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Modern but pre-epidemic encounters with bedbugs - thoughts, questions
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earthangel
newbite
Joined: Sep '09
Posts: 28
Posted 1 month ago
Sat Oct 10 2009 14:26:46
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Here's something that's crossed my mind more than once - up to some point, everyone I know (we're all well over 50) just about would have a story that went something like this --
--oh, when I went to Paris (London, San Francisco, etc) after college, this one place we stayed in had bedbugs - the next day I saw these bites in the mirror -- etc.
And that would be that, that would be the story - oh, we stayed in this cheap place, and we got these bits, guess they were bedbugs - absoutely NO additional chapters about having them in suitcase, having them at home, etc.
Needless to say, these people would notice an infested home.
So what do you think was the story? this really is a common story of travel, maybe in the 60s and 70s, maybe later. The only thing I can think of is -- when DDT was around, was it likelier that luggage would one way or another be exposed to it, and bugs killed? I've lived in NY a long time, and only in the past few years have I heard of anybody having bedbugs problems, and of course I hear a lot now, mostly from younger people who are renters.
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lmao Thanks I needed that on the start of this very long weenekd~~
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Back around the early/mid 1990s (I think), the Village Voice did this feature on a woman and her NYC apartment on the Bowery, which she'd rented since the 1960s.
Anyway, at one point, several years before the article was published, she'd battled bedbugs in that apt. It might've been either in the 1970s or 1980s - decades before the current resurgence. The article mentioned it really briefly and casually - like in less than a sentence. Just one of the things that randomly stuck in my memory.
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earthangel
newbite
Joined: Sep '09
Posts: 28
Posted 1 month ago
Sat Oct 10 2009 21:15:44
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I wonder if it was Lauren Hutton, the model, who had a Bowery loft for a really long time and probably still does.
For sure people had bedbug problems once in awhile pre-epidemic, but in nothing like the numbers in the present era. I just have been thinking about the bedbugs that didn't come home with people. Pre-epidemic, or at least way before it, people didn't get alarmed right away, the way I would today, if they found they'd been bitten in a hotel - they'd just decide not to go there again, probably tell their friends the same thing.
Until now, I never knew anyone in 40 years in NY who had them, now I know plenty of people who've had to deal with them.
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It wasn't anyone famous. It was a weekly feature on neighborhoods and homes. Don't remember the name of the column.
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