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oocRadio|Sleep Tight... Episode
A year or so ago, I noticed a small storefront off the beaten path in beautiful Downtown Hamilton advertising for bed-bug extermination. Now this wasn't a pest company emphasizing one aspect of it's offerings, this was all these people did.I wondered at a friend how much of this could be going on and how a service like this could stay in business. To my mind, people with enough money to pay for the service wouldn't have bedbugs and people who had bedbugs probably couldn't afford to have someone come in to get rid of them.To my surprise, he admitted to having them and having paid to remove them. When I asked him how much he paid, he just rolled his eyes.All this came back to me when I read the following on Cincinnati's WLWT.com via MSNBC:City's Bedbug Problem Gains Worldwide Attention.Health officials said the best way to combat the city’s bed bug problemwas to raise awareness, and now the whole world knows about the area’sresurgent pests.And here's a report from Cincinnati's channel 12: Apartment Infested with Bed BugsBed bugs have a long history of interaction with humans--paleontologists have found a fossilized Egyptian bedbug over 3500 years old and, according to this LA times article:Bedbugs first turned up in print in ancient Greece and Rome. TheRoman philosopher Pliny described the bugs in a book on naturalhistory; Greek playwright Aristophanes wrote the pests intoseveral plays.Greek doctor Dioscorides found more practical uses for the critters.To heal a wound, he suggested mixing crushed bedbugs with tortoiseblood. Whether or not such cures worked, they stuck around. More than1,000 years later, some Chinese medical practitioners advised mixingcrushed bedbugs with rice or lime and sesame oil to treat injuries.The bedbug’s love of warm, dry places may be why it took so long tomove beyond Africa and the Mediterranean. The earliest English mentionof bedbugs dates to the late Middle Ages, and even then the insects hadlimited reach. They only bothered the well-to-do, the ones lucky (orunlucky) enough to have warm, dry homes. According to Techletter.com, a pest control resource, bed bugs were another gift of the early settlers: Bed bugs were first introduced into the Americas by the earlycolonists. Colonial writings of the early 18th century documentedsevere bed bug problems in the English colonies and in Canada, but notin Indian villages. Old sailing ships werenotoriously infested with bed bugs, some so much so that some shipsforbade passengers and colonists from bringing bedding on board. DDT and Malathion pretty much wiped out bed bugs in the mid-20th century, but in the last ten years they've made a comeback.
[ Tue, 06 Jan 2009 21:09:35 -0600 ]
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