Once virtually eliminated in the United States, bedbugs are back with a vengeance. Earlier this summer Environmental Protection Agency and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported the little pests had made an ”alarming resurgence,” possibly due to increased resistance to available pesticides and a decline in local pest control programs. Some pesticides once used for bedbug control have been phased out from indoor use, if not altogether, and the blood-sucking insects have developed resistance to their replacements. Lifestyle changes also play a role in the bedbug rebound.
As the Washington Post reports some state and local officials are seeking EPA approval for indoor use of chemicals that retain their effectiveness against the pesky parasites. Ohio Governor Ted Strickland, for one, has sought approval for use of propoxur, a pesticide currently banned from residential use, but so far the EPA has said no. Without a safe and effective indoor pesticide to use, bedbug infestations are spreading. As the Columbus Dispatch reports, bedbugs are spreading to schools, fire departments, and group homes, among other places, and increasing burdens on charities that collect and sell used clothes and furniture. There are also increasing reports of health problems caused by ill-advised efforts to use available outdoor pesticides indoors.
Health officials in Ohio and several other states believe that the risks posed propoxur are outweighed by the severity of the bedbug problem. The EPA disagrees. The EPA has the legal authority to preempt state preferences, and is often obliged to under existing statutes, but should it? Why should the EPA’s assessment of the relevant risk-risk trade-offs override those of the states?
There is an unquestionable case for federal intervention where activities in one state cause spillovers into another. Think of air pollution. But there’s no risk of such spillovers here. Indeed, if there’s any risk it operates in reverse — jurisdictions that fail to control bedbugs can increase the risk of infestation for their neighbors. By limiting local pest control options the EPA is protecting local jurisdictions from themselves, and some don’t want this protection.
If local communities wish to strike a different risk balance than the feds, the EPA should not stand in their way. It is one thing for the EPA to inform local choices, and help clarify the relevant health trade-offs, quite another to impose one set of health preferences on the nation as a whole. If EPA’s resistance to propoxur was motivated by spillover concerns, such as potential groundwater pollution that could cross state lines, the federal rule would make sense. But it is not and does not. This is precisely the sort of environmental problem which state and local preferences should control.
foxlets14 says:
I’m betting the problem will be resolved once the infestation reaches the homes and offices of the EPA decision makers.
September 6, 2010, 11:10 amApep says:
How long before the Mexican drug cartels start selling DDT on the side?
September 6, 2010, 11:11 amOrenWithAnE says:
Holy crap, did anyone actually read up on this stuff? It’s the trio of acute toxicity, very slow breakdown and high solubility.
I would be very sore if any of my neighbors were using the stuff in all but the most controlled fashion. Perhaps it would be their right (depending on how the EPA comes down on it) and I’m not going to stop them but it merits, at absolute minimum, dis-invitation from all neighborhood events.
September 6, 2010, 11:21 amTaking Liberty Seriously says:
This kind of thing just shows just how far we’ve come since our liberties really started eroding fast in the New Deal 1930s. Why indeed should the EPA’s assessment of risks override those of the states? As long as we’re talking about “should,” shouldn’t there be a presumption against federal intervention unless there’s a showing of a federal interest that demonstrably outweighs the interests of states, localities or individual liberty?
The fundamental problem is that there’s absolutely no legal structure in place to keep these kinds of interventions within bounds. Without such a structure, ad hoc complaints and push back is going to get us nowhere.
takinglibertyseriously.net
September 6, 2010, 11:23 amCassandra says:
Zoonoses spread by dogs and cats kill and injure more people than bedbugs do. So does sex. Why doesn’t the EPA control domestic animals and sex?
September 6, 2010, 11:30 amSam Hall says:
Rachel Carson is so proud.
September 6, 2010, 11:44 amPassing By says:
If local communities wish to strike a different risk balance than the feds, the EPA should not stand in their way.
This assertion assumes what needs proving.
There’s no obvious libertarian answer here. The issue raised isn’t whether each household should decide for itself, but rather what level of government should decide.
So why should ‘local community’ governments make that decision? Do local health departments have superior scientific expertise? (Doubtful.) Are local circumstances somehow key … do bedbugs thrive in Cleveland but not Buffalo or Chicago? (Doubtful.)
Give us some reasons here, not just conclusions. Because, as OrenwithanE noted, this stuff is ugly; and I don’t have any reason to trust the state of Ohio more than EPA in this area.
September 6, 2010, 11:48 amSteve says:
I like how any environmental thread by Prof. Adler is guaranteed to bring out at least one of the Rachel Carson know-nothings.
September 6, 2010, 12:00 pmbfwebster says:
If the Republican Party were smart — a dubious proposition (and I say that as someone who switched from being a lifelong registered Democrat to a registered Republican two years ago) — they’d use this as an ‘and another thing’ campaign item: “Under the Democrats, the EPA not only wants to regulate your breath, they won’t even let you kill bedbugs.” ..bruce..
P.S. We really do need to bring back DDT.
September 6, 2010, 12:01 pmruuffles says:
Read the article. The regulation was enacted in 2007.
September 6, 2010, 12:06 pmLarryA says:
Our local pest control company uses a dog trained to sniff out bedbugs. You have to book 6-8 weeks in advance, on the days they can pry him out of Austin and San Antonio.
September 6, 2010, 12:06 pmTaking Liberty Seriously says:
If bedbugs are a problem that varies from place to place, then it would be surprising if a one-size-fits-all national solution would strike the right balance for every locality.
The problem is that the current situation presumes that the national solution (EPA’s) is the correct one, and there is no effective mechanism to rebut or test this presumption. Thus, we always get a national solution whether it is the better one or not.
Why not make federal intervention contingent on a showing that there’s a federal interest that demonstrably outweighs the interests of states, localities or individual liberty?
I already know the answer, of course: As a political matter there are strong interests that want to keep the federal government as the predominant regulator of public health, safety and general welfare. But is this okay?
takinglibertyseriously.net
September 6, 2010, 12:08 pmruuffles says:
Once the dog finds them, then what? The wapo article suggests people are unwilling to throw away their mattress and box springs.
September 6, 2010, 12:11 pmgeokstr says:
Damn tootin’.
Who cares about those several tens of millions dead because of the ban on DDT? Most of them are just backward brown people, and we got too many damn parasitic homo sapiens sapiens around mucking up goddess Gaia anyway, right? It’s enough to make a guy want to strap on a bomb and take hostages or something.
Good thing we have those Rachel Carson deny-everythings, blame-everyone-elses to look to for moral guidance on these issues.
September 6, 2010, 12:24 pmnewrouter says:
lift the ban on ddt
September 6, 2010, 12:26 pmbfwebster says:
It may have been enacted in 2007 (and I’m sure the ban on DDT was enacted decades ago), but it is the 2010 EPA that is refusing to provide waivers.
September 6, 2010, 12:32 pmbfwebster says:
It may have been enacted in 2007 (and I’m sure the ban on DDT was enacted decades ago), but it is the 2010 EPA that is refusing to provide waivers in the face of a rapidly growing problem in New York City and elsewhere.
September 6, 2010, 12:33 pmGary Britt says:
If one doesn’t want to be exposed to a neighbor who uses effective chemical treatments to kill bedbugs, then the solution is not to have the government infringe on the neighbors liberty by imposing your judgments on them, but for such person to stay out of their neighbors house and make sure they only visit with friends who let their bug infestations run wild.
How about following a modified version of the old pro-abortion adage used by weasel word politicos: “I’m personally opposed to propoxpur-ddt-malathion but I wouldn’t want to impose my judgment on others”.
Gary
September 6, 2010, 12:39 pmconiston says:
London story: A year ago, I spent almost three months getting rid of bedbugs from the flat of my neighbour who is 90. At first I tried through the Council – she lives in sheltered accommodation – and they sent someone twice but there was no effect. I checked things out on the web and found something stronger, permethrin. I threw out all the bedding and the mattress and the base (which was wood) and sprayed very very heavily (my friend was not present) about five different times and then hand picked up the remaining lot over the next 3 months and kept up monthly treatments. They are very very difficult to eradicate even under those conditions. A good help was the mattress cover (£45 ouch – American made). Total cost of replacing everything and the cost of the chemicals and subsequent cleaning was about $1000 US which for a woman who only has 6k total in the world is a lot.
I would urge people to take this seriously as for the elderly they can be serious (about 10-15% of people are allergic). And they are disgusting. I am not squeamish. I wish I had taken a picture of the colony that had taken over a section of the mattress because it would make you want to vomit.
They can live for up to a year without food. Throwing out the bedding is a start but they can hide in walls and carpets. Shine a bright light in the middle of the night (when they are active) if you want to get a shock. If you see their discarded skin/shell you know they have just eaten. You.
September 6, 2010, 12:41 pmPassing By says:
Taking–
Local solutions might be best if the key consideration is the variation in the bedbug problem from place to place. Or a national solution might be best, if the key is specialized scientific understanding of the perticide and its alternatives’ effects on both bedbugs and the broader ecology.
What bothers me is that Mr. Adler’s post doesn’t weigh those trade-offs … he just lunges to the conclusion that “local” is best.
Ideology is for dorm-room bull sessions; standards are higher in discussion amongst adults.
September 6, 2010, 12:49 pmJonathan H. Adler says:
Passing By –
There are multiple reasons libertarians (and others) should support decentralization of decision-making in cases likes this where there are no interjurisdicitonal spillovers. I’ve written on this quite extensively. (See, e.g., here and here.) Among the reasons are, first, that risk preferences are not uniform nationally, and decentralized decision-making will maximize the likelihood that each jurisdictions policies match the preferences of those within each jurisdiction. If we can’t let each household set its own policy based upon owner preferences, we can let each community do so.
Second insofar as there is uncertainty about how to strike the best balance between the risks of pesticide (mis)use and bedbugs (or whatever), allowing jurisdictional variation facilitates a discovery process whereby we can learn more about the benefits and costs of various policies.
Scientific expertise is not the issue. Science can tell us what the risks of various policies might be — e.g., the risks likely from certain exposure levels caused by certain types of use — but it cannot answer the normative question. That is knowing what risks are does not tell us what risks we should allow people to be exposed to, voluntarily or otherwise. As I explained in one of the articles linked above, the federal government likely has a comparative advantage in scientific research, but this does not mean it has a comparative advantage in setting risk policy standards for the nation, particularly given that risk preferences are not uniform. Ohio and other states don’t dispute EPA’s scientific judgment here, but rather its determination that the risks of persistent bedbug infestations do not justify the risks posed by propoxur or other available chemicals.
JHA
September 6, 2010, 1:11 pmalkali says:
Sometimes local is just better. You can’t tell me that some pointy-headed Washington bureaucrat with a Ph.D. in biochemistry knows more about pesticide risks than a deputy mayor with a degree from the local community college.
September 6, 2010, 1:14 pmrobert says:
I had them a couple of years ago. I used an outdoor pesticide, sprayed down my mattress and a couple other areas in the apartment, then went out of town a couple days. I came back and had no problems ever again.
September 6, 2010, 1:20 pmSFC B says:
“So why should ‘local community’ governments make that decision? Do local health departments have superior scientific expertise? (Doubtful.) Are local circumstances somehow key … do bedbugs thrive in Cleveland but not Buffalo or Chicago? (Doubtful.)
Give us some reasons here, not just conclusions. Because, as OrenwithanE noted, this stuff is ugly; and I don’t have any reason to trust the state of Ohio more than EPA in this area.”
Because I actually stand a chance of being able to affect the decisions of my local government. If the mayor or town council of my town do something I don’t agree with, or something I do agree with, there is a better chance I can make my opinion heard, and considered. The further from local you get the less meaning your opinion matters. If someone does live in an area when bedbugs have returned in force, they should be allowed to, at least, consider using more powerful pesticides. That right has been taken from them by an executive agency who is wholly unaccountable to the people whose lives they are affecting.
September 6, 2010, 1:27 pmSteve says:
You care about them, obviously, notwithstanding that they only exist in your extremely fevered imagination.
Of course, it’s not just the crazy Rachel Carson-haters who hear about bedbugs and suggest reasonable things like “we need to bring back DDT.” This is a good example of where science needs to trump the risk preferences of local communities. Even though science tells us that modern bedbugs are almost entirely resistant to DDT, people still keep clamoring for it like it’s some kind of wonder drug.
Resistance is one of those thorny issues where the “experts” can be of great assistance to us. When people find a pesticide that works, the natural instinct is to use it as widely and as often as possible, but that may not be the smartest decision if the result is nothing more than a pesticide-resistant bug population. Rachel Carson, for example (in the real world, not the crazy right-wing one), wanted to limit the widespread use of DDT in agricultural applications in order to focus on using it for public health and malaria control. But without some international equivalent of the EPA to enforce this excellent idea, the farmers just kept spraying as often as possible, and DDT stopped working.
September 6, 2010, 1:28 pmruuffles says:
Why not? If it’s isolated within the house, why stop there? Why not make the point that a city or state should not impede on a homeowner’s right to fumigate his own house as long as it doesn’t leak outside?
If bedbugs are such a big issue and this pesticide isn’t that big of a deal, then it shouldn’t matter which city or state you live in.
September 6, 2010, 1:36 pmPublic_Defender says:
I see two major advantages of federal control:
1. Resistance. Bed bugs are mobile. Unwise use of a chemical one place would increase resistance to that chemical, which would affect everyone.
2. Control of inventory. If one state allowed liberal access to the chemical, out-of-state people would also gain easier access to it. National control makes it less difficult to control the chemical everywhere.
September 6, 2010, 1:52 pmLessinSF says:
http://bedbugregistry.com/
September 6, 2010, 1:58 pmBob (from Ohio) says:
Bedbugs are a hot button issue with people, more so than any other type of insect even roaches. Once this bites enough middle class households, the Congress will sweep away the EPA regulation in any event.
Why? Do you plan on licking them? Use in their house will have no impact on your house unless it drifts during application.
September 6, 2010, 1:58 pmToby says:
Puts me in mind of the less publicized decision just a few years to no longer spray the cabins of planes flying back from Africa because someone somewhere might get sick. Instead we got the spread of West Nile Virus throughout North America, tens of thousands ( or a magnitude or two more) of dead birds, hundreds of sick humans. Yep those risks were sure balanced well.
Speaking as someone who is on the road far too much of the year, I would gladly choose to go to conferences only in cities that allowed aggressive spraying of hotel rooms. If I had that choice. Let other cities choose to compete in other ways.
September 6, 2010, 2:07 pmPersonFromPorlock says:
Surely a rhetorical question. Government is wise, and its higher echelons are wiser yet. QED.
September 6, 2010, 2:09 pmtamerlane says:
I can only guess that you haven’t read many MSDSs or, for that matter, many warning labels on the backs of various common pesticides, herbicides, household cleansers, lubricants, etc. I read your link and it described a chemical with a maximum half-life persistence in the environment of about a month (slowest noted degradation 1.5%/day: do the math) and only a moderate toxicity.
September 6, 2010, 2:09 pmbilly q. says:
I wouldn’t feel bad about smuggling that.
September 6, 2010, 2:34 pmRobinGoodfellow says:
This appears to be a general use pesticide, not a restricted use pesticide, meaning it is safe enough for the general public to use without any specialized training.
Certainly it is a dangerous chemical because it is a PESTICIDE. Its purpose is to kill living things.
However, general use pesticides available today are like Perrier when compared to now-banned chemicals such as DDT or malathion.
September 6, 2010, 2:39 pmPQuincy says:
The Federal authorities have been reluctant to approve use of propoxur because it is a long-lasting chemical particularly dangerous to children.
If a child becomes ill or disabled owing to high levels of propoxur in the child’s home after locally-authorized spraying, guess who pays for the disability benefits for the rest of the child’s lifetime?
Oh, yeah, the Federal government. Spillover effects can take many forms. The prudence of having trained scientists specializing in toxicity make the judgment, rather than local politicians, is not only that they likely know more about propoxur and its consequences, but they also know how to make epidemiological assessments, something that local politicians have no incentive to undertake.
The war on science has been disheartening for the last decade or more, but by now, judging from some of the posters here, it’s apparently become a general war on all expertise of any kind. “Hey, I sprayed this stuff in my house, and I’m not dead yet. It must be OK!”
Libertarians do seem particularly prone to the “I can figure it out, and you can’t tell me I can’t” syndrome. Sometimes that’s true. But sometimes, really, honest, it isn’t, at least not without a lot of work, which means no one can genuinely be an expert on everything.
September 6, 2010, 3:00 pmZoolbia says:
Malathion is neither dangerous nor banned. It has low human toxicity (look it up). The head of California’s Medfly spraying program 20 years ago famously drank a glassful of it on TV to show how innocuous it was. You can buy it in any home-improvement store.
September 6, 2010, 3:06 pmalkali says:
This strikes me as argument from the stock libertarian toolkit rather than actual thought.
Allowing that every single one of us is a special unique snowflake, it would be incredibly surprising to me if (i) a significant minority of the population could even articulate their relative risk preference as between effective bedbug control and exposure to dangerous pesticides; (ii) there were significant differences in the population on that issue; and (iii) those differences were significant across states and localities.
To put that another way: I don’t think most of us could give a meaningful answer the question, “Would you allow use of a pesticide that was X% more effective against bedbugs if it gave you a Y% greater risk of liver cancer?” for values of X and Y that are within bounds of reasonableness. Further, I have no reason to think that my answer would vary much from my neighbor’s answer, or that people in my city would on average answer that question differently from people in a city across the country. It is therefore hard for me to imagine that would be any utility gain in letting states and cities make up different rules for pesticide use so that they can more perfectly target regional variations in risk preference.
If someone from the government proposed this, you’d be gasping (and properly so) at the absurdity of the experimental design. The only way we might learn actually something from doing this is if disaster were to ensue (“Hey, look, half the kids in this town have leukemia now!”). Most likely, we’d learn nothing at all.
September 6, 2010, 3:14 pmOrenWithAnE says:
There is no property right to infect your neighbor’s property with toxic chemicals. If you can apply it without it spilling onto my land, go right ahead. The plain fact is that this is not the case with easily dispersed and highly water-soluble chemicals such as the ones at issue here.
Because willfully exposing your neighbors to toxic chemicals against their wishes (or without their knowledge), while perhaps legal in some jurisdictions, is still perfectly good grounds for shunning.
The law might give you a right to be a jerk to your neighbors but it hardly requires them to ignore your actions and pretend like nothing happened.
This absolutely correct. The problem is that local decision making is often corrupted by substandard science as “input” to their normative balancing.
You guess wrong, I’ve worked in labs for the better part of a decade. I wouldn’t touch this stuff outside a fume-hood.
Quite the opposite — my friends that have worked with real safety precautions (fume hoods, poly-vinyl gloves, double-containers, routine sweeps) tend to be more conscious than those that have never seen what actual safety really entails.
There’s a world of difference spraying this on a soybean field in Iowa and in my neighbor’s yard.
September 6, 2010, 3:42 pmpublic_defender says:
PQuincy said it better than I did, I see good reasons for the feds to be involved here, but I think it’s pretty much always a fair question to ask, “Why should the federal government be doing this?” If the federal government changes hands (and it will, eventually), people on the other side might be arguing for permission to hold a tougher line than the feds might want.
September 6, 2010, 3:43 pmJohn Stephens says:
How difficult is it to make this stuff? Buy American!
September 6, 2010, 3:48 pmColin says:
Drinking a glass of it doesn’t actually prove anything, despite being fantastic PR. The very interesting “Poisoner’s Handbook”, which is essentially a history of the New York coroner’s office during prohibition (and much more engaging than it sounds!), tells of a Standard Oil representative who drank a glass of tetraethyl lead additive in front of reporters to show how harmless it was. His subsequent treatment for lead poisoning was not so well publicized.
I don’t mean to imply that malathion is terribly toxic–I have no reason to dispute your comment. I just wanted to share an interesting and related anecdote.
September 6, 2010, 4:05 pmPeter Gerdes says:
Do you really think relative risk preference varies that significantly by state? Do you have evidence? For instance do you think people in Ohio speed significantly more, require smaller wage increases to take dangerous jobs, or are less willing to pay for life extending medical care? This is the thing economists spend bucketloads of time researching so if the heart of your criticism of the EPA for denying Ohio’s waver is that Ohio residents might have different risk preferences shouldn’t you provide some evidence?
Moreover, there are plenty of obvious negatives associated with granting local control. Just to list a few:
1) Without a uniform federal rule each state or locality will have to debate and study the issues themselves. Even with advice from federal scientists this imposes costs and the mere possibility of varying regulations based on state/locality impose substantial costs on businesses, especially startups without huge markets to amortize the legal research costs over. Thus unless risk preference varies substantially between states/locality the mere overhead of allowing local deciscions favors a uniform federal rule.
2) Variations in chemical risk preference create barriers to travel and relocation imposing negative externalities on the US economy as a whole. If the fixed costs in 1 are to be overcome there must be substantial variation in risk preferences across states/localities. Thus in the abscence of a uniform federal rule taking a job in Ohio, or simply traveling there on vacation, will expose one to substantially different risks of harm from toxic chemicals. This in turn makes the labor markets less liquid and imposes economic costs.
3) Companies with a profit motive to sell more of a potentially dangerous pesticide can target those localities whose residents are least able to come to an accurate objective understanding of the risks or whose politicians are most easily swayed to ignore the evidence. However, when distributing it’s expert opinions and advice the EPA can’t practically identify those targeted communities to focus outreach efforts there. This imbalance means that local control on this kind of issue increases the expected number of people who will be misleadingly lead to believe a dangerous product is likely safe.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with a pesticide maker presenting evidence to the public to convince them their product is safer than the federal scientists suggest. However, they shouldn’t have the strategic advantage of choosing those communities who have the least access and least ability to understand the arguments of the federal scientists.
4) It’s extremely difficult to prevent people from simply having the stronger chemicals mailed to them by a friend in a state with a higher risk appetite. Any attempt to effectively create different rules on home pesticide use between states/localities would therefore incur substantial enforcement costs.
—
I could come up with more but I think I’ve made my point. Maybe local control on this issue is better maybe not but it’s a complex issue that requires balancing many considerations and isn’t clear cut.
September 6, 2010, 4:29 pmLarryA says:
It is a pest control company. I would suppose they have something up their sleeve.
September 6, 2010, 4:48 pmJonathan H. Adler says:
PQuincy –
You’re making the fundamental error of assuming that determining the proper risk trade-off is a scientific question. It’s not. Further, to say that local jurisdictions can set their own rules is not to say they must do their own science. No one is challenging the federal government’s scientific conclusions. Rather, the question is whether some communities are willing to expose themselves to a slightly greater risk (from pesticides) due to a specific, current problem (bedbugs) that some people think is a bigger concern.
alkali –
There is variation in the stringency of environmental measures across states. See, e.g., California’s Proposition 65. I think it’s also reasonable to assume that people suffering from an acute problem, such as bedbug infestations, might be willing to expose themselves to greater pesticide risks than those who live in areas without such concerns.
As for state experimentation, the history of environmental law is replete with examples of various jurisdictions learning from what others have tried. Indeed, the more successful federal programs are themselves modeled on pre-existing state programs.
Mr. Gerdes –
I do think environmental risk preferences are anything-but-uniform. See, again, California’s Proposition 65. As for the remaining concerns: 1) Every jurisdiction does not need to go through that process; the federal rule can serve as a default (as it often does in environmental policy). The question is whether jurisdictions should be allowed to deviate. The claim that local variability is a barrier for startups is implausible. National conformity tends to benefit larger, established firms, where as locally tailored rules tend to benefit smaller players. 2) This is a rationale for federalizing everything. I also don’t see the impact on travel from the sorts of limited uses at issue here. 3) I don’t get this. Either local jurisdictions are allowed to deviate from the federal rule or they are not. 4) This is irrelevant, as these sorts of chemicals are available, as are far more dangerous substitutes. The issue is not whether some substances are to be prohibited, but whether rules governing certain uses (e.g. indoor use) must be nationally uniform.
JHA
September 6, 2010, 4:51 pmRexx says:
Let the bedbugs start biting the EPA’s ass and maybe they will resend! (I would not like my mule being bit by them.)
September 6, 2010, 4:54 pmRexx says:
I have always believed, like Jefferson, that the least government the better, and the more local the government the better.
September 6, 2010, 4:59 pmRexx says:
Then pray tell what you believe is the cause of the millions of deaths in Africa by Malaria if not the inability to buy a good insecticide since DDT was band?
No DDT never stopped working, it was just stopped being allowed to work. It was not the use of farmer of DDT that was the complaint, it was the use to kill mosquitoes that was the main complaint. I remember every evening when I was a child the foggers coming around the neighborhood spraying for mosquitoes. When they stopped the production of DDT they stopped effective mosquitoes control around the world.
Here is a good link that tells the story way better then I can:
September 6, 2010, 5:14 pmhttp://www.21stcenturysciencetech.com/articles/Fall02/DDT.html
KenB says:
foxlets14 points out:
I don’t doubt that pesticide use can be dangerous and presents externalities. Doing nothing in the face of pests presents externalities, too.
A large hotel chain with a problem is well situated to collect a large sample of bed bugs. They can then bring them to a meeting in EPA headquarters and accidentally let them loose. Whatever the EPA uses to get rid of them ought to be good enough for the rest of us.
September 6, 2010, 6:13 pmconiston says:
I think some commentators are exaggerating the risks of spray drifting from one house to another. You want everything sealed tight when you spray.
However, I certainly would not want someone whose house was infested with bedbugs to come to my house – unless they were naked.
Regional/local control seems by far the best solution. And if one locality comes up with a good solution you can be sure that other localities will copy their plans long before the Federal government would get around to it.
September 6, 2010, 6:22 pmFrenchie LaBombette says:
Sacre bleu!! What a, how you say… delicacy!!
September 6, 2010, 6:31 pmHouston Lawyer says:
You just need to build a proper fire under the administration. Once they found out that the EPA was going to hold hearings regarding a petition to ban lead in bullets, someone in the Administration made it clear that the preferences of the voters was going to control. Petition denied.
We have a problem with bedbugs. The EPA doesn’t care to let people control them with known effective methods. Someone should start making political ads on point. The EPA is a large target.
September 6, 2010, 7:14 pmFub says:
People make that kind of decision all the time.
Recently a friend in his 70s had a cancerous tumor removed. After surgery he took about a 6 month round of chemotherapy which made him wretching puking ill every single day. After the first round, his doc opined that he needed another round “just to be sure”.
So, he asked his doc for the statistics. His doc said that without another round, he had about a 5% chance of recurrence in 5 years, but if he had regular checkups they could catch it in time for successful surgery. With a second round, he would have about a 3% chance of recurrence in 5 years.
For my friend the decision so simple that any child could understand it: I’m in my 70s. I can have another 6 months of misery and reduce my chances of a recurrence that requires surgery within 5 years from 5% to 3%?
F#$% that! I want to live reasonably comfortably for a while before I die. At least I can rest up for the next surgery if it’s necessary.
Most people understand that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Except government regulators, and the hysterical “reduce all risk of everything to zero” crowd who always clamor for more regulation.
Thank Gawd the government doesn’t yet require citizens to take any medical treatment that some bureaucrat deems necessary. But I wouldn’t doubt that they’re working on it.
September 6, 2010, 7:53 pmMaureen001 says:
And, in code, what does this mean?
I’m pretty sure this is PC for third world hygienic practices. The federal government abets the bringers-in of the beasties, then claims jurisdiction when the public wants to solve the problem. Sounds ever so much like the border states’ issues, doesn’t it?
September 6, 2010, 7:54 pmpublic_defender says:
Professor Adler,
You are right that state experimentation can be helpful. You are also right that trade offs could be different in different states. But you did not address the externality problems. One state’s poor use of a pesticide could foster pesticide resistance. One state’s lax regulation could negate strict regulation in a neighboring state by allowing people to obtain the chemical from the lax state. One state could inflict the health expenses on residents of another state when residents move. On the other side, if one state was insufficiently aggressive, it could help the infestation spread.
If you could keep chemicals, bedbugs, and residents in one state forever, you’d have a stronger argument. But your arguments don’t seem to deal with these realities.
September 6, 2010, 8:18 pmOrenWithAnE says:
But the open question is whether they will make that decision with the correct scientific conclusions as input (i.e. as you assume) or will they make a decision based on an incorrect scientific information.
I’m not disputing that the normative weighing has to happen, it’s just my experience that local bodies engaging in that normative weighing are broadly targeted by those seeking to tip the balance by playing fast-and-loose with the facts and, as a result, they end up weighing based on incorrect ‘inputs’.
September 6, 2010, 8:41 pmJonathan H. Adler says:
We can hypothesize externalities all day, but we should focus on the reasons for the current policy. So, if EPA’s rules were based on concerns about insect resistance to pesticide resistance, you might have a point, but they’re not. Bedbugs have become resistant to the pesticides that EPA allows, but not to the type that folks want to use. The issue is whether to allow communities the options of using more effective methods that are not being used now (and don’t effect those methods currently used now), or force them to make do with less effective, but “safer,” alternatives.
The supposed lax regulation externality is also not relevant here, as there are plenty of dangerous pesticides — far more dangerous pesticides — that are available on the market. As I said above, the issue is NOT whether a pesticide will be available for sale in various jurisdictions, only what use restrictions will be imposed. So while this might justify federal prohibition in some cases — it’s the argument the feds used (unpersuasively, in my view) in Gonzales v. Raich — it’s not relevant here.
While it’s true that federal agencies tend to have greater internal scientific and technical expertise than state and local agencies, this does not always mean that federal decisions are more scientifically informed. Where local communities and the EPA disagree on risk trade-offs — as occurred at some Superfund sites in former mining towns, for instance — the local views are often more scientifically grounded than the EPA. (I.e. actual likely exposures vs. hypothetical children who eat dirt by the spoonful daily for seventy years). When a local community is faced with a difficult choice — allowing more dangerous pesticides or suffering a bedbug infestation, or whatever — the evidence suggests they are likely to consider the trade-off seriously, as they bear the costs and reap the benefits of the decision, whereas centralized regulators do not.
JHA
September 6, 2010, 8:58 pmZoolbia says:
Lots of educational material at this blog “War on Bedbugs” including well-informed speculation that bedbugs have been liberated by the banning of nearly all effective insecticides over the last decade or so.
That author does NOT say it, but I will: the insecticide bans are the result of hysterical and dishonest “environmentalism” from despicable fund-raising machines like the “Center for Science in the Public Interest” coupled with rent-seeking at the EPA by US pesticide makers eager to drive low-cost generic (patent-expired) pesticides from the market to prop up excessive profits on still-patented pesticide formulations. Another problem is that EPA is like FDA: the bureaucrats there can never get in trouble for saying “no,” only for saying “yes.” So they always say “no.”
September 6, 2010, 10:07 pmDymphna says:
In 2003, my freshman son’s dorm room was infested with these things. His roommate had a pillow (as it turned out later) that was breeding them by the hundreds.
These bugs didn’t bother the roommate but my son was highly allergic to the bites and slept very little for months. No one would do anything. He went to the ER and they put him on antibiotics. Then a round of steroids. Then they told him it was anxiety.
I kept yelling “bug infestation” but no one would listen. Finally, after Christmas break, my son stayed up one night and gathered enough evidence on a piece of scotch tape to show to an entymologist at the school who’d argued with him about his ‘dermatitis’.
They finally moved the boys out of the room, threw everything away, and sealed all the cracks. Meanwhile, the guys were moved to a good hotel — where they no doubt brought a few with them.
When they were permitted to return to their rooms, there was no further infestation. However, due to my son’s ongoing bug-induced illnesses, his GPA that year was a miserable 2.5 and even with (almost) straight A’s the next three years he couldn’t sufficiently wipe out that first miserable year.
I don’t believe in litigation normally, but I regret not suing the school to reclaim the expenses caused by that infestation, but particularly the admin’s refusal to listen.
I hated that p.c. school anyway, and closer contact didn’t improve my opinion of them.
We were lucky; he didn’t bring any of them home with him since we were careful to dump everything out before it came in the house.
His roommate’s parents worked for over a year to get rid of the things at their house — which they think originated in a hotel.
A custodian at the school told my son that the outbreaks were due to so many illegal immigrants working in housekeeping. He said the warm climate south of the border bred them like crazy.
I’d love to see a map of infestation.
September 6, 2010, 10:15 pmORID says:
Why isn’t this a Congress problem? They could explicitly remove preemption for a short period of time.
September 6, 2010, 10:48 pmRicardo says:
Not sure what DDT has to do with bedbug infestations. In any case, many African countries have extremely poor and ineffective public health agencies. Visit an African country sometime — you will stagnant pools of water all over the place that serve as breeding grounds for mosquitoes while few people aside from the wealthy have window screens to keep mosquitoes out of the house. And malaria is just the tip of the iceberg.
Mosquitoes in some countries with intensive DDT spraying have indeed developed resistance to DDT. That’s simply a fact. Countries can and do use DDT for mosquito control but some do not because the native population of mosquitoes have developed resistance to DDT. Other countries simply do not have competent agencies that are committed to dealing with the problem.
Spraying the walls of people’s homes seems to effective at controlling malaria. But who is going to make sure people in remote areas have a regular supply of DDT or who is going to make sure that the DDT gets applied at regular intervals to be effective?
I will close by pointing out that controlling public health menaces like malaria sometimes requires what you might call a dose of big government. In Singapore, there are periodic outbreaks of dengue fever — dengue is also transmitted by mosquitoes and mosquitoes in Singapore like to live inside air-conditioning units that are not properly maintained. The authorities in Singapore have the power to conduct warrantless inspections of people’s homes to examine the air-con and will fine anyone whose air-con is a breeding ground for mosquitoes.
September 7, 2010, 12:19 amHow to get rid of bed bugs! | Bed Infestation says:
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September 7, 2010, 12:27 amJoshL says:
It looks to me like most people haven’t been reading up on bedbugs. There are a number of pesticides that will kill them on contact. What’s missing, right now, is a residual killer, where one spraying can work over a period of times (said pesticide also can’t be something that the bedbugs notice, or else the treatment will be ineffective). Very slow breakdown would be an advantage for any anti-bedbug pesticide.
September 7, 2010, 12:31 amDangerMouse says:
It means that hotels that used to steam-wash all bedding daily don’t do that anymore. They cold-wash all bedding upon request or once a week. Unless you request clean sheets, you’re not sleeping in freshly washed bedding when you enter your hotel room. While I suspect that cost controls are the main reason for this change, I wonder if the EPA or some other business regulation had something to do with it – in the name of energy efficiency. Certainly, the hotels are finding that it was a poor choice of cost cutting, because now they’re finding out how much it’s really costing them.
September 7, 2010, 12:38 amDangerMouse says:
You want a map? Here’s a map. Look how infested Times Square is:
http://bedbugregistry.com/hotel/NY/New-York/New-York-Marriott-Hotel
September 7, 2010, 12:43 amBR says:
Quote: (OrenWithAnE) “There is no property right to infect your neighbor’s property with toxic chemicals. If you can apply it without it spilling onto my land, go right ahead. The plain fact is that this is not the case with easily dispersed and highly water-soluble chemicals such as the ones at issue here.”
Except ….. the federal rules say that it is OK to use propoxur outdoors, but not indoors. Considering the relative prospects of spilling on someone else’s land, how does your contention stack up against current legal reality?
September 7, 2010, 2:05 amJohn C. Randolph says:
DDT is what made it possible to eradicate bedbugs in the USA in the first place. It was banned for political reasons, when the director of the EPA, having attended none of the hearings, overruled his own administrative law judge who had heard all of the evidence and concluded that the ban wasn’t warranted.
The anti-DDT nutjobs were basically equivalent to today’s anti-vaccine nutjobs.
-jcr
September 7, 2010, 3:08 amJohn C. Randolph says:
Thank Gawd the government doesn’t yet require citizens to take any medical treatment that some bureaucrat deems necessary.
Sorry to break it to you, but this is already commonplace. Kids are drugged to make them docile in school, and tremendous pressure is brought to bear on any parents who dare to resist.
-jcr
September 7, 2010, 3:12 ampublic_defender says:
If this were a court case, you’d be correct. Proponents of a regulation would likely have to limit themselves to the positions the government actually took, not the positions the government might have taken. But you posed this as a question of whether the feds should override local control. In that discussion, the whole array of potential externalities are fair game for discussion.
September 7, 2010, 6:02 amBedbugs, public policy, and relative risk assessment « Knowledge Problem says:
[...] Adler tackles some of these relative risk assessment issues in a post yesterday, but he focuses more on a specific issue of federalism: Health officials in Ohio and [...]
September 7, 2010, 8:30 amBeth Donovan says:
Cassandra, the EPA might not want to control domestic animals, but the USDA is working hard to trace every animal in the country – starting with farm animals (including chickens in backyard flocks and riding horses) and eventually extending to pets.
It will be a huge intrusion on privacy. First they tried to implement NAIS, but small farmers and individuals raised quite a fuss over it, so they “gave up”,and now they are going for Animal Traceability – new words, very similar program.
September 7, 2010, 8:42 amRexx says:
All conversation have tangent points in which a subject not germane to the conversation is touched upon and sometime leads the conversation of on a tangent line. That was the case here.
I was responding to Steve’s response to geokstr’s question:
“Who cares about those several tens of millions dead because of the ban on DDT?” ,
Where Steve responded in part by saying, “You care about them, obviously, notwithstanding that they only exist in your extremely fevered imagination.”
And Steve went on to say, “But without some international equivalent of the EPA to enforce this excellent idea, the farmers just kept spraying as often as possible, and DDT stopped working.”
I spent two years in the Congo in the early sixties and the same stagnate waters was there then as it is now but the occurrence of malaria was relatively rare then thanks to the indoor spraying of DDT.
Donald R. Roberts, Ph.D., Professor of Tropical Public Health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland says, “Another favored ideology of environmental activists is that any use of insecticides is counterproductive, because it results in resistant mosquitoes. In fact, there is little evidence that insecticides on house walls constitute a strong selective pressure for insecticide resistance. Likewise, there is little evidence that resistance, once developed, reduces the effectiveness of DDT residues in preventing indoor transmission of malaria.”
You ask, ”But who is going to make sure people in remote areas have a regular supply of DDT or who is going to make sure that the DDT gets applied at regular intervals to be effective? I don’t know that they cannot afford to buy it for themselves being as cheep as DDT is, but I do know that no one is going to get it to them as long as it is band by the governments.
And as to, “The authorities in Singapore have the power to conduct warrantless inspections of people’s homes to examine the air-con and will fine anyone whose air-con is a breeding ground for mosquitoes.” Are you suggesting that (to get off the tangent) that the U.S. government be give the same powers for bedbugs?
September 7, 2010, 8:59 amOrenWithAnE says:
In my experience, when a local community is faced with a difficult choice, proponents on both sides of the choice make a concerted effort to bend the facts to their suited policy. The result is that instead of having the policy question resolved at the normative level, it is resolved at the factual level by whichever side can convince others of ‘their facts’.
That is, if the local decision-making process resembled what you say it does, I would have no problem. Instead, it seems to me to operate in an entirely different fashion — not one of reasoned balancing of trade-offs but rather a contest to see which side can sell their empirical claims.
September 7, 2010, 9:22 amKrestina says:
The best non-toxic solution for bed bugs is called Bed Bug Terminator. It was studied at a University and they proved that it kills on contact. You have to spray thoroughly, but the stuff works. I found it at http://www.bedbugterminator.com
September 7, 2010, 3:29 pmElliot says:
The war really isn’t against science. It’s against the unwarranted controls that legislators and regulators impose based on their evaluation of the science and the politcal pressures being applied by various interest groups. There is no reason to presume a biologist or chemist has any expertise in public sector cost benefit analysis.
September 7, 2010, 7:31 pmRyan Waxx says:
If there’s a war against science, it began when liberals weaponized it in all manner of forms ranging from diagnosing their political opponents as mentally ill all the way through an all-out assault of bogus and refuted statistics versus the second amendment.
When you have a Michael Bellesiles “proving” that nearly no one had guns at the time of the founding, you have a charlatan.
When you have a gallery of “critics” that would have done nothing but cheer him on and use his book to further stifle second amendment rights had he not been caught by others, you have a echo chamber for politically convenient lies.
When you have host of lawyers and judges practically standing on their head to conceive a twisted image of that amendment that agrees with their worldview but one that no one with basic understanding of the english language or a cursory familiarity with the people who wrote that amendment could honestly hold, then you have an entire system – one dedicated to taking politically convenient facts and moving them to the political front lines as weapons, with zero regard for their truthfulness.
Don’t even get me started on including the suicide stats to inflate the “gun deaths” statistics. Reporters are too busy retyping the press releases from their favorite lobbies verbatim to do any fact checking… on those stats or on anything else where they might find out something they might not want to report.
So yeah, sometimes people who are to the right of Michael Moore reach for more confirmation when a left-captured organization says “The science is on our side, so you peons shut up and obey.”
It’s called healthy skepticism. Something that USED to be part of the scientific mindset.
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September 8, 2010, 2:01 pmHerb Spencer says:
How did your boy like going to Duke? ;0)
September 9, 2010, 7:02 pmbedbughater says:
I think DDT return should be mandatory. Bedbugs will not go away and cause more psychological harm that can evolve into physical problems stemming from stress and sleeplessness. Not to mention the staggering expense that the majority of people can’t afford. Get real, several thousand??????? The government needs to protect its people and help those who are unable! Once acquired, it is a lifelong fear, even if you think you have eliminated these parasites from your home or business. Yes, I say, definitely start mixing the chemicals. We are killing more people by sending them willing to be masacred in foreign countries than some chemical may do. We have a real problem here. I think the people who cry,,,,,,,,,,no DDT are idiots and have no clue what a problem we have here. It can destroy homes, businesses and sanity….much worse than a chemical.
September 10, 2010, 7:21 ambedbughater says:
are u an idiot? Or do u just want to blog ur personal views? This is a bedbug forum.
September 10, 2010, 7:30 amWhiskeyJim says:
A new Congress could make 2 new laws which would curtail the reach of government in the future:
Repeal the 17th Amendment.
Enact a law that put the relationship between the states and the federal government back where the constitution originally designed it.
September 13, 2010, 6:23 pmRexx says:
Governors of 35 states have already filed suit against the Federal Government for imposing unlawful burdens upon them. It only takes 38 (of the 50) States to convene a Constitutional Convention.
September 13, 2010, 9:51 pmA Hall says:
Precautions are what are needed. We currently throw everything in a hot car when we return from anyplace that may be infested.
There is a discussion of whether or not this is effective: http://www.freebedbugadvice.com/is-a-hot-car-hot-enough-to-kill-bed-bugs/
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October 6, 2010, 8:59 am