Boing Boing has a picture of a “Disney-logoed DDT-impregnated wallpaper for the kids’ room” c. 1947.
No. words.
Enjoy.
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From the category archives:
DDT
Time to put away the old DDT nostalgia. This should be the last DDT post. I should have ended on the good stuff, but apparently can’t leave well enough alone.
Guess what I found, an old top 10 pest list from from a Rutgers survey of New Jersey Pest Control Association members:
Top 10 pests, Rutgers NJPCA survey, Pest Control, May 1961
Kirby, J. 1961. Termites Rank No. 2 with PCOs in New Jersey. Pest Control. 29(5): 69-71
The New Jersey Pest Control Association is now the New Jersey Pest Management Association, and Pest Control is Pest Management Professional. I wonder if Rutgers or NJPMA did surveys in other years?
Anyway, what is interesting is the commentary from John Kirby, Rutgers extension entomologist:
It was somewhat of a surprise to me that bed bugs were mentioned on 11 of these 17 questionnaires and on this basis gained fourth place in the problem rating. A couple of years ago, bed bugs didn’t seem to be very much of a problem but now they appear to be popping up more often. Perhaps the proven resistance of Cimex lectularius to DDT in other areas of the United States is also a factor in New Jersey. Although such resistance has not been definitely established in New Jersey, PCOs have generally switched from DDT to lindane for bed bug control.
The bed bug, habitual popper-upper. Always causing surprise too—why do you think that is? Bed bugs?
Wonder if we’ll ever stop acting surprised.
Say bye-bye, DDT.
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A DDT study that isn’t 50 years old:
Susceptibility levels for the adult bed-bug, Cimex lectularius, in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais – Brazil, to DDT, were determined during the period 1985 to 1986. The test results showed that a 4% dosage of DDT is not enough to kill 55% of the insects. The data are sufficient to show that there exists bed-bug resistance to DDT in Belo Horizonte.
NAGEM, Ronaldo L. and WILLIAMS, Paul. Susceptibility tests of the bed-bug Cimex lectularius L. (Hemiptera, Cimicidae) to DDT in Belo Horizonte, MG (Brazil). Rev. Saúde Pública [online]. 1992, vol.26, n.2 [cited 2009-05-07], pp. 125-128. ISSN 0034-8910. doi: 10.1590/S0034-89101992000200009
I’m glad I found this because the Brazilian online scientific library, SciELO, is pretty neat.
There is also this review from 1990 that clarified some questions for me and led to some other interesting paths:
FORATTINI, Oswaldo Paulo. The Cimicidae and their importance in Public Health (Hemiptera-Heteroptera; Cimicidae). Rev. Saúde Pública [online]. 1990, vol.24, suppl., pp. 1-37. ISSN 0034-8910. doi: 10.1590/S0034-89101990000700001.
It’s in Portuguese but there’s a handy automatic translation that is serviceable (I hope).
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“NEW YORK THIS SUMMER HAD PLAGUE OF BEDBUGS,” the St. Petersburg Times, October 10, 1944:
New Yorkers suffered not only from heat and humidity this summer—the city had a plague of bedbugs. Congested areas all over the country had the same complaint.
The 1944 season was hailed as one of “the worst” to date by the insects’ victims; one of “the best” by the dozens of exterminating companies that rushed to their rescue.
The Sameth Exterminating Company, Inc., one of the largest in the metropolitan area, reported calls averaging 120 a day during the height of the heat—not including contract customers such as hotels, theatres and warehouses.
There is a familiar diagnosis:
One of the main drawbacks in combating the pests, exterminators say, is that many people are ashamed to admit their presence.
“They think bedbugs are a disgrace,” one exterminator said, “but anybody can pick them up anywhere—in theatres, subways, busses, trains. The thing to do is get rid of them and then forget it.”
The exterminators agree that there is no sure way of preventing bedbugs.
And a working bed bug savvy meter:
[A]ny exterminator who walks into a house and sees a lot of coats lying across a bed will throw up his hands in horror.
“That’s practically planting the bugs,” they shudder.
And then a simple and reasonable hope, or perhaps the DDT PR machine of 1944:
A rosy post-war future for bedbug victims is predicted when the use of DDT (dichloro diphenyl tricholoroethane) becomes general. Department of agriculture experiments have shown that a surface sprayed with this chemical, now reserved for military use, will remain toxic for 300 days.
I’m not sure what happened to the Sameth Exterminating Company. They practically founded the city’s first industry association. In 1905, Nathan Sameth started Rat-Catchers of New York, a social club of sorts; later, “with reservations” according to Dr. Robert Snetsinger in The Ratcatcher’s Child: The History of the Pest Control Industry, they became the New York Vermin Exterminators Association. New York Vermin Exterminators Association is a fabulous name. It was predictably downhill from there, as far as names, and by 1939 they were called simply the New York Pest Control Association.
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We write about DDT altogether too much here, all because once upon a time, all too briefly, it killed bed bugs dead. The mystique naturally persists.
But the LIFE photo archive at Google will not be resisted.
Maybe humans will never die, as long as we are capable of this:
DDT sprayed from a TIFA (Todd Insecticidal Fog Applicator) around model Kay Heffernon, Jones Beach, New York. 1948. George Silk, LIFE photo archive.
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A recent article in the Journal of Medical Entomology finds deltamethrin resistance in a New York City bed bug population:
The NY-BB population was 264-fold more resistant to 1% deltamethrin in contact bioassay compared with an insecticide-susceptible population collected in Florida (FL-BB).
Yoon KS, Kwon DH, Strycharz JP, Hollingsworth CS, Lee SH, et al. (2008) Biochemical and Molecular Analysis of Deltamethrin Resistance in the Common Bed Bug (Hemiptera: Cimicidae). Journal of Medical Entomology: Vol. 45, No. 6 pp. 1092–1101 DOI:10.1603/0022-2585(2008)45[1092:BAMAOD]2.0.CO;2
The article tells us where NY-BB came from:
A hard-to-control (putatively resistant to deltamethrin) bed bug population (NY-BB) collected from infested residential buildings, including apartments and houses, in New York City, NY, was provided by Gregory Zarek (Vice President, Metro Pest Control, Glendale, NY).
NY-BB, fresh from the bed bug wars in our city, vs FL-BB, fresh from a jar, a 20-plus-year-old lab population. I have to make an effort to imagine the people living in homes where resistant bed bugs are collected for researchers. The intractable cases. I think about them to get through some difficult reading sometimes. Each one of those bed bugs, NY-BB, agents of misery.
Median lethal time was 19.1 minutes for the Florida bed bugs and 5,048.2 minutes (that’s three and a half days) for the NYC bed bugs.
What is interesting here, well, two things. The study is really about DNA sequencing to find the genetic mutation that is the likely cause of this type of resistance; the study found two candidate mutations. They’re called kdr-type mutations—they cause knockdown resistance. For once, a fairly easy to understand concept: in this type of resistance, insects have nerve insensitivity at the pesticide target site and… don’t get knocked down. (Apologies if that causes an ear worm!)
As is often the case, cherchez le DDT:
Because DDT has been used indiscriminately to control many insect pest species including bed bug, the widespread and frequent use of DDT is likely to have predisposed bed bug populations to pyrethroid resistance through the neuronal insensitivity mechanism.
The other thing that’s interesting is simply the fact that this is another study about deltamethrin. What a sorry pesticide. Other pyrethroids are equally useless against resistant populations of bed bugs, but for some reason deltamethrin really gets the research ink. (Consider, for example, this article (PDF) (Haynes et al (2008). I confess that I worried for days and days after reading it. It’s not just resistance, but behavioral avoidance, or repellency. Bad things that make things worse.)
So, the question clearly is, who is minding the resistance shop?
When Clive Boase told us that:
We should be able to discuss and address resistance issues in a practical way, and importantly should be developing ways to manage the use of insecticides to slow the onset of resistance before it appears. Resistance management techniques are reasonably well established and warrant open discussion with the key players in pest control.
I missed the opportunity, didn’t I? I should have asked what these resistance management techniques are and who are the stewards of these management principles.
There’s no one to complain to. This dysfunctional situation just is.
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There is so much of interest in this excerpt from the documentary, The Greatest Generation and the Modern Pesticide Revolution, available at pctonline.tv, but you might especially appreciate the story from Dr. John Osmun recalling his service days as the entomologist on post at Camp Gordon in Georgia during WWII:
Dr. Osmun established the urban entomology program at Purdue.
Notice how they tried superheating? Among other things! None of them worked.
And Gesarol? Who knew!?
Our interest in this subject is apparently limitless despite the fact that we consider it a dead-end.
Personally, I enjoy looking back and I don’t mind even a little nostalgia. We’ve long understood that nothing like Gesarol is “coming back” or on the horizon and that the real solutions available to us are difficult ones, education and coordinated action.
The Greatest Generation and the Modern Pesticide Revolution was produced by David Fincannon and Phi Chi Omega. The excerpt above also features interviews with Emille Pappas, Lonnie Holder and Jim Steckel. (Perhaps, like me, you’ll enjoy hearing about how the Queen Mary was sealed for fumigation.) A second DVD excerpt, also at pctonline.tv, features Harry Katz and John Osmun recalling J.J. Davis (Purdue) and Bill Buettner (National Pest Control Association)—we learn what Buettner thought about DDT and the future of the pest control industry and we learn that pest control, like undertaking, was a “war-time essential” service.
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So, I guess our earlier DDT post was too lighthearted. Please bear with us; we’re learning. This is actually a very serious subject. I hate to see people in our bed bug community wasting their precious resources of energy and time on the idea that DDT could once again be a solution for bed bugs.
I understand why people yearn for it, and media reports are partly to blame, but entertaining the idea of ‘bringing back DDT’ is so disheartening, such a powerful distraction from the good work that can be done and that we should all consider.
So, for those who doubt that bed bugs are really resistant to DDT, here are some sources for your review.
Links below are PDF articles retrieved from the Armed Forces Pest Management Board’s excellent Literature Retrieval System (an amazing resource).
“Almost Everywhere”
Bed Bugs [to download PDF enter accession:112924], World Health Organization, Vector Biology and Control Division, 1982:
Table: Insecticide Resistance in Bed Bugs in Countries or Areas (WHO, 1980)
C. lectularius is the particular bad guy we’re tracking in the table above, the common bed bug.
Insecticide Resistance of Medically Important Arthropods [to download PDF enter accession:23590], Report of the U.S. Army Environmental Hygiene Agency Medical Entomology Division, January 1962:
Table: Insecticide Resistance of Medically Important Arthropods
Note, in the earlier post I cited slightly different years for the first reports of observed resistance, 1947 for the Hawaii report and 1951 for Israel. The 1947 date is cited in various secondary sources and the 1951 date is from a WHO bulletin: A survey of bed-bug resistance to insecticides in Israel, Norman G. Gratz, 1959, 20, 835-840.
Contemporary Sources
In a March 2008 Bedbugger interview, Texas A & M research scientist James W. Austin noted the continued resistance to DDT (emphasis added):
While screening multiple populations of bed bugs against various insecticides we have found virtually all populations were 100% resistant to DDT. This is not a surprise given that the first observances of DDT resistance were noted almost 50 years ago. It is a little surprising that they continue to be so completely resistant to DDT.
In 2007, Alvaro Romero, Michael F. Potter, and Kenneth F. Haynes, published their findings of insecticide resistance: Insecticide Resistance in the Bed Bug: A Factor in the Pest’s Sudden Resurgence? (Journal of Medical Entomology, Volume 44, Number 2, March 2007 , pp. 175-178). The July 2007 article in Pest Control Technology contains an additional table (on page 50) which outlines DDT susceptibility of 5 bed bug populations:
Three of the four pyrethroid-resistant populations we tested exhibited minimal mortality after five continuous days of exposure — suggesting that bed bug resistance to DDT may be common today, as was becoming the case a half-century ago when the pest was vanishing from this country.
It’s really not that difficult to find references to the history of DDT resistance in bed bugs. Here’s one, from a July 2001 New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell, The Mosquito Killer, where Dr. McWilson Warren (National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases) remembers the challenges of malaria eradication work in Malaysia in the 50s and 60s:
“Then the Malaysians started to complain about bedbugs, and it turns out what normally happens is that ants like to eat bedbug larvae,” McWilson Warren said. “But the ants were being killed by the DDT and the bedbugs weren’t—they were pretty resistant to it. So now you had a bedbug problem.”
A bed bug problem is exactly what we have right now.
But DDT is a complete waste of mental space.
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In the coming days we’ll describe some of the challenges we face in the fight against bed bugs and the solutions we believe should be considered.
Something that we want to get out of the way at the outset, though, because it hovers over every news report and clouds every discussion of what we as a society must do about bed bugs, old DDT.
I am fond of the way May Berenbaum put it in the Washington Post in 2005:
Banned in the United States more than 30 years ago, it remains America’s best known toxic substance. Like some sort of rap star, it’s known just by its initials; it’s the Notorious B.I.G. of pesticides.
Yes! We read the Post. Imagine that. And you should definitely read Berenbaum’s article; it is absolutely fantastic. I will only quote one more thing:
What people aren’t remembering about the history of DDT is that, in many places, it failed to eradicate malaria not because of environmentalist restrictions on its use but because it simply stopped working. Insects have a phenomenal capacity to adapt to new poisons; anything that kills a large proportion of a population ends up changing the insects’ genetic composition so as to favor those few individuals that manage to survive due to random mutation. In the continued presence of the insecticide, susceptible populations can be rapidly replaced by resistant ones. Though widespread use of DDT didn’t begin until WWII, there were resistant houseflies in Europe by 1947, and by 1949, DDT-resistant mosquitoes were documented on two continents.
Resistance to DDT in bed bugs was first observed in 1947 in the United States. 1951 in Israel, 1956 in Italy. And on and on. Long before DDT was banned in 1972, DDT was not the weapon of choice against bed bugs.
Recently, researchers in the United States have tried DDT in their labs once again and have found that some bed bug populations are nearly 100% resistant to DDT.
I feel a bit silly saying that we do not advocate the return of DDT. As if! I hear you saying. Of course, we know that. There is no chance, no way, never gonna happen. But, just so you know, and because the issue is brought up again and again.
We do not advocate the return of DDT.
Still, while you are here, how about some DDT nostalgia? Come on, it’ll be fun!
Did you know that all manner of historical treats are available online from Time?
Let’s set the stage, from Cimex Lectularius, November 4, 1929:
It is at night that he marauds, hiding in crevices in daytime. He confines his activities to man, whose blood he sucks, upon whose body he makes his permanent home.
Not quite, but let’s not get all technical on 1929 copy, especially when it’s so downright fabulous.
Signs of a new hope, DDT, June 12, 1944:
Censorship was lifted last week from one of the great scientific discoveries of World War II. It is an insecticide called DDT. DDT stopped a typhus epidemic in Naples. It promises to wipe out the mosquito and malaria, to liquidate the household fly, cockroach and bedbug, to control some of the most damaging insects that prey on the world’s crops. Lieut. Colonel A. L. Ahnfeldt, of the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, exclaimed last week: “DDT will be to preventive medicine what Lister’s discovery of antiseptics was to surgery.”
But wait, the wonders of DDT are then enumerated:
Sprayed on a wall, it kills any fly that touches the wall for as long as three months afterward.
A bed sprayed with DDT remains deadly to bedbugs for 300 days.
Clothing dusted with it is safe from lice for a month, even after eight launderings.
A few ounces dropped in a swamp kills all mosquito larvae.
In a swamp? Mamma.
Two months later, the lay of the battlefield, from Insect Front, August 28, 1944:
Manhattan harbors every known species of urban insect—and many of their country cousins. The battle against them costs $5,000,000 a year in labor alone, many millions more for weapons. Three-quarters of the city’s business buildings and apartment houses are constantly sprayed and fumigated.
…a pre-women’s lib diagnosis of the problem:
The bedbug is harder to poison. Unlike the roach, it is an epicure: it feeds on human blood. A loathsome, wingless insect, it is light brown and flat before feeding, swells up and turns mahogany afterward. Chief difficulty in fighting bedbugs : housewives hate to admit their presence.
…and some skepticism:
Veteran exterminators are interested but not enthralled by the idea of such war-born insecticides as DDT (TIME, June 12). They are inclined to think bugs will survive DDT, too.
Then, just two years later, a dark cloud, This Summer–DDT, June 24, 1946:
Some commercial DDT preparations available to U.S. householders and gardeners have proved 1) disappointingly feeble, 2) harmful to plants and animals. But the U.S. Department of Agriculture last week declared that DDT, properly used, is still the best insecticide.
I hope you enjoyed that as much as I did! Thank you, Time!
Do please remember, the enemy marauds at night.
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