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Rachel Carson and the Bed Bugs

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bedbugs

A month ago, a family I know returned from a trip in which they stayed in an ordinary hotel off the interstate in Virginia. They arrived late and left the next morning. The parents slept in the bed while the kids slept on the sleeper sofa. The kids had red welts all over their faces and backs the next day.

The parents had no idea what the red marks were. They were gone in a few days. In the meanwhile, they looked it up and found what many Americans are discovering day by day. This country is being overrun with bedbugs. The reports began trickling in about eight years ago. Three years ago, the sightings were common enough to make the headlines.

When the reports of bedbug infestation first came along, it was all rather shocking. Bedbugs had been eradicated, so far as anyone knew, sometime after World War II, in both the United States and Europe. It was a major advance for civilization, a bedbug-free life.

Generations knew nothing of these ghastly creatures that come out at night, inject numbing poison so that you don’t feel them, feast on your blood as you sleep, and then sneak away again in the morning gorged and bloated at your expense.

The reason for the eradication? DDT, the lifesaving insecticide discovered by Swiss chemist Paul Hermann Müller, who received the Nobel Prize in 1948 for having saved millions from malaria. DDT was the miracle drug that gave mankind a fighting chance against its great enemies in the insect world.

Recall that it was insects that carried the diseases that several times wiped out major swaths of the world’s population in the Middle Ages. Gradually over the centuries, as sanitation improved, prosperity arose, the swamps were drained, and medical science discovered the cause of the yellow fever, the plagues diminished and were finally controlled. DDT delivered that final glorious blow, to the wild cheers of a world in love with progress and confident in humanity’s capacity to control its future.

Then sometime in the 1960s, all that began to change. There was a dramatic shift in the philosophy of government and in popular culture. The landmark book that appeared 50 years ago this week was Silent Spring by popular writer Rachel Carson. The purpose of the book was to ban DDT. But there was more going on: the advance of a philosophy that turned everything on its head.

Carson decried the idea that man should rule nature. “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.” This anthropocentrism she decried.

She suggested that killing a bedbug is no different from killing your neighbor: “Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is — whether its victim is human or animal — we cannot expect things to be much better in this world… We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature.”

In fact, she spoke of animals in patently untrue ways: “These creatures are innocent of any harm to man. Indeed, by their very existence they and their fellows make his life more pleasant.”

I guess she never heard of the Black Death.

In short, she seemed to suggest that bedbugs — among all the millions of other killer insects in the world — enjoy some kind of right to life. It was a theory that could be embraced only in a world without malaria and bedbugs. But embraced it was. By 1972, DDT was banned. And not only DDT. The whole enterprise of coming up with better and better ways to further human life and protect its flourishing was hobbled.

Even now, there are pesticides that were available only five years ago that have disappeared from the shelves. You can buy and buy, spray and spray, but find that you can control the bugs only a bit, not finally. Even now, the typical suburban house dweller and summer home tourist imagines that pesticides constitute a greater threat than insects, and they will tell you this while swatting mosquitoes off their face.

Today, the Bed Bug Registry logs anywhere from 30 to 100 new reports of bedbugs per day, and this must be a small fraction. How many people who deal with this problem never think to go to the Internet to log their experiences?

Here is a report from yesterday in San Francisco that I just grabbed at random:

“We have lived here for seven months. Starting in March 2011, we noticed we first had bedbugs. We washed and packed up everything right away and left it that way for six weeks during extermination. That whole process did nothing and we ended up with bedbugs again after two weeks. Finally, by June, we stopped getting bitten. We thought everything was OK until a neighbor at the end of the hall told us they had had bedbugs three or four times in the past two years and that they need to be sprayed every few months (and were in the process of getting sprayed again). A few weeks after hearing that, two new people moved in next door to us and told us they had bedbugs as well. We now have bedbugs AGAIN!! The management has agreed to exterminate, but only when the two neighbors next door were ready as well ‘so that we could get it all done in one shot.’ It’s disgusting to see that this building is still operable. There is CLEARLY a HUGE problem and the building needs to be condemned. This is a totally uninhabitable place to live!!”

In this one report, you can see the problem. Getting rid of bedbugs is very expensive. There are multitudes of companies that promise to do this, but they are forbidden from using serious chemicals on them. DDT is out of the question. And there is no way to know if they really succeeded in the end, since bedbugs can lay dormant for a year before coming out again at night. The sheer terror that they might reappear can cause insomnia and even insanity — and I can fully see why.

So contrary to Rachel Carson, you don’t sleep better knowing that the bedbugs are enjoying their right to life at your expense. In the end, it is them or us. Their bloated and red bodies appear that way only thanks to your blood, which they have stolen like thieves in the night.

The bedbug problem in this country is epidemic compared with two decades ago. And it is getting worse. And strangely, in the meanwhile, the whole subject has fallen out of the national news. It appears sometimes in local papers, but there is no national controversy about this. A pest that vexed the whole history of humanity and was smashed within the last century has reappeared, a fitting symbol of our regression into decivilization with the advent of a humanity-hating regimentation that protects the physical integrity of swamps and uses the power of government to uphold the rights of insects to live and thrive at our expense.

Instead of alerting us to the bedbug epidemic, what do the media focus on? The pious lovers of nature are right now celebrating their modern saint, Rachel Carson, the woman who manufactured the allegory that drives the decivilizing policies our time.

Most everyone recognizes that the scientific specifics of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring are dated at best, and often wholly fabricated. What stuck was the narrative: If people thrive, nature dies, and that harms all of us spiritually. Therefore, the story goes, we’d better stop all this stuff about economic progress.

To see our possible future does not require imagination. Look at the situation with malaria around the world today. It is a wholly preventable disease, provided that we want to prevent it. But with the banning of DDT, here is the situation, according to the truth-telling website Rachelwaswrong.org:

“Malaria is often a fatal disease caused by a protozoan that is transmitted to humans via mosquito bites. According to the World Health Organization, malaria kills more than a million people a year — mostly children — and makes more than 300 million seriously ill. Ninety percent of malaria’s victims live in Africa, and most of them are children under the age of five. In Africa, one in 20 children dies from malaria, according to one estimate. The malaria death toll is equivalent to about 3,000 children dying from the disease a day — which amounts to one child dying every 30 seconds.”

There is no shortage of websites run by greenheads who imagine that bedbugs can be controlled by airing out mattresses, washing sheets, or using Tarot cards, or whatever. It’s all nonsense. There is a chemical you can use, but it is not approved for indoor use.

In other words, you are going to have to break bad to do this. You can’t even get it at your local big box hardware store, because they fear carrying it. It is called malathion. You can still buy it from Amazon and other online dealers. If you have a bedbug problem, load up on this stuff while you can. Even if you don’t have a problem, it is not a bad idea to prepare.

I’m not at all surprised at the rise of popular culture memes about vampires sucking blood and zombies eating brains. Why are these tropes being trotted out again and why do they tap into our cultural moment in such a penetrating way? Perhaps it is because we are living in the age of real-life vampires and zombies, symbolized most commonly by the bedbug epidemic, but ultimately embodied in the ruling class that lives off the proceeds of our labor and banishes intelligence by the promotion of policies that promote the well-being of things that destroy us, rather than the things like private capital that give us life.

  • http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/laissez-faire-today-lazy-and-unfair-as-yesterday-on-issues-of-ddt/ Ed Darrell

    Reading, bedbugs became highly resistant to DDT long before they were “eradicated” in the U.S. If you check the professional exterminator literature, you find that the switch to other chemicals — some perhaps nastier than DDT — came in the late 1950s.

    Consequently, Mr. Tucker errs when he claims that DDT was the miracle substance — it wasn’t — and he misleads when he implies that all we need to do is poison our homes with a substance found inherently dangerous to be rid of the bedbugs. It’s simply false to imply, as he does, that DDT is harmless, too. It’s not. It’s a deadly poison to all forms of life, only slow working on large animals like humans.

    The UK site does not rebut in any way my statement that bedbugs were resistant to DDT in the 1950s. Yes, it’s generally informative — but it doesn’t say what Mr. Tucker needed it to say to salvage his argument.

    I referred readers here to a practicing entomologist who has written popularly on bedbugs, with citations to the most recent research. The report “did not conclude” anything? Not to those who are biased against the facts and whose science blinders prevent their seeing: When research indicates that all populations of bedbugs are highly resistant to DDT, genetically, and actual tests show that a month of living in high doses of the stuff do not affect the bedbugs’ feeding on human hosts, mobility or breeding, a reasonable person does not need to be told directly that “Mr. Tucker erred.”

    Only anti-science, anti-history partisans would swallow such inaccuracies. The rant against Carson, and for DDT, is wholly political. It is absolutely ungrounded in reality, in science, or history.

    Biases? I have a powerful bias for using solid facts in issues of science, for using good research, for getting the history right, and for not making claims about laws that never existed. A reasonable person can draw the connections. Let me make them more obvious.

    1. In the U.S. we banned the use of DDT on crops in 1972. 40 years later, we have problems with bedbugs. That 40 year gap suggests that the EPA’s regulatory action had absolutely nothing to do with the current rise of bedbugs.

    2. Rachel Carson wrote a great piece of literature that was determined to be highly accurate, scientifically, by the President’s Science Advisory Council, and by every serious analysis of the work in the ensuing 50 years. She gathered together 25 years of research into the dangers of DDT, and made it clearly understandable. That’s a remarkable achievement by itself.

    3. Carson’s science was solid. It was golden. No one without a political axe to grind has complained about its accuracy since 1963. No one has successfully challenged any piece of science she wrote about in 1962 — few other science books of the time, by anyone, could have withstood such a test of time. Carson’s book remains accurate, scientifically, conclusions only blostered by 50 more years of research.

    4. Under U.S. laws, DDT was banned because it’s an uncontrollable poison in the wild. Of course that regulatory action was challenged, because under U.S. laws agencies cannot act on whims. Both challenges ended with the courts ruling there was ample science to show the harms of DDT, and EPA’s action was scientifically valid, and required by laws passed in the 1950s, not by a modern environmental movement.

    5. DDT has been constantly available to fight malaria, around the world (including in the U.S.).

    6. DDT’s great utility against malaria-carrying mosquitoes began to fade before 1950. By 1965, abuse and overuse of DDT, by advocates such as Mr. Tucker, rendered DDT unfit for the WHO’s ambitious campaign to eradicate malaria from the world. There was no substitute by then, sadly. While Mr. Tucker claims Ms. Carson and environmentalists should be blamed for malaria deaths after 1972, they were the ones fighting to keep DDT useful, and available.

    7. Despite the screwup of the malaria fighting by DDT advocates, malaria fighters did not give up. They continue the battle today, and malaria deaths are at the lowest level in human history. Ironically perhaps, much of the progress against malaria comes using integrated vector management methods Carson advocated in 1962 (if we had listened then . . .). Consequently, claims that Rachel Carson is somehow complicit in the deaths of millions, are dead wrong; she should be credited with the three million lives saved annually with the reduction in malaria deaths.

    The level of denial required to argue the case Mr. Tucker argues is truly breathtaking. One needs to deny evolutionary biology, chemistry, entomology and entomology history. One needs to deny U.S. laws and regulation, and the history of their application. One needs to deny African law and history, medical history, medicine and law. One needs to deny the calendar, claiming that a 1972 ban on DDT traveled back in time to 1965. One needs to deny geography, claiming that a ban on DDT use in Texas increased disease in Subsaharan Africa. On needs to accuse Africans of a lack of sense, claiming that despite their having plenty of DDT, they all read Rachel Carson’s book and, contrary to her urgings, decided not to use it to fight malaria though the disease was killing their children. Do I need to mention the not-really-implicit racism inherent in that claim?

    Six impossible things before breakfast was the Red Queen’s record — you’re requiring far too many impossible beliefs, all the time, in the face of facts. We are not the Red Queen.

    Biases? My bias for accuracy cannot be checked.

  • http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/2012/09/25/laissez-faire-today-lazy-and-unfair-as-yesterday-on-issues-of-ddt/ Ed Darrell

    Mr. Tucker, please read the UK site more closely: It does not say bedbugs were controlled with DDT after the 1950s. You’ll notice that site does not recommend DDT now, nor even lament that it is not available. Responsible professionals know DDT can’t work.

    Recent research shows that all populations of bedbugs are extremely resistant to DDT (see Bug Girl’s Blog, she’s the resident internet expert).

    The conclusion of the paper:

    “This evidence suggests that the two mutations are likely the major resistance-causing mutations in the deltamethrin-resistant NY-BB through a knockdown-type nerve insensitivity mechanism.”

    AND:

    “Because DDT has been used indiscriminately to control many insect pest species including bed bug, the widespread and frequent use of DDT is likely to have predisposed bed bug populations to pyrethroid resistance through the neuronal insensitivity mechanism.“

    So, what does this new information tell us?

    DDT will be utterly useless against bed bugs, so people should stop asking for it.

    Rachel Carson was no more “a Roussouian” than you are a Rasputinist. You obviously did not read her books, nor did you even bother to read where I show you have mis-cited her and edited her quotes to something quite different from what she wrote. She was writing about kittens, cattle and songbirds when she wrote about creates that give humans pleasure, not bedbugs.

    Your misquoting of a fine scientist is worrisome. What else do you spy with such jaundice? Fifty years of crude attempts to rebut Carson, like yours here today, remain incorrect and fruitless. I dare you to cite a single error in the science she cited — and I plead with you to quote and cite her accurately.

    • Reading

      “Mr. Tucker, please read the UK site more closely: It does not say bedbugs were controlled with DDT after the 1950s.”

      So what? The point is that it is generally acknowledged by all but partisans such as yourself that DDT had all but eradicated bedbugs.

      “You’ll notice that site does not recommend DDT now, nor even lament that it is not available.”

      Perhaps you didn’t notice that the purpose of the article was to be largely informational about the current state of bedbugs, not to make moral/ethical proclamations about the situation.

      And your report did not actually conclude anything; it suggested some things and said some things were likely. In scientific terms their stated conclusions are, for the most part, meaningless…until we actually intend to test the theory with a new round of DDT treatments.

      Check your own biases at the door, True Believer.

  • Janet Wallace

    @Ed Darrell: Thank you for so eloquently stating what needed to be said about the fallacies in Jeffrey Tucker’s article. Well done. I was just getting ready to ask him to divulge where did Rachel Carson suggest “that killing a bedbug was no different than killing a neighbor,” but you took care of it much better than I could have.
    Mr. Tucker, you’re a good writer, and you have some thoughtful ideas (much better stated than in this piece, however). Why degrade your skill with facile arguments and name calling (“greenheads who imagine that bedbugs can be controlled by airing out mattresses, washing sheets, or using Tarot cards”)? Why waste your time?

  • http://timpanogos.wordpress.com/ddt-chronicles-at-millard-fillmores-bathtub/ Ed Darrell

    I’m shocked by your mischaracterizations of Rachel Carson, her great book Silent Spring (which it appears to me you didn’t read and don’t know at all), and pesticide regulation. Consequently, you err in history and science, and conclusion. Let me detail the hub of your errors.

    You wrote:

    Carson decried the idea that man should rule nature. “Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of the world.” This anthropocentrism she decried.

    Carson was concerned that we were changing things that would have greater effects later, and that those effects would hurt humans. Her concern was entirely anthropocentric: What makes life worth living? Should we use chemicals that kill our children, cripple us, and create havoc in the things we enjoy in the outdoors, especially if we don’t know the ultimate effects?

    Exactly contrary to your claim, her book was directed at the quality and quantity of human lives. She wanted long, good lives, for more people. How could you miss that, if you read any of her writings?

    She suggested that killing a bedbug is no different from killing your neighbor: “Until we have the courage to recognize cruelty for what it is — whether its victim is human or animal — we cannot expect things to be much better in this world… We cannot have peace among men whose hearts delight in killing any living creature.”

    Carson never wrote that there should be difficulty in killing bedbugs. The passage you quote, but conspiratorially do not cite, comes not from Silent Spring, but from a commentary on a compilation of hunting stories. She’s referring to killing for the sake of killing, in that passage. I think it’s rather dishonest to claim she equates fighting biting bedbugs with killing animals unsportingly. I worry that you find it necessary to so grossly and dishonestly overstate your case. Is your case so weak?

    In fact, she spoke of animals in patently untrue ways: “These creatures are innocent of any harm to man. Indeed, by their very existence they and their fellows make his life more pleasant.”

    She did not write that about bedbugs. That’s a false claim.

    I guess she never heard of the Black Death.

    I guess you never heard of accuracy. On page 266 of Silent Spring Carson directly addressed plague in a list of insect- and arthropod-borne diseases:

    “The list of diseases and their insect carriers, or vectors, includes typhus and body lice, plague and rat fleas, African sleeping sickness and tsetse flies, various fevers and ticks, and innumerable others.

    These are important problems and must be met. No responsible person contends that insect-borne disease should be ignored. The question that has now urgently presented itself is whether it is either wise or responsible to attack the problem by methods that are making it worse.

    Carson describes abuse of pesticides — such as DDT on bedbugs — that actually makes the insects stronger and tougher to get rid of. That appears to be your stand, now, to do whatever Carson said not to do, in order to poke a thumb in her eye, even if it means making bedbugs worse.

    In short, she seemed to suggest that bedbugs — among all the millions of other killer insects in the world — enjoy some kind of right to life. It was a theory that could be embraced only in a world without malaria and bedbugs. But embraced it was.

    That’s total fiction. What you write is completely divorced from fact.

    By 1972, DDT was banned. And not only DDT. The whole enterprise of coming up with better and better ways to further human life and protect its flourishing was hobbled.

    By 1960, DDT had ceased to work against bedbugs — this was one of the things that worried Carson and would worry any responsible person. In her book, Carson warned that indiscriminate use and abuse of DDT would render it useless to fight disease and other insects and pests. By 1965, super mosquito-fighter Fred Soper and the World Health Organization had to stop their campaign to eradicate malaria when they discovered that abuse of DDT in agriculture and other uses had bred malaria-carrying mosquitoes in central and Subsaharan Africa that were resistant and immune to DDT. Keep in mind that the U.S. ban on DDT applied only in the U.S., and only one other nation in the world had a similar ban. DDT has never been banned in Africa, nor Asia.

    Carson sounded the warning in 1962. By 1972, when the U.S. banned use of DDT on agricultural crops (and only on crops), it was too late to preserve DDT as a key tool to wipe out malaria.

    Was the pesticide industry “hobbled?” Not at all. EPA’s order on DDT explicitly left manufacturing in the U.S. available for export — keeping profits with the pesticide companies, and multiplying the stocks of DDT available to fight disease anywhere in the world that anyone wanted to use it.

    The fact is that DDT was a fortunate find, a bit of a miracle substance, and we overused it, thereby cutting short by decades its career as a human life-saver. That was exactly what Carson feared, that human lives would be lost and made miserable, unnecessarily and prematurely, by unthinking use of chemical substances. Pesticide manufacturers have been unable to come up with a second DDT, but not because regulation prevents it. Carson understood that.

    There is no shortage of science-ignorant, and science-abusive websites that claim Rachel Carson erred. But 50 years out, the judgment of the President’s Science Advisory Council on her book remains valid: It’s accurate, and correct, and we need to pay attention to what she wrote. Not a jot nor tittle of what Carson wrote in 1962 has proven to be in error. Quite the contrary, as Discover Magazine noted in 2007, thousands of peer-reviewed studies reinforce the science she cited then.

    Malaria deahts today are at the lowest level in human history, largely without DDT, and much due to malaria fighters having adopted the methods of fighting the disease that Carson advocated in 1962. Unfortunately, those methods were not adopted for nearly 40 years. Still, the reductions in malaria are remarkable. At peak DDT use in 1959 and 1960, a half-billion people in the world got malaria every year, one-sixth of the world’s people. 4 million died from the disease. In 2009, about 250 million people got malaria — a reduction of 50% in infections — and fewer than 800,000 people died — a dramatic reduction of more than 75% in death toll. This is all the more remarkable when we realize that world population more than doubled in the interim, and at least a billion more people now live in malaria-endemic areas. Much or most of that progress has been without DDT, of necessity — every mosquito on Earth today now carries the alleles of resistance and immunity to DDT.

    You impugn a great scientist and wonderful writer on false grounds, and to damaging effect. I hope you’re not so careless in other research.

    Rachel Carson was right. The re-emergence of bedbugs, 50 years after she wrote, is not due to anything Carson said, but is instead due to people who petulantly refused to listen to her careful and hard citations to science, and exhortations to stick to what we know to be true to protect human health and the quality of life.

    • http://lfb.org Jeffrey Tucker

      Thanks for this note. Actually, every non-ideological expert agrees that DDT controlled bed bugs. that’s not even in dispute. http://www.ca.uky.edu/entomology/entfacts/ef636.asp

      As for Rachel, she was a Rousseauian, imaging a world of happy mutual coexistence between mankind and nature before the 20th century when we arrogantly decided we should control nature more aggressively. In her view, that was the snake in the Garden. This is pretty much her whole thesis, and everything follows from that.

      She condemns the power we have over nature, from the opening pages! Her admissions that bugs are dangerous are mostly perfunctory and prelude to arguing that chemicals only make the problem worse. She paints a picture of a world being poisoned by chemicals and nothing else. She offers ZERO mention of how insects wiped out half the population of Europe. Mostly she thinks insects control themselves provided that we live far enough apart. She ends by pleading for “reasonable accommodation between the insect hordes and ourselves.”

      So, there you go.

      Fifty years experience show us that she was wrong.

    • Reading

      @Ed Darrell, I’m schocked that you can’t even see the extent of your partisan-minded analysis.

      “Exactly contrary to your claim, her book was directed at the quality and quantity of human lives. She wanted long, good lives, for more people. How could you miss that, if you read any of her writings?”

      For such a history buff, how could miss the fact that the worst roads humanity has been marched down were paved with such naive idealism?

      “Carson never wrote that there should be difficulty in killing bedbugs.”

      Tucker never said she said it, he said she *suggested* it through her ideas and thoughts. Congratulations on defeating a claim that doesn’t exist.

      “The passage you quote, but conspiratorially do not cite, comes not from Silent Spring, but from a commentary on a compilation of hunting stories.”

      Did Tucker say the quote came from Silent Spring? No. He used the anniversary of Silent Spring as a launching point into a broader discussion of her and her thoughts. Yet another straw man you knock down with conspiratorial zeal.

      “She did not write that about bedbugs. That’s a false claim.”

      Tucker never even suggested that she wrote that specifically about bedbugs, so you again debunked a claim that was never made.

      Perhaps you should work on your own credibility before appointing yourself to judge others.

  • Maxine R.

    ‘The Bed Bug Survival Guide’ has probably the best advice on how to prevent and get rid of bed bugs:
    http://failuremag.com/feature/article/dont_let_the_bed_bugs_bite/

  • Jacob Steelman

    Yes we have a similiar problem here in Australia with cockroaches. The legal eradication chemical was not effective. Fortunately an Asian shopkeeper who I know sold me some of the good stuff (which I believe comes from China or some other Asian country) for cash. Problem solved permanently.

  • MM

    Nice article and definitely needed. More people need to get on the knowlege train before they get bedbugs. They aren’t just pests–they are a walking nightmares. It can costs thousands in repeat treatments (not to mention lost work hours). It’s seriously damaging to health–both physically (if your allergic the bites are insanely painful and people often get staph infections from scratching) and emotionally. Many relationships have ended as a result of the stress of bedbugs. Depression and anxiety are also common among people during and after bedbug infestations. Now there’s evidence that bedbugs could be spreading antibiotic resitant strains of staph. That the EPA still will not allow the use of effective pesticides to address this problem is shocking. After decades of improving quality of life, environmentalists are succeeding in their attempt to throw us back into the dark ages.

  • http://www.pretenseofknowledge.com/ Chris Meisenzahl (@speedmaster)

    Bravo, great post.

  • http://lfb.org Jeffrey Tucker
  • MR

    Thank you for this. I’m a twenty-something living in Washington D.C., and last year my roommate and I had bedbugs for three months before we were able to eradicate them. She had them worse than I did and continues to be plagued with nightmares and sleep troubles – because if you can’t feel safe in your own bed, where can you? It’s patently absurd that we as a society put up with this.