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If you could get DDT, would you use it?
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If you can get hold of DDT (illegally), would you use it?
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thebedbugresource
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Posted 4 months ago
Sat Jul 4 2009 13:39:50
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If someone was illegally acquiring DDT my guess is they would not risk the consequences if they had no intention of using it.
Why would you want DDT? For bed bugs? They are resistant to it ... so what would be the point?
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buggyinsocal
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Posts: 1,160
Posted 4 months ago
Sat Jul 4 2009 13:48:17
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No.
For starters, plenty of research suggests that in places where it can still be used, it's ineffective on bed bugs at best, and prone to make bed bug infestations more intense at worst.
Secondly, I already live near a pretty major site of DDT that has been dumped into the ocean. I don't want to contribute to creating more hazardous waste to begin with, and to do so to use a product that we know no longer works seems terribly pointless.
I think the longing for DDT is more a matter of nostalgia--looking back at the past through rose colored glasses.
It's a bit of a fallacy to assume that bed bugs were vanquished by a single chemical. Remember that when bed bugs were mostly eliminated from society (and let's be clear, at least as many researchers think that the bugs were never 100% gone and were really hiding out in reservoirs that didn't make their way back to most of society like poultry farms during those decades when bed bugs were "gone" as think that they were only reintroduced through travel to places that hadn't gotten rid of them), there were likely many other factors besides pesticides that we're forgetting about.
Likely in the 1950s and 1960s, there were enough people who'd been alive when bed bugs were common that people had adopted behavioral habits that also made infestations harder to get a hold of. For example, I would bet that it was more common to wash clothes and linens in hot water then than it is now.
It's probably not DDT itself that eliminated bed bugs.
Given the perilous status of the rereleased California condor and bald eagle, no, I wouldn't put more DDT into the ecosystem to access a chemical that is likely to be ineffective in treating bed bugs.
That post has links to a number of studies about how DDT was never as effective as people now think, including one that shows that bed bugs in Hawai'i in the 1940s were already showing resistance to DDT.
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Thanks for the reply. Very informative!
The reason for me posting this was because my friend told me he knows a guy who sells something "very toxic and very illegal" for bed bugs. But I'll move that into a new thread now.
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cilecto
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Joined: Aug '08
Posts: 459
Posted 4 months ago
Sat Jul 4 2009 14:10:56
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buggyinsocal - 12 minutes ago »
I think the longing for DDT is more a matter of nostalgia--looking back at the past through rose colored glasses.It's also a way to deflect attention from other, more likely causes of BB resurgence that have shown up since 1970, when DDT phased out, e.g.,
- roach baits
- phase-out of organophosphates, like DDVP
- widespread travel
- manufacturing of consumer goods in third-world countries with less attention to workplace hygiene
- the amazing amount of stuff we accumulate
- aging of the population, combined with emphasis on "home care" with armies of underpaid, overworked people coming to these people's homes, even staying over, but without the "facilities management" function that a hospital or nursing home would (or should) have to mitigate a BB-outbreak.
- Reduction in the amount of time we actually devote to home maintenance, thanks to the 'net and increasing job demandsIt's a lot easier to shut down the serious business of the BB battle and say, "just bring back DDT".
That said, I'd like the experts today to run experiments on today's BBs with DDT and say definitively if it could help or not. then we can debate the cost-benefit and how (if possible) we can apply it safely.
That said, if I were in the heat of BB-battle and someone made me an offer as above, I'd be very wary and run the other way.
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buggyinsocal
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Posts: 1,160
Posted 4 months ago
Sat Jul 4 2009 14:31:45
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I have to object to one of the things you said above, cilecto.
First of all, the term "third-world" country is increasingly falling out of favor, partly because it is increasingly inaccurate with the whole second world largely no different than the first. And secondly because it denigrates countries whose infrastructures are still developing. I generally hear people use the term developing nations more often to refer to such places, as was discussed in this thread:
http://bedbugger.com/forum/topic/fighting-bed-bugs-in-third-world#post-51379
And secondly, when you say that developing countries have less attention to workplace hygiene, you're phrasing things in a way that replicate racist ideas about people in developing countries. I am not saying that you are racist, or even that you meant it in a racist way. I am saying that that thing you said reads as racist to an awful lot of people, and since part of the problem with bed bugs are that racial, ethnic, and social class based stigmas make the problem harder to deal with, I would really prefer if the way we talked about differences between bed bug issues in countries didn't accidentally (which is what I assume this is) or purposefully reinforce those prejudices.
I'm sure that there are plenty of places in developed countries where workplace hygiene isn't what it should be, as evidenced by the extensive E. coli in peanut butter problem which happened at peanut processing plants right here in the United States.
I agree that importation of bed bugs from lots of places around the world is a problem in that jet travel increases the speed at which anything can get from point A to point B, whether that thing is a bed bug or the H1N1 flu.
And I agree that some countries have far fewer protections for the safety and health of workers.
And I'm not saying that you are a racist or that you meant to say a racist thing.
But I very much think that the thing you said sounds racist, and I don't want people reading it to hear that, esp. if that's not what you intended.
Everything else on your list I absolutely agree is part of the set of variables that has contributed to the resurgence of bed bugs, and I also agree that the fact that more workplaces throughout the world have all kinds of pressures on them (everything from not caring to not realizing that bed bugs are a problem they need to worry about) don't have protocols in place to keep them from spreading bed bugs is a contributor. After all, some researchers think that the bed bug population was held in the US during the "bed bug free" decades in poultry farms where the bugs fed on the birds, meaning that reintroduction might have come from poultry workers bringing bugs home.
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cilecto
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Joined: Aug '08
Posts: 459
Posted 4 months ago
Sat Jul 4 2009 22:52:51
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Buggy: I hit enter, left the house and recalled the post you cited and rued my use of "third world. I'll also concede that I'm probably more X(race, class, sex, whatever)-ist than I realize or prefer to be. :(
Perhaps saying a business environment (in any country) where getting things out the door quickly and cheaply with no regard to how safe the workplace is (avoiding the word "hygiene" as it might be interpreted as "personal hygiene") or, under what conditions your workers live under in order to participate in that economy.
Am I allowed out of the doghouse yet?
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dire - 12 hours ago »
Thanks for the reply. Very informative!
The reason for me posting this was because my friend told me he knows a guy who sells something "very toxic and very illegal" for bed bugs. But I'll move that into a new thread now.Add on to what others have noted above, the DDT that a guy is selling from his basement may have been sitting around for 30+ years. (I don't know what this would do to the product in terms of affecting its effectiveness or its safety, but it certainly might.)
It may also have been obtained more recently from another country. It may have been produced for agricultural purposes.
It also is worth considering that it may not be DDT at all. There is a black market, and there are people willing to play on people's desire for the magic bullet, but they may be selling something else.
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buggyinsocal
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Posts: 1,160
Posted 4 months ago
Mon Jul 6 2009 12:27:11
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cilecto,
Oh, goodness, I don't think of you as in the doghouse, and I'm very sorry if something I wrote felt like I was trying to put you there.
I was trying to stress that I don't think you did anything racist on purpose. I actually thought the post was a really good example of something I'd been thinking about elsewhere--that all too often our words get away from us and mean things that we don't mean them to say.
We all make mistakes, and often we make the biggest mistakes unintentionally. It's why I said that the thing you said felt racist to me, not that you were racist. There's a big difference between the two.
I do think, however, that talking about those times when the words get away from us makes it easier for us to fine tune how we phrase things so it happens to all of us less often.
And yeah, your rephrasing is exactly what I thought you were trying to say in the first place. I'll also even give you that if there are cultures in workplaces that are more concerned about short term profit than anything else, there isn't going to be a concerted effort toward making sure that things like bed bugs or other pests (do not get me started on the Argentine ant, for example) don't migrate in the global economy, and there's a very long lis of ways that non-native species, most of whom are spread through international commerce, have a hugely negative effect on the environment.
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senior member
Joined: May '07
Posts: 426
Posted 4 months ago
Tue Jul 7 2009 12:27:16
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Lets stop the foolishness as well as the Pavlovian DDT response.
1. DDT was a great tool in the war against many pests.
2. Unfortunatley at the time there was no real regulation or certification and it was subject to misuse by anyone.
3. DDT is no longer an effective tool for bed bug control.
4. It is a violation of Federal and State law to sell this or any other unregistered product in the US.Why break the law for something that will not work? End of story.
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I agree fully with Winston's comments ....
Additionally, due to the legal status .... the legal liability of using an outlawed chemical could be staggering ....
Imagine the cost of having a HAZMAT crew remove all of the materials that were contaminated with DDT including the wall, floor & ceiling materials.....
Imagine trying to sell a residence or condo after it has been treated with DDT .... or the major lawsuit that would result, if the new owners learned of the presence of DDT without any disclosure being made prior to the sale.
The purchase price of a bottle of DDT would be cheap compared to the cost of stuffing that DDT Genie back into the bottle after it has been released into an indoor environment.... Tens of thousands of dollars for the remediation plus federal fines & potential criminal charges ....
There are more effective legal pesticides available on the market..... Properly applied Vikane gas is 99.9% effective..... Why use a product that has up to a 90% survival rate for field captured bed bugs with a genetically based resistance .... Do your research & you will discover that DDT is not the effective weapon it once was.....
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