Thank god the olympics are coming or they may never have had such a push to have this solved. Kinda strikes me as a problem that should have been important before inviting the world over. Like, I had an apartment and we got the buggers. Sucks. So we got on top of it, and delt with it.
Didn’t wait until we invited people over to start worrying about it.
I’ll be honest, there are a lot of things I personally don’t deal with properly until I’m expecting company. But bedbugs should take priority 100% of the time.
the article would imbue it with sentiments about government confidence and legitimacy. since it’s France (ignore the enormous popular uprisings against this government in recent years) it’s simple a ‘political row’ unrelated to the things people have been violently complaining about for years
Probably if they decided to assertively solve the matter they’d provide free extermination services and temporary clean housing (for the day or two it takes to do a clean extermination) for affected households and use the data of which addresses have used the service to map out infestation sources and clear them.
(for the day or two it takes to do a clean extermination)
A thorough extermination actually takes months between two extensive treatments to make sure all the eggs (which are staggeringly resilient) were caught between both treatments.
If it were that easy, this would have been solved everywhere already. A day or two is almost certainly not enough, you also have to do adjacent apartments (whose inhabitants probably aren’t going to be very happy, especially if they have to leave for the fifth time), your map can show that it affects like every other building (especially when it’s a large apartment block), the temporary housing is at risk of becoming infested too, which will make people fear being there, etc.
It actually sounds a lot like zero covid - simple on paper, you try it, you find out it doesn’t really work, and then you’re left with the choice to either change strategy or try to go harder and cram it through regardless.
What I mean is that we would never hear the end of it and years later people would still be saying of anywhere in China that it’s crawling with these pests.
Then what? China does worse. Like kidnapping and murdering people for their religion or for speaking against the dictator. Hexbear needs to be defederated from everywhere. They are a bunch of pro genocide, ultra nationalist russia and china fascists
Row (pronounced like wow) is another word for argument or disagreement. It’s most commonly used in the UK. A “political row” just means politicians are bickering with each other.
Oh. That’s one of those words I’ve only ever read (generally in brit lit), and thought it was pronounced as row like row a boat. Thank you for the correct pronunciation!
in westminster parliamentary procedure, when there is a disagreement the two partisan groups get together and competitively row in a race up the Thames, winner taking the victorious position on the matter.
I have a theory that you could transfer bedbugs by putting them in water balloons right before you fill them with water and tie them off, that way you could throw them and have them pop then due to how durable bedbugs are they would probably survive to breed
well they are free to take but I think their size would cause them to get hurt when the balloon break on impact, the smaller the creature the less it could be hurt I’d guess like how a mouse can fall off a building without really getting hurt
What about a spy balloon? If you put some bedbugs in a huge, high altitude balloon would some of then survive being shot down with an air-to-air missile?
As we’ve seen worldwide, I’m not sure how well turning a public health problem into a political issue will work out. No matter your political slant, politicians just aren’t the solution to public health issues, as much as they’re needed to administer the legal solutions.
As well as the fact that bedbugs are spreading more and faster due to climate change since they thrive in warmer environments. This problem has been growing and will continue to grow. I worry about when it reaches my own city.
Solutions for such a wide outbreak are scarce, but viable solutions I think would come from the scientific community about effective treatments and long-term changes to keep them at bay. However, as we’ve seen with COVID, there will be a number who will resist efforts to control the pests as some form of social control, infringing on their right to be scruffy bastards, I suppose.
I do wish Paris the best in finding a long-term viable solution to this, it’s a terribly difficult problem to be facing. Especially with intent to host an Olympic games.
The assumption that you could ever treat such a crisis as "apolitical" requires the existing power structures to not be designed to literally kill off whole segments of the population (poor people, disabled people, old people, immigrants, anyone defined by capitalism as "burdens").
It's political because they won't act (like they haven't so far) until it threatens the economy they depend on to maintain their power and/or rich households, at which point their solutions will only ever be in defence and service of those things, not the general population.
So sure, in utopia it wouldn't be political and the obvious thing would be that we help society and everyone in it, but that's not the reality we live in, and those in power aren't going to just put their entire ethos to one side to do the right thing, and expecting them to, at this point in time, and especially fresh out of a pandemic that isn't actually over, is extremely naive, at best.
Unless you tent and fumigate the entirety of Paris or heat treat it, meaning bringing the temperature of Paris to ~118° for 90 minutes, the other options are…middling in effectiveness.
Also, neither of those treatments keep bedbugs from reinfesting a second after the treatment concludes. (There are no treatments that do. Zero. Ziltch.) And since bedbugs are hitchhikers that can also hide in the tiniest of cracks and crevices, such as fitting between your wall and socket cover, total and permanent eradication is unlikely. The only possibility is if a bait treatment similar to those used for roaches that alters the DNA of the next generation so they can’t reproduce is created and actually attracts bedbugs more than a nice blood filled human.
In dense population centers like Paris total elimination at this point in time is incredibly unlikely. They could with continuous effective treatments bring it under a semblance of control but they will always be there. The Olympics will almost certainly exacerbate the issue.
There’s no other solution than to treat them the way we did the first time — with DDT.
Bedbug populations are not necessarily increasing but returning to normal pre-DDT levels.
There’s btw no reason not to use DDT. The cancer fear was overblown. Obviously it’s not a substance that should be available over the counter, but there’s no reason why qualified and trained personell shouldn’t be able to use it.
If that is true then the only recourse will be antiparasitic drugs. Ivermectin seems to kill bedbugs but not for very long. Fluralaner seems promising.
It’s very interesting that when we treat animals for parasites we treat the animal itself but for humans we believe that something as nebulous as “treating the space” is actually possible.
When the world is ready to actual solve bedbugs it’ll solve them through a pill you take.
I’ve been thinking about this and it seems developed and developing countries have some kind of an ideological thing against ectoparasitic medications. There’s a common delusion that stuff like lice, fleas, bedbugs, etc, are very rare because everything and everyone is so clean these days.
But it’s not really true. All these parasites circulate, especially now that people travel so much for business and pleasure. Also, none of these parasites really care how clean your body and your house are, all they “care” about is drinking your blood.
I really think if we could get over this wrong idea, and we could start actual government-funded research into effective and safe ectoparasitic drugs for human use, we’d stand a much better chance at ending bedgbugs and other stuff once for all. Environmental treatments have been proven ineffective time and time again. They work for a while and then the bugs develop resistance. We need a way to make our blood unpalatable to them.
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