Sitting at Gentry Junior School’s start-of -the-year orientation, I was delighted to hear from school nurse, Gayle Boisture, that the H1N1 virus—otherwise known as the swine flu—had been downgraded and was not the concern it was this time last year. But I must warn you all of the latest threat. On your behalf, I stay on the cutting edge of trends and have been monitoring something creepy for a good while. It’s time for me to sound the alarm.
If you are in the least bit squeamish, or if the mere mention of head lice makes your scalp crawl you may want to stop here. My head’s feeling a bit itchy, and I may not sleep for a week, but I’m highly compensated for such burdens.
An infestation eradicated decades ago is rearing its ugly, bloodsucking-insect head here in the good ole United States of America. I’d seen a sprinkling of news stories with professionals warning it was coming as the problem was getting severely worse around the globe, and tucked it away.
Most of what I ran across sounded “chicken little”, but the headlines are popping up in greater frequency and I recently learned that the Environmental Protection Agency held a summit on the impending crisis in 2009. What has some high-ranking officials bugging out? Bedbugs.
The little critters have caused Ohio’s government and the EPA to scratch at each other over the “proper” use of chemicals, and as is usually the case, the good citizenry is hung in the middle—taking to the sidewalks to sleep at night because sleeping quarters are uninhabitable. Now the Centers for Disease Control and, I kid you not, the Department of Defense are involved in the crisis.
I know, at first glace and from up on a cleanliness pedestal, filth comes to mind. You may want to hop on down, because this is a problem for any one of us who doesn’t reside in a hermetically-sealed bubble. One can pick them up in just about any public place, and bring a happy bedbug couple to reside and start a family in their dream home: your bed.
Back in the day when pesticides were pesticides (I know some have been proven harmful, but in my humble opinion the pendulum has swung too far the opposite direction. Save the hate-mail for someone smarter than me.) DDT wiped out this nuisance in the developed world.
Since about 1995, they’ve been re-emerging: resistant to DDT and any other weenie-fied chemical we now have at our disposal. Some statistics show the infestation doubled between 1995 and 2001 and that the bedbug population has continued to grow as more pesticides used to counter other pests while peripherally killing bedbugs were removed from the arsenal.
Luckily, extensive lab testing shows that bedbugs are not likely to pass disease from one human to another. However, they can be extremely harmful to mental health. I know some of you are already in a panic and will no doubt soon be suffering from delusional parasitosis, whereby you’ll be certain you are infested with a parasite that isn’t present.
I suppose the world just isn’t right unless we have a certain level of paranoia to contend with. I sometimes lie awake at night wondering what to obsess over next. I bet you’ll do it now, too. Good night, sleep tight; don’t let the bedbugs bite!
© 2010 Natalie Whatley
Tags: bedbug infestations, bedbugs