I also thought that today’s trendy devils of foreign origin and global warming were blamed for the infestation.

Had bedbugs last year. :cry:Nightmare:cry:.

But they only came from the guy down the hall who decided that the best way to rid himself of the bugs wasn’t by telling our sweet landlord or the other tenants in our 5-unit building, but by dragging his infested futon down the hallway and shoving it through the door leading to the back stairs to the alley. Where’s my door? Directly across the hall from the back stairs… .

The talley: replacement of my full bed and bedframe, my guest bed, 40 loads of laundry, huge red welts on my face and arms, a good seven weeks of sleepless nights, putting everything into plastic bags, ditching my TV ’cause it was in the bedroom, vacuuming and cleaning every day, having some of my wooden furniture’s drawers swell up because of the fumicide so that they don’t line up properly even today… .

Basically, you went to bed every night knowing you were bug bait and you had to stay in the apartment and not leave after spraying or the bugs wouldn’t come out of hiding to traipse through the chemicals to kill ‘em if they didn’t feel the body heat of a midnight dinner.

Over-the-counter sprays don’t kill ‘em, either.

The exterminator (who was great!) told me that there’s a huge upswing in infestations - from homes and apartments to the finest hotels in the city. It’s just that few people want to admit having them, thinking it has something to do with cleanliness… which it doesn’t. He thinks this lack of speedy action is the real problem, not the lack of DDT. If the infestation is hit very soon after arriving, it can be dealt with. Have one condo-owner in a building or landlord who doesn’t want to act immediately, then the bugs spread out and soon enough you have multiple dwelling infestations and it becomes harder to contain.

Why, yes, I am still rather traumatized by it.:neutral:

Sing it, sistah. And I’m in Vancouver, BC. Bedbugs are e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e. When I travel, I now put everything into little zippered plastic bags, check hotel mattresses for hints of infestation and keep my luggage as far away from the bed as possible. Makes me feel a bit like wacky Howie Hughes but I couldn’t take another infestation. No way.

tlxftrf, this was in the article:

Though cooties are not particularly harmful other than making the head extremely itchy (and thus making the scalp vulnerable to injury from scratching), there’s plenty of misplaced information about lice. Prime is that they result from poor personal hygiene.

“Anybody can get cooties,” a public health official tells Sunday Mainichi. “Adults, children, the most fastidiously clean people … anybody who shares a towel or pillow can pick up lice.” (By Ryann Connell)

France invaded by swarms of hornets - global warming blamed.

hey,look over your shoulder atlantic cousin’s

this is more of a concern - it’s in your backyard.

http://www.newsobserver.com/102/story/543054.html

Sorry (JP) I like bees and honey.

Wait a minute tlxtftrf, the point of my mentioning the Wonder!Exterminator’s discussion with me was to point out that personal hygiene has nothing to do with getting bedbugs and that this misconception is one of the reasons he thinks people don’t want to face admitting to themselves or other tenants that there’s an infestation.

Bedbugs feed only on warm blood, nothing else, so how sterile and clean before getting the exterminator in the surrounding area is immaterial since the bugs hone straight in on a warm body and don’t want to bother spending any time away from areas where warm feeds are (ie. beds and areas around where you spend time sitting).

As for the guy down the hall… he wasn’t some dirty slob, he was just stupid to try to fix the problem by himself… mostly, I think, because he knew on some level that admitting he had the infestation would entail some inconvenience on his part - which I made damned sure it did when I told my landlord and the exterminator that the infestation started with him and if they didn’t spray there that day, I would guarantee a more costlier extermination plan ’cause how long would it be before his bugs migrate across the hall to another tenant’s place… which would also then have to be sprayed at the landlord’s expense.

I still wanted to punch him out every time I saw him for the next three months… .

As for lice. The best kids are dirty little things. Put 30 of them in a classroom and 180 of them in a school playground and you can tell them everything about hygiene and they’re still going to do some disgusting things to themselves and other people. They’re going to touch inappropriate things, not wash their hands, come in close body contact with their friends (or enemies), grab body parts not their own (i.e. ‘playing’) and school staff can’t watch every single one of them.

I’ve found that, unfortunately, using logic and good sense doesn’t always work with kids until they’re about 19. They’re totally on their own for their decisions after that, I reckon.

Actually, the main story seems to get mixed up between head lice and body lice. Wikipedia confirms that they are two different species, and head lice will only stay on the head, and definitely have nothing to do with hygiene. In Australia (and Western countries generally, it would seem) they are a frequent problem in kindergarten and primary schools, where kids routinely have close head contact during play. The kids bring them home, where they easily spread to adults during rough and tumble play, or using your comb, or whatever. As normal shampoo will not remove them, daily hair washing will not guarantee you don’t get them.

Body lice, on the other hand, are pretty much unheard in your “normal” household here, and (I imagine) are probably only found on the unwashed homeless.

I would bet the real problem in Japan is with head lice. Strangely enough, my wife (from the northern part of Honshu) says she had never heard of head lice in Japan, and she was also of the (understandable but mistaken) belief that it was a hygiene issue too. Is it that case the Japan really did have very few head lice cases until recently? It seems hard to believe, given how ubiquitous they are in the West.