Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [74]
A big part of his job, he said, was to act as a sort of mental health counselor. “It’s almost therapeutic when these people put themselves into my hands. They’re stigmatized by old ideas about bed bugs, poverty, filth, and such. So they come in undercover. ‘Don’t let anyone know what you’re doing,’ they tell me.”
At that point, my conversation with Andy was interrupted by a phone call. It was a woman who had just figured out that her daughter had brought back bed bugs from her college dormitory. Now the tiny monsters had infested her home and the woman was frantic. He’d call her back in a few minutes, he told her.
Andy shook his head. “She’s going to freak when I tell her what she needs to do before we can treat her house.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Because she’ll have a lot of homework to do before we get there. Furniture, bedding, magazines—you’ve got to be ruthless about throwing stuff out,” Andy told me. “Everything that has a crack, crease, or crevice has to be chucked out, steam-cleaned, or vacuumed.”
“Everything?” I asked.
Andy nodded. “People with huge libraries or old LP collections are pretty much screwed.”
After the prep work, “infestibles”*113 are either packed into a sealed container to be heated or pumped full of a fumigant like Vikane (sulfuryl fluoride) for forty-eight hours.
“Bed bug infestations were quite common before World War II,” Andy Linares explained, “but in the 1940s and 1950s, the use of DDT pretty much put a stop to them.”
Paul Müller, the Swedish chemist who figured out that DDT was an effective contact pesticide against arthropods like mosquitoes, ticks, and moths, was awarded the Nobel Prize in physiology. Mueller discovered that DDT worked by causing neurons to fire spontaneously—not a helpful thing if you’re trying to fly, bite, or crawl.
By the mid-1950s, however, bed bug resistance to DDT had became so widespread that two alternate pesticides, malathion and lindane, became the tools of choice for controlling them. Unfortunately, during the next decade, studies began to show that the lethal effects of these pesticides weren’t just confined to the insects.*114
“Pyrethroids are our tool nowadays,” said Dr. Jody Gangloff-Kaufmann, during her lecture.
Pyrethroids are man-made compounds, similar in chemical structure and insect killing properties to the natural pesticide pyrethrum, produced by chrysanthemum flowers. According to a fact sheet issued by the Illinois Department of Health, “When used properly, pyrethroids have been found to pose very little risk to human health and the environment.” Unlike the previously mentioned (and banned) insecticides, pyrethroids apparently break down within a day or two of application. This means that should you ingest some, it won’t stick around in your body to cause problems like birth defects or cancer.
Not bad, I thought at the time. Sounds easy enough.
But several days later, I learned from Andy Linares that there was nothing simple about the treatment of bed bugs, and that pest-control specialists were in fact using a number of additional substances in their war against cimicids.
The Bug Off Web site, for example, suggested that exterminators might inject “a variety of flushing agents (565-XLO, CB123 Extra), aerosols (D-Force), liquid residuals (Permacide Concentrate, P-1 Quarts, P-1 Gallons), powders (Drione), sanitizers (Sterifab Pints, Sterifab Gallons, Sterifab 5-Gallon), and growth regulators (Gentrol Aerosol, Gentrol Vials, Gentrol Pints), in all possible cracks and voids as part of a comprehensive treatment.”
“Bed bugs are becoming resistant to pyrethroids,” said American Museum of Natural History entomologist Lou Sorkin.
Andy Linares agreed. “Using a variety of chemical compounds minimizes the resistance factor.”
Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann also addressed the question of bed bug resurgence with another treatment-related explanation. “In the old days,” she said, “exterminators used to regularly spray baseboards and molding with pesticides to control roaches.”
She went