes diseases, wars, and natural disasters more efficient, too.”

That, says Owen, is a conundrum. Indeed, his book is filled with environmental conundrums that he tries to resolve while overtly and inadvertently exposing the idiocy of environmentalism.

Simply put, farmers are the world’s natural environmentalists, relying on the weather—which they cannot control—and the stewardship of their land to feed themselves and others. They must, however, have a means to move their crops to places where other humans can acquire them and that requires a massive system of transportation which, in turn, requires the affordable use of energy.

Environmentalism’s goals, clean air and water, are laudable, but a massive governmental bureaucracy to require that people use less energy and consume less is not.

Time and time again we see examples of environmentalism that only manage to kill people, whether it is the banning of beneficial chemicals or the use of the least efficient forms of electrical power, wind and solar energy.

The least reported story out of Europe these days is the extreme cold that is literally killing people because it puts the lie to all the environmental “solutions” advanced since the 1960s. Environmentalism has been decried as a religion and, for those who want to deny a greater power, Nature or God, it remains their holy grail.

© Alan Caruba, 2012.

The Insanity of Protecting Rats

By Alan Caruba

Going back to the 1980s I have worked professionally with elements of the pest control industry providing public relations services  The process of educating the public is necessary because new generations must be informed of the threats pests pose to health and property.

Back when it was still known as the National Pest Control Association, I even received a beautiful certificate of appreciation that hangs in my office. At some point several years ago, it and state organizations changed their name to “Pest Management” presumably to divest themselves of the image of actually killing the creatures that annually spread disease and do millions in property damage.

In past years environmental organizations devoted a lot of time and money to convince the public that the real problem was the pest controllers, not the pests. If they all changed their profession next Monday, the entire nation would be totally over-run with roaches, termites, rats and mice in a month. The work is not glamorous, but it is utterly essential to society.

A case in point is bed bugs that have emerged in a few short years into a full-fledged pest problem from coast to coast. Thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, the lack of pesticides registered to exterminate them has facilitated this new plague. There is, I believe, only one.

I have watched as the EPA has, since its founding, insanely strip pest control professionals and consumers of access to pesticides that formerly had protected their parents and grandparents, as well as their homes and businesses.

When you take away the pesticides, all you have left are the pests.

The modern pest control industry had its beginnings in the Middle Ages with the emergence of “rat catchers”, men who had developed a variety of poisons to rid homes and other properties of the ubiquitous rodent. Even the kings and queens of England had a royal rat catcher.

They were such a part of life in those times that the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin has been passed down to us. It was, of course, the combination of rats and fleas that spread the Black Plague in the Middle Ages, killing a third or more of the population of Europe.

So why, one must ask, have the burgers of Washington, D.C., responsible for passing the laws, passed the truly insane one titled the “Wildlife Protection Act” that requires pest control operators to not only capture rats in a fashion that does not harm them in any way, but to transport them twenty-five miles away to be set free?

As Dr. Don Boys noted in a recent Canada Free Press article, “Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia’s Attorney General, said D.C.’s new rat law is ‘crazier than fiction’ because it requires vermin not be killed but rather captured, preferably in "families", and transferred to a ‘wildlife rehabilitator’”, presumably living in Virginia!

Here are a few facts about rats:

# Rats have a life span of approximately nine months.

# Rats are ready to breed within three months. Their gestation period is 22 days and they have an average litter of eight. An average female rat will provide 20 offspring.

# A single pair of rats has the potential, mathematically, of producing 359 million descendents in three year’s time.

# The average overall length of a rat is l6 inches, with a body measuring 9 inches and a tail of 7 inches. The average weight of a rat is l ¼ pounds. Their color can range from reddish brown to black.

# A rat’s sense of smell is excellent, as is its sense of taste. They are particularly suspicious of food. This results often in “bait shyness.” Rats will leave a poisoned bait untouched for almost a week. Other members of the pack will avoid food not eaten by other members and often warn other rats away by sprinkling it with their urine or feces.

# Rats can gain access to virtually any structure. They can climb 15 feet up a rough, surfaced vertical wall. They can jump vertically one foot from a flat surface and they can easily traverse telephone wires and ropes. They are, in addition, good swimmers.

Virginia and other states contiguous to Washington, D.C. do not want the District’s rats. They have plenty of their own. They also have a complete host of other rodents and wildlife that require the ministrations of pest control professionals.

There are a host of very good reasons why every American city and town has extensive laws regarding the control of insect and rodent pests, as well as wildlife that, in my home state of New Jersey, includes raccoons, opossum, squirrels, turkeys, coyotes, deer, and bears!

Anyone with an ounce of common sense knows that rats must be killed to protect people and property, but not the idiots on the Washington, D.C. city council who were more intent on protecting the rats than their constituents.

A lot of Americans have concluded they need protection from Washington, D.C. and its incessant and insane production of laws and regulations that pose the greatest threat of all to our personal freedoms and to the nation’s economy, security, and future.

© Alan Caruba, 2012

EPA Protecting You Into An Early Grave

By Alan Caruba

The Environmental Protection Agency is always going on about the ways it “protects” everyone, but its greatest achievement has been to protect them out of countless jobs eliminated by their regulations and restrictions. Their latest diktat is directed at products that consumers can purchase to rid their homes, apartments, and other facilities of mice and rats.

If they keep it up, soon the only thing you will be able to purchase is a mouse trap.

I stopped believing anything the EPA had to say on most things because it is usually based on distorted statistics and totally dubious “science” such as their continuing claim that carbon dioxide (CO2) is a “pollutant” that must be regulated. CO2 is vital to all life on Earth as the “food” that supports all vegetation. It has zero affect on the atmosphere, being a mere 0.0380% of it.

Recently, the EPA gave $1.29 million of our money to China “to promote environmental research” there. The objective was to reduce “carbon emissions” in a nation that, unlike America, is building reliable, traditional coal-fired utilities to generate electricity, i.e. power to grow their economy.

I happen to know a lot about pest control because, for twenty-five years I have been the public relations counselor to a state pest management association. Before that I served in a similar capacity for a pesticide manufacturer who was forced by the EPA to withdraw an extraordinary defense against all manner of insect pests from the marketplace. It had passed all the requirements to initially be registered for use, but the EPA then insisted it repeat the multi-million dollar process. The company and the product that was applied with nothing more than water waved bye-bye to the U.S.A.

For the record, I have not represented any pesticide manufacturers in more than four decades. I say this because most of the smear “profiles” of me on the Web continue to suggest that I do. That is, when they are not insisting that I work for Exxon, too.

Pest management firms use rodenticides that are inside enclosed bait stations that children or pets cannot access. That said, mice and rats cannot be exclusively controlled by such devices. Professionals must access wall voids, attics and other areas rodents use for nests. They use a variety of products to do this including small bags of rodenticide and even powders.

The EPA claims that poison control centers receive between 12,000 and 15,000 reports of children under the age of six being exposed to pesticides in the form of pellets or baits placed where they can find them. Reports, however, are not poisonings. Any call a poison center gets is “a report”, so what we really have here is the EPA playing fast and loose with the truth. When you consider that there are millions of rodenticide applications every year by pest management professionals, that constitutes an astonishing record of safe use.

Anyone who would go to the local garden supply outlet or similar vender, purchase rat and mice bait, and then put it where children can get at it is the definition of stupidity, but it happens. Trained, licensed and certified pest management professionals do not do this.

The goal of the proposed ban is to “better protect children, pets, and wildlife.” Well, okay, but rats and mice are wildlife.

Moreover, rats and mice are responsible for an enormous amount of property damage to all kinds of structures from homes to warehouses. They are Nature’s prime vectors of disease, spreading Salmonella, whenever they get access to foods of all description. This is why all food-related outlets are subject to constant inspection by health departments in cities and towns.

The difficulty people encounter with a mouse invasion has to do with how swiftly they breed. A female can have anywhere from five to ten litters of five or six young. They are born between 19 and 21 days after they mate and their young reach reproductive maturity in six to ten weeks. The result is that a single pair of mice can rapidly multiply wherever they can find a steady source of food and water.

Rats reproduce in a similar fashion. Thus, by the time you realize you have a problem, it is probably already in need of professional pest control. Rats bite more than 45,000 people each year, a figure far in excess of the EPA claim of poison “reports” (many of which include other substances.)

All the enclosed bait stations you can purchase are not likely to respond to a do-it-yourself effort to reduce a rodent infestation. The availability of other rodenticide products at least gives people—particularly those with low incomes—a chance to deal with the problem.

Since the EPA intends to ban the sale and distribution of products containing brodifacoum, bromadiolone, defethialone, and difenaccoum to residential consumers, that means most consumers will no longer have access to any rodenticides to protect themselves against a rat or mouse infestation.

Meanwhile, the EPA is under pressure from Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) to ban Triclosan, a key ingredient that has been safely used to stop the spread of viruses and keep kids healthy via anti-bacterial soap. Hospitals use such products to maintain a sterile environment, but Markey is determined to end that with the help of the EPA.

This is what passes for “protection” from the Environmental Protection Agency.

In sum, Americans are not being protected. They are being put at risk for all manner of diseases from an insane, Nanny-State agency that has pushed so far beyond its original mandates that the safest thing Americans could do at this point is to insist that it be shut down.

© Alan Caruba, 2011

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

We Must Defeat the EPA Power Grab

By Alan Caruba

“The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is carrying out one of the biggest power grabs in American history. The agency has positioned itself to regulate fuel economy, set climate policy for the nation and amend the Clean Air Act—powers never delegated to it by Congress. It has done this by declaring greenhouse gas emissions a danger to public health and welfare, in a proceeding known as the ‘endangerment finding.’”

So wrote George Allen and Marlo Lewis in a recent Forbes commentary. Allen is a former U.S. Senator and Governor from Virginia. Lewis is a senior fellow in environmental policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

The Senate is scheduled to vote June 10 on the Murkowski Resolution, S.J. Res. 26. If passed it will stop the out-of-control Environmental Protection Agency’s global warming rampage. The resolution has 41 sponsors, but needs 51 votes to pass. There will be no filibusters and no second change to reverse the worst attack on the U.S. economy and the freedom of Americans to utilize energy for business and personal use.

“If allowed to stand,” wrote Allen and Lewis, “the EPA’s endangerment finding will trigger a regulatory cascade through multiple provisions of the Act. America could be burdened with a regulatory regime more costly than any climate bill Congress has rejected or declined to pass, yet without the people’s representatives ever voting on it.”

Americans have witnessed the spending of billions in stimulus bills that have not reversed or slowed the worst unemployment rate since the Great Depression.

They have witnessed the take-over of General Motors by the federal government.

They have watched this Democrat-controlled Congress ram through a healthcare “reform” bill that takes over one-sixth of the nation’s economy and a Cap-and-Trade Act, renamed a “climate” bill, is waiting for a vote.

When the Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 no one ever imagined that it would exceed its mandate to ensure clean air and water to such an extent that it would pose a threat to the lives of Americans and to the economy.

It is in control of two people who are virulent environmentalists. Carol Browner, an Obama “czar” whose appointment was not subject to congressional oversight was an EPA administrator during the Clinton administration. She is an avowed socialist and close associate of former Vice President Al Gore. Lisa Jackson, the current administrator, worked with her before being selected to head the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection.

The same day Rasmussen Reports revealed that Barack Obama has the lowest approval rating of any previous President it was reported that Ms. Jackson had cancelled attendance at a political fundraiser in New York next week.

It must have occurred to someone in her office that, in the midst of the worst oil spill in U.S. history, that might not be a good idea. They scrubbed her participation saying “her priority has continued to be protecting human health and the environment.”

If that is an EPA priority it has pursued this goal in some strange ways.

For example, it has consistently banned some of the best pesticides ever invented to protect against termite infestations that do billions in damage every year or DDT that actually won a Nobel Prize for its protection of human life against the scourge of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases.

The EPA is so anti-chemical it is currently looking for a way to stop the use of oil dispersant chemicals to reduce the threat to marshes and other areas the spill may reach!

While this is happening, it is seeking to impose rules that would put an end to mountaintop coal mining, closing off access to an energy resource responsible for 50%of all the electricity used daily and putting an end to countless mining industry jobs.

The nation is now at a crossroads between a future in which the federal government, through the EPA, controls the entire economy or whether this evil genie gets put back in the bottle.

We live in an America in which the amount of water we can use to flush our toilets has been regulated and we will soon be unable to purchase an incandescent light bulb, one of the greatest inventions in the history of mankind.

We live in a nation that requires that every gallon of gasoline include ethanol, an additive made from corn. So much corn is diverted to this that it has forced up the price of virtually every food product we purchase. At the same time it has reduced the mileage of every gallon.

If you have had a lingering feeling that something is terribly wrong, you’re right.

For now, the job at hand is to get the Murkowski resolution passed or, in effect, we might as well close the doors on America’s future because the EPA will destroy it.

© Alan Caruba, 2010

An Unhappy Pest-Filled 2010

By Alan Caruba

From its inception on December 2, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency has done everything in its power to deprive Americans of the protection against insect and rodent pests that is afforded by the proper use of pesticides.

I know this from personal experience because in the 1980s I worked with a company that produced a pesticide called Ficam. Following its introduction, it was immediately embraced by the pest control industry because, not only did it work wonders against a broad spectrum of insect pest species, it was applied with nothing more toxic than tap water!

It costs several millions of dollars to get a pesticide registered with the EPA because they are subject to all kinds of field and laboratory tests to ensure they do not pose an unacceptable risk to the public. Despite having secured registration, the EPA came back to the company within a decade and demanded it re-register the product. The company decided to no longer market Ficam in America.

This is just one example, but perhaps the worst was the way the EPA denied access to Dursban, a Dow Agrosciences product, that was so effective and widely used for such a long time that it was evident it posed no threat to humans unless, perhaps, you drank it right from the bottle or injected it directly into your blood stream.

On June 10, 2000, using the power authorized by the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act, the EPA decided that anything that good had to be a risk to public health and forced the company to restrict it to agricultural use only. Some eighty popular pest control products used Dursban as a component, but you can no longer find them in your home and garden store.

The latest effort to deprive Americans of any protection against Mother Nature’s most active vectors of disease, insect and rodent pests, was announced in late December. The EPA requested public comment on options for disclosing inert ingredients in pesticides. This is a required charade before the EPA is allowed to do what it has already made up its mind to do. Inert ingredients are part of the end use product formulation and are not, by definition, active ingredients.

Pesticide manufacturers usually only disclose their inert ingredients to the EPA. More than 350 inert pesticide ingredients are at risk. This latest attack on the public’s access to pesticides was in response to a petition by the Northwest Coalition for Alternatives to Pesticides. These demented “environmental” groups exist for the single purpose of leaving the public vulnerable to a list of diseases spread by insects and rodents.

If you’re a big fan of Salmonella, dysentery, murine typhus fever, leptospirosis, trichinosis, gastroenteritis, Lyme disease, West Nile Fever, Bubonic plague, and a host of other diseases spread by insect and rodent pests, you are going to love the EPA because it has been doing everything in its power to bring about their spread. Much of what we accept as public health today is based on the use of pesticides by trained, licensed, and certified pest control professionals.

In the endless effort to make schools “safer” for those condemned to twelve years of incarceration in them, Congressman Rush Holt (D-NJ) has introduced H.R. 4159, the School Environment Protection Act (SEPA) to inflict a one-size-fits-all piece of legislation on American schools from Alaska to Alabama. Suffice it to say, different States and region of the nation have different insect and rodent pest populations. There are vast numbers of different species and each has specific habits and habitats.

At the request of Beyond Pesticides, yet another group devoted to leaving children and adults vulnerable to an astonishing variety of pest species, Rep. Holt’s bill ignores the fact that 38 States have approved or implemented a state law or rule expressly related to the management of pests in schools. In many cases, these rules have been in place for more than fifteen years.

No doubt the public will be deluged with studies asserting that pesticides are associated with acute illnesses due to exposure at school, but under the widely used standards of Integrated Pest Management (IPM) the likelihood of exposure is virtually non-existent.

It’s bad enough that the EPA is insanely insisting that carbon dioxide, a gas vital to the growth of all vegetation and all life on planet Earth, is a “pollutant”, but these latest regulatory and legislative actions add up to just one thing, a very buggy 2010 and beyond if enacted.

Wheat, Yes, Wheat!

By Alan Caruba

Today, we shall talk of wheat. Yes, wheat!

Since 98% of Americans have no connection to farming beyond a visit to the supermarket, most give no thought to how food products get to the shelves.

However, if you do a quick inventory of the foods you eat on a daily basis, you will discover that a significant number have some connection to wheat. Pizza crust is a wheat product. Some cereals (Wheaties!) and all pastas begin as wheat.

All breads. All cookies. All cakes and pies. All pancakes. Donuts, too. Hhhhhmmmm, donuts!

Born and raised in the suburbs, I never gave any thought to farming until my work as a writer and photojournalist took me to the fields of farmers around the nation to document aspects of their work. It was a revelation.

Indeed, as revelations go, if you are at all familiar with the Old Testament, you should swiftly begin to add up the many references to this king of all grains. From “give us our daily bread” to “cast your bread upon the waters” wheat has played an essential role in the development of civilizations dependent upon it or which thrived based on its export.

Little wonder that the lyrics of “America the Beautiful” begin, “O beautiful for spacious skies, For amber waves of grain, For purple mountain majesties, Above the fruited plain!”

Wheat still plays an important, though largely unreported role among nations today. China recently completed a three-month inventory and, with a population of more than a billion, it is little wonder that Chinese officials say that “grain has always been the first and foremost issue to maintain peace and stability.”

I had a college professor who suggested that no government is ever more than two weeks of being overthrown and replaced if it cannot feed its people.

Saudi Arabia just purchased 440,000 tons of hard wheat from the U.S. A desert nation, it needs about 2.3 million tons of wheat per year. The disruption to life in Pakistan, thanks to al Qaeda and the Taliban, has affected its wheat production and the U.S. is providing $26 million to go toward the purchase of wheat and other food. The world’s largest importer of grains is Japan and it is looking to use overseas investments in nations like Brazil, Argentina, Romania and Hungary to ensure a stable supply of food as global demand increases.

So maybe now wheat isn’t as boring a topic as you might have thought, eh?

While most people think of Kansas when you say wheat, the State of Washington is a major producer and Dr. David Bragg, Ph.D., an extension entomologist, recently enumerated the insect pests that can be depended upon to attack wheat.

They include the Russian Wheat Aphid, the Ladybird Beetle, the English Grain Aphid and Rosy Grass Aphid. Then there’s the Haanchen Barley Mealybug and Wireworm Beetle Larvae, as well as the False Wireworm, the Cereal Leaf Beetle, Cutworms and Armyworms. By no means should we leave out the Wheat Stem Maggot, the Wheat Stem Saw Fly, and the Wheat Joint Worm.

I want you to think about this army of insect predators the next time some environmental group is demanding that all pesticides be banned and that all grains and vegetables be grown “organically.” They feel the same about the herbicides that counter the affect of an astonishing range of weeds that also want to take up residence in Farmer Jones’ fields.

America is blessed to be the “bread basket” to much of the world that imports our wheat. Agricultural exports account for a major part of our national wealth and, other than the producers of the energy we use, our farmers and ranchers are among the most essential citizens we have in this great nation of ours.

And that, dear reader is today’s tribute to wheat!

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.”

Of Mice and Men (and Pest Control)

By Alan Caruba

Among the many books in my office is the “Handbook of Pest Control”, seventh edition, edited by Arnold Mallis. Its contributing editors are a who’s who of the leading authorities on pest control and its encyclopedic text includes thousands of references to the diseases that insect and rodent pests routinely spread in the course of their daily lives.

In one fashion or another for some three decades or more, I have provided public relations services to various elements of the pest control industry; manufacturers of pesticides and my own state’s trade association which is affiliated with the National Pest Management Association.

I tell you this so you don’t think I am evading an obvious bias that favors a profession that dates its history back to medieval times when being a “ratcatcher” was so highly regarded that the Queen of England designated one to keep the castle free of the nasty beasties.

Over the years, these men developed formulas for killing off rodent and insect pests. When you contemplate that the Black Death that swept Europe and England killed a third of the entire population and was caused by a combination of fleas and rats spreading the bubonic plague, the need to control such pests is obvious.

These days, America is experiencing a huge comeback of a pest that had been largely eradicated, the common bed bug. After DDT was banned from use worldwide, along with depriving millions of Africans from protection against malaria, the bed bug returned. Other pest related diseases that have emerged in recent years are West Nile Fever, imported from Africa and spread by mosquitoes, and Lyme disease, spread by ticks.

It is common knowledge that cockroaches spread Salmonella and a variety of other diseases, but probably less well known that termites do more property damage nationwide every year than all the floods and fires combined.

I tell you this because the Center for Biological Diversity sued the Environmental Protection Agency in order to get it to evaluate the effects of 74 pesticides on eleven endangered and threatened species in the San Francisco Bay area over the next five years.

America is on the brink of bankruptcy, but this inane environmental group thinks that pesticides are a greater threat to eleven supposedly endangered species than national insolvency.

While people are losing their jobs and their homes, the environmentalists are worrying about pesticides, not pests. In the San Francisco Bay area represented by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, tucked away in the under-performing $787 billion “stimulus” bill is a provision for as much as $16.1 million to save the habitat of the allegedly endangered Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.

Stay with me just a bit longer. As reported in Pest Control Technology, “As part of the Endangered Species Act, the EPA is required to consult with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services—and sometimes the National Marine Fisheries Services—when they make a pesticide regulatory decision to register or re-register a product.”

The suit, settled in favor of the Center for Biological Diversity, will ultimately require the EPA to ban the use of pesticides anywhere in the entire nation if they are found to threaten “endangered species” which are anywhere and everywhere in the entire nation.

At present this means that “As a result of the lawsuit filed in California, pest control operators in Northern California are presented with serious challenges.” All of the pesticides that are the subject of the proposed injunction are used routinely to protect homeowners, apartments, restaurants, hospitals, schools, as well as warehouses where various food products are stored. The affect on the agricultural use of pesticides and herbicides is incalculable.

To put it another way, the Center for Biological Diversity has put the health of everyone living in Northern California and eventually the entire nation at risk of the many diseases insect and rodent pests spread in order to protect some “endangered species.”

For now, the least protected specie will initially be the people living and working in Northern California if pest control operators are deprived of the pesticides they use. The most privileged specie in the Bay Area will be the Salt Marsh Harvest Mouse.

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.

Mosquitoes: Just Waiting to Kill You

By Alan Caruba

I’ll bet you didn’t know that the American Mosquito Control Association (AMCA) held its 75th annual meeting in New Orleans in early April. It had nearly one thousand attendees according to the report out of its Mount Laurel, New Jersey headquarters.

As a youngster, almost as long ago as when the AMCA was founded, I can recall the torment of New Jersey’s mosquitoes. During the spring and throughout the summer, they were ever present. These days it is a rare occasion to find one buzzing around inside one’s home or apartment. Why is that?

The short answer used to be DDT and, in more recent times, the development of a variety of pesticides that effectively “knock down” the mosquito population. Before its invention and use during World War II, mosquito abatement programs mostly consisted of “the ditching of marshlands” to reduce the habitat where mosquitoes bred in the millions. From 1935 through 1950 that’s how New Jersey dealt with mosquitoes.

In the next twenty years, killing mosquitoes got a lot easier, but in the 1960s Rachel Carson wrote a screed against DDT and, in the wake of the environmental movement and from the earliest days of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, a primary target for elimination became pesticides, not the pests that spread disease.

These days, the AMCA is a “partner” in the EPA’s Pesticide Environmental Stewardship Program whose goal is “reducing pesticide risk.”

Let me tell you what the real risk is.

I shall do so in the words of the AMCA. “Mosquitoes cause more human suffering than any other organism—over one million people die from mosquito-borne diseases every year. Not only can mosquitoes carry diseases that afflict humans, they also transmit several diseases and parasites that dogs and horses are very susceptible to.”

Okay, I hear you saying, hey, Malaria is something that just kills off Africans. Well maybe you’ve heard of something called West Nile Fever. Thanks to some mosquitoes that hitched a ride on an international flight, “Since 1999, nearly 29,000 cases of West Nile Virus, with more than 11,000 neuroinvasive disease and more than 1,000 fatalities have occurred in the United States, the world’s most advanced nation.”

West Nile Fever was the star of the AMCA meeting this year which also included a symposium “on the future of Public Health Pesticides.”

I will tell you what the future is now that Carol Browner is President Obama’s “environmental czar” and Lisa Jackson, formerly of New Jersey’s Department of Environmental Protection, is heading up the EPA.

The future is an all-out effort to ban or restrict the use of any insecticides that might actually protect PEOPLE against the transmission of West Nile Fever or any other disease organism by a mosquito or other insect species. Then add to their hit list the rodenticides that kill off rats and mice.

Mosquitoes also transmit Dengue and Yellow Fever. They transmit dog heartworm. Then there’s an equine disease that can also infect humans, and a couple of others. All occur in many States throughout the nation even if you don’t hear much about them.

As Joe Conlon, Technical Advisor for the AMCA, points out, “As the world shrinks through trade and tourism, we can expect to be continually challenged by exotic diseases far worse than West Nile Virus only an 8-hour plane flight away.” And, dear reader, your primary line of defense are the unsung heroes of the AMCA, part of the nation’s public health infrastructure, working to combat mosquitoes.

As if mosquitoes weren’t enough to worry about, pest management professionals in New Jersey and throughout the northeast are gearing up to combat Lyme Disease, transmitted by ticks.

A little known fact about ticks is that they also transmit diseases that include babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, bartonella or tularemia. There are, in fact, more than a hundred different strains of Lyme disease and the Northeast is a major region for infections, but it has also been reported in 49 States because more than fifty species of migratory birds spread the tick population in addition to deer and other creatures.

Why am I telling you this? Because Mother Nature in all her glory and beauty has an arsenal of mosquitoes, ticks, cockroaches, and other insect species lining up to kill you if they can. Or, at the very least, to make you very ill.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is aptly and correctly named. It exists to protect the “environment”, but behind its green doors are people whose war on any pesticide use anywhere demonstrates that they have a greater concern for the welfare of mosquitoes, ticks, and other creatures than for you, your children, or your pets.

EPA Holds a Bed Bug "Summit"

By Alan Caruba

I know the media and, by extension, everyone else is focused on April 15 as the day tax returns must be filed, but there is another event going on in Washington that is not likely to get much attention.

It is a two-day, April 14-15 Bed Bug Summit being held by the Environmental Protection Agency to address the nationwide infestations of bed bugs. One of the reasons this nasty little pest has burst upon the scene goes back to the banning of DDT by the EPA.

By the end of the 1950s, bed bugs were no longer a significant pest problem. Bed bugs had been so thoroughly eliminated by pest management professionals that a new generation of them had never seen one or had any idea how to combat them. Of the many insect pest species, bed bugs are among the most difficult to eliminate.

Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” got the anti-pesticide panic going by defaming DDT. Not only was it banned here, but also worldwide. The ban has since led to millions of needless deaths in malarial regions like Africa.

Bed bugs are common in other nations that are less attentive to insect pest eradication and with the rise of international travel they hopped a ride to the United States via the luggage of foreign tourists and Americans returning home from traveling abroad. They began showing up initially a few years ago in hotels and resorts frequented by travelers as well as the homes of Americans who had been overseas.

Had the EPA not banned DDT in 1972 it is very likely there would be no significant bed bug problem here in the United States.

As the EPA put it at the time, “The general use of the pesticide DDT will no longer be legal in the United States after today, ending nearly three decades of application during which time the once-popular chemical was used to control insect pests on crop and forest lands, around homes and gardens, and for industrial and commercial purposes.”

This has been a chronic problem with the EPA. It tends to create or exacerbate more problems than it solves.

The agency banned Chlordane in the 1980s; it was one of the most effective and successful termiticides ever invented. Pest controllers used to pump it into the ground around a home and it would stay there for a half century as a chemical fence against termites seeking access through foundations or getting close enough to build a mud tunnel to get inside a home. Termites are responsible for an estimated five billion dollars damage annually, more than all the fires and floods combined.

In 1998, Harry Katz, a pest management expert, noted that “Many studies were made of chlordane’s effect on humans. The World Health Organization reports about a study in 1981 in which mortality of 782 workers who manufactured chlordane and heptachlor for up to 20 years showed no increase in cancer in comparison to normal death figures. In another study by Wang and MacMahon in 1980, all cancer deaths were lower than expected. In a follow-up study in 1982, the two Harvard researchers looked again at the mortality rates of termite control technicians and found there was no significant increase of cancer cases.”

These and other bans almost always come down to a political and/or ideological decision. The science regarding such bans rarely represents any real or significant threat unless perhaps someone literally drinks the stuff from the bottle!

The EPA has a registration process for new pesticides (and renewal of older ones) that literally costs chemical producers millions of dollars before a pesticide can be registered for use either exclusively by pest management professionals and specific to particular pest species, or made available off the shelf to the public.

During the Clinton administration, Carol Browner, then the EPA Director and now the environmental advisor to President Obama, announced the restricted use of one of the most effective pesticides against a whole range of insect pests, Dursban, and removed it from use by consumers who had been using it successfully for decades to rid homes, dorm rooms, offices and everywhere else of cockroaches, spiders, ants, mosquitoes, etc.

Browner said the Agency was "shutting off the manufacture of this chemical” according to the Associated Press, but anti-pesticide fanatics complained that the EPA action did not recall the product already on store shelves. The EPA saw no problem allowing the use of Dursban to continue as an agricultural application to protect food crops against insect predators.

The primary reason given for the Dursban ban was that the action was taken to protect children from exposure. Any time you hear it’s “for the children” that’s a sure sign there is little real science-based justification.

The EPA effectively banned a pesticide called “Ficam”, a remarkable product that eliminated a wide range of insect pests and was applied with nothing more toxic than water. By demanding that the product go through the multi-million dollar registration process again, the EPA drove it from the marketplace when the manufacturer decided it wasn’t worth it.

These bans are almost always based on the ideology that pesticides are a threat to humans and other species like birds or fish. When properly applied pesticides are only a threat to insect pests that have, for millennia, transmitted diseases to humans.

In parts of Central and South America today, people are dying of Dengue fever and a nasty disease called Chagas. In the United States Lyme Disease, transmitted by ticks, continues to afflict people. By contrast, a pesticide-based campaign against West Nile Fever, transmitted by mosquitoes, has proven effective.

There is a reason your favorite supermarket or restaurant is not home to insect and rodent pests. It is because professionals using pesticides keep it pest free. There isn’t a school, a hospital, or any other public facility that is not kept pest free in the same way. Usually the work is done at night so as not to disturb the delicate sensibility of the very people being protected.

For two days the EPA will listen to testimony about the bed bug problem afflicting the nation. They could have saved themselves the time, effort, and cost involved by simply adopting a more science-based attitude toward pesticides, but that is not going to happen so long as the ideologues and other scare mongers are in charge.

In the interest of full disclosure, years ago I used to do public relations for “Ficam” and I continue to provide PR services to my state pest management association. For nearly four decades, I have known dozens of pest management professionals who take justified pride in keeping the homes, offices, and businesses of their clients pest-free.

The Secret of Success

By Alan Caruba

Unless you are a pest control professional, it is unlikely you ever heard of Norm Ehmann. Those of us who were fortunate to know him, however, just loved the man. He passed away recently at the age of 84 and everyone in America owes him a huge debt of gratitude.

Every business and industry in America has a handful of men who transform it and always for the better. They come to their daily tasks with a personal integrity and an enthusiasm that is irresistible.

There was a time when, if people had a pest problem, they asked the local pest control provider to park his car or truck around the corner so others would not know. The inference was that you were not keeping a clean house. People who engaged in pest control had a handful of products and devices to get rid of insect and rodent pests. Their business practices frequently involved a low-ball price for dubious services and results.

Norm Ehmann was instrumental in changing that. He was involved in pest control for more than fifty years and he was passionate about it. What he and others did was introduce educational seminars to the profession. He understood that the most important element of eliminating insect and rodent pests was a thorough-going knowledge and understanding of their habits, life cycles, and harborages.

I knew Norm because, back in the 1970s I participated in the introduction of a remarkable new insecticide called “Ficam.” It was applied with water. It was lethal to a wide variety of insect pests, but virtually harmless to human beings. You’d think this was a good thing, but many years later, the Environmental Protection Agency demanded that the product undergo a repeat of the multi-million dollar registration process and the manufacturer decided it just wasn’t worth it.

I tell you this because it reflected what happened to DDT. During WWII, DDT successfully saved the lives of countless American soldiers and refugees from insect-borne diseases. People were literally dusted with DDT and, then as now, they lived because of this remarkable insecticide. Then Rachel Carson wrote a book, “Silent Spring”, that defamed DDT and, in time, it was banned. Every year now, in Africa alone, five million people die from Malaria for the lack of this miracle insecticide.

Norm worked for Van Waters & Rogers, a leading distributor of pest control products that purchased the company for which he was a salesman. He helped take VW&R from a $3 million operation under its previous owner to a $200 million enterprise. The introduction of new pesticides is the reason that Americans do not have to fear the diseases that insect and rodent pests spread whether it be in a supermarket, a hospital, a school, a hotel, or anywhere else professional pest control services exist.

For Norm, pesticides, used properly, were the answer to the threats of disease and property damage that had always plagued mankind. Over his life he was instrumental in creating 8,000 insect slides and specimens to help train pest control operators, owners and technicians.

That’s why people greet “the Orkin man” and other pest control folk with a smile. Most arrive in a clean uniform, have a professional demeanor, and all are licensed and certified by state agencies.

Norm didn’t just give sales talks. He helped train thousands of men and women to be effective, to understand the products they were using, to understand the pests to be exterminated, to project pride in their profession, to regard and respect each customer as essential to their own success.

Such people transform their industries and, as a result, improve the lives of all Americans.

Pesticide-Free Does Not Mean Pest-Free!

By Alan Caruba

In my home State of New Jersey we have a woman going around convincing one city and town after another to pass “pesticide free” resolutions and regulations in the name of protecting children in schools or people using parks for recreation or relaxation.

Jane Nogaki is the program coordinator of the New Jersey Environmental Federation and she devotes herself fulltime to this effort. Meanwhile, members of the pest management profession are busy protecting homes, businesses, schools, hospitals, supermarkets, and everywhere else people gather against Nature’s legions of pest insects and rodents.

Lawn care professionals are likewise devoting themselves to beautifying their client’s lawns and looking after public areas to ensure they do not become overgrown with weeds and invasive species.

Every day people use chemicals in one form or another without any fear and without much thought to their benefits because they already know that disinfectants and odor neutralizers enhance indoor areas while protecting against germs and noxious smells. They use detergents to clean their clothes and wash their dishes. They improve their homes by applying a new coat of paint and protect outdoor wood flooring with protection against water erosion.

The list of chemicals people use is vast, but environmentalists continue to strive against their use to protect people against insect or rodent pests or used to protect thousands of dollars worth of property against termites and other wood-destroying insects.

Proudly communities announce they have “pesticide-free” schools or their parks are going to be “pesticide-free.” This defies good sense and good science.

Meanwhile, in Africa millions of children die annually because environmentalists have secured bans on DDT to protect them against malaria that mosquitoes spread. Here in the United States they spread West Nile Fever, while ticks infect people with Lyme disease. Pesticides protect against stinging insects and, of course, against cockroaches that can swiftly spread salmonella and other diseases in an inadequately protected school cafeteria, the teacher’s lounge and in classrooms.

I doubt the Americans can even imagine what a pestilent “environment” they would live in without the professional and proper use of pesticides. In the occasional incidents where rats or mice take over a restaurant or bedbugs infest a hotel or dormitory it becomes front page news.

Local politicians like to boost they are protecting their community and they are fair game for the likes of “environmentalists” who claim that millions of pounds of pesticides and herbicides are being used throughout a State or at the local level.

They don’t stop to think about the beautiful, healthy lawns residents proudly maintain or expect from their local parks and recreational areas.

They don’t stop to think about schools kept pest-free by licensed pest control professionals working within Integrated Pest Management protocols that they have written in cooperation with their State environmental agencies.

I am reminded of earlier eras in which plagues spread to vast populations for lack of modern chemicals to eliminate the pests that infected and killed thousands. In modern times, West Nile Fever arrived on the East Coast in the 1990s and spread to the West Coast within a few years. That is the reality of the actual threats to health.

The next time your local elected officials start discussing “pesticide-free zones” or schools, remind them that the real threat are the pests!

I resent “environmentalists” who put people’s lives at risk.

The "McCain" Cockroach Wins the Race!

By Alan Caruba

On Thursday, I attended the midday 14th “Cockroach Derby” staged by the New Jersey Pest Management Association during its 61st annual Clinic and tradeshow. The highlight of the day so far as the media in attendance were concerned was the running of the “Presidential Cockroach Race” that pitted a designated John McCain cockroach against a designated Barack Obama cockroach.

These weren’t your commonplace American and German cockroaches that have plagued homeowners and apartment dwellers since the dawn of human civilization. They were giant Madagascar “Hissing” Roaches, the kind Hollywood uses when it wants to scare the daylights out of the audience. These roaches are double or triple the size of your typical roach.

The race is run inside of Plexiglas track with two lanes. At one end the cockroaches are held in a “gate” area until the door is raised and, usually, they take off down the track for lack of anything better to do.

The “John McCain” cockroach took off as if shot from a cannon, rambling down the six feet of the track with ease and one might almost say a sense of real purpose. The “Barack Obama” cockroach seemed addled as it loitered around the gate area. It was no contest. Two cockroaches designated Republican and Democrat ran a comparable race presumably to determine the outcome of the vice presidential election. Here again the Republican cockroach won handily.

I wish to state that these races have absolutely, positively, no predictive power whatever. In the 14 years I have been witnessing them, the only thing they predicted was that the men and women of the broadcast and print media would show up with their cameras and notebooks to record the action and scribble notes while gleaning comments from the host of professional pest control folk who gather to cheer on the cockroaches in a non-partisan fashion.

Why, you may ask, do I attend these festivities? Because I am, by profession, a public relations counselor and the New Jersey Pest Management Association has been a client of mine for over twenty years. When we began our long association, they were called the “Pest Control” association, but as the impact of the environmental movement occurred, they found themselves accused of spraying deadly pesticides with no other purpose in mind than to kill every living creature known to man and God.

This was not true, but that didn’t matter to the Greens who were determined to get every pesticide banned. The problem is that the only beneficiaries would have been the billions of pest insects and rodents. Pests that carry and transmit many diseases harmful and even lethal to mankind don’t care. Pest control professionals do care.

So does the public. Putting aside the fact that every state, in the interest of public health, requires by law that restaurants, hospitals, schools, supermarkets, hotels, and everywhere else the public gathers must be protected against infestations, the industry pulls in several billion annually because people understand that bugs and other nasty critters represent a threat to their lives and property. Every year for example, termites destroy more property than all the floods and fires combined.

In time the pest control industry metamorphosed into the pest “management” industry for public relations purposes. They instituted Integrated Pest Management (IPM) programs that emphasized more intensive inspections of structures and the least use of pesticides on site. New products and technologies were created to deal with termites after the most effective termiticide ever invented was banned from use in the 1970s.

Mother Nature insures that insect and rodent pests, as well as others such as bird pests and feral animals, exist in such abundance that were it not for the very unglamorous work of pest control professionals, life for all of us would be very unpleasant.

None of this occurred to the media folk in attendance or even the coverage given the event by those relying on my news release about it. Even with access to some of the leading experts in the nation who were there to conduct seminars on bed bugs, termites, rats and mice, it was the cockroach race that was their only interest.

For 61 years the New Jersey Pest Management Association’s leaders have ensured that their members—some six hundred technicians and owners attended—received the best scientific information possible to protect the public against these scourges of humanity.

To me, that was and is the real story.