Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for November 16, 2010

Call the pest exterminators fast!!

That raccoon doesn’t have a turtle and squirrel in tow, does he?

http://comics.com/over-the-hedge/

(replace dashes w/ underscores)

A bit late for yesterday. Inner-city immigration somehow jars. I could settle for just inner-city migration. Otherwise we may need to know about the details of the matching emigration. In a large nation with controls there might need to be a department of intra-migration. Naturally it follows in this theme that some of the migrants are bed bugs.Do they have to have papers? Or perhaps they have one overarching blanket cover authority being a department of integration.

Maybe there’s something that preys on Bedbugs? Or bedbug traps?

surprising that republicans aren’t insisting that we bring back DDT.

wmbrainiac, it’s still early. It could come to that. And I don’t think there IS anything that preys on bedbugs.

wmbrainiac said, about 1 hour ago

“surprising that republicans aren’t insisting that we bring back DDT.”

I really hate to say this but I have read some far right wing nuts that say we should. (and I am more right than left wing myself)

DDT is banned for agricultural use under the Stockholm Convention, but is still available for use for disease vector control. According to the World Health Organization, it is in use today for mosquito control in malaria-infested areas.

If bedbugs were shown to carry lethal diseases, and if DDT was shown to effectively control them, you can bet that the CDC would consider using it. However, I do not believe that either condition applies.

Centipedes and fire ants eat bed bugs, but it may not be a good idea to release them into your home.

WMBRAINIAC You are obviously older than me so fill me in. DDT, that was the pesticide that fed the world until some do gooders decided that bird shells were breaking? And they replaced it with something that only affected humans, not birds?Gotcha! “Alright all you birds! You gotta move out of the Hilton for a couple of days so we can spray bedbugs. Don’t want no impromptu omelets here.” OK Brainiac, what you gonna save next, spiders?

Heating the house to 140 F for a few hours or days is supposed to get rid of bedbugs and the eggs as well.

@ dook

I hear that setting the house on fire also works.

In South America, it is said to be routine to drag one’s mattress outside and place on a fire ant nest for a few days. Supposedly, this rids the mattress of all traces of bedbugs. It does not, however, rid the mattress of all traces of fire ants.

@ Lewreader - Google “food chain” and you’ll find out why it’s not just about the birds.

Nemesys, that seems to be the typical manner of fixing problems by the Left. Cure the original problem, ignore the resultant, more pernicious effects of the original “cure”.

fwiw, spiders are critical to maintaining any kind of ecosystem at all. Without spiders, we’d all be up to our eyeballs in flies (including mosquitoes) in no time. Also, all the plant-eating insects would happily destroy the vegetation.

Humans, however, aren’t at all critical to any ecosystem. Just the reverse.

Just sayin’.

AKHenderson,

To get underscores to display, put a backslash, \, in front of each one like this: http://comics.com/over\_the\_hedge/ will display as http://comics.com/over_the_hedge/

Hmmmm… bedbugs “more pernicious” than malformed babies – I don’t think so.

Heat the house up, set the table in the garage, tell folks why and let them deal with it. Besides raccoons are cute – we have them all over our cottage, feed them, play with them and they never hurt anything.

Hmmm… millions of humans dying of malnutrition or of malaria (not in the US of course, we can and do come up with alternatives), more pernicious than bird eggshells being too thin…Perhaps one might decide to think again. DDT had naught to do with malformed human babies. Thalidomide on the other hand (which of course is not an insecticide) was the cause of malformed babies. Don’t wanna be a JAD and go into the whole story, but here’s a link for some additional reading.

http://globalhealthreport.blogspot.com/2009/05/human-health-effects-of-ddt.html

Raccoons are fun, unless of course they are rabid, which happens more often than most people know. Unfortunately, they are also quite destructive in their search for food in human developments