Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Bedbugs

Episode Date: March 13, 2019

We eradicated bedbugs so thoroughly in the 50s that generations who came later suspected they weren’t anymore real than jackalopes and snipes. But since we banned DDT, the pesticide that kills bedbugs best, they’re back again. And they’re terrible.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. I'm Josh, there's Chuck, there's Josh, and this is short stuff, okay?

Okay, bedbugs, gross, the end. This is actually a request from years back by our Disney buddy, Brandon Reed. We're finally getting to it, Chuck. I can't believe we didn't cover this on a longer one, but now that I've read it, it's usually like 12 minutes of material here. Exactly, man, that's why it languished for so long,

but now finally that we're doing short stuff, it's bedbugs time to rise and shine. Right, so back in the day, there used to be bedbugs, and then for a while there, like in the 1950s, we didn't have bedbugs because we were pumping DDT into the house, like basically dousing homes with poison. It wouldn't even bother to leave, you'd just sit there and bake a cake.

Yeah, yeah, and everything would die, and they were like, that's great, everything's dead, and then people would be like... Right, I don't have any hair on my body anymore. Right, I have cancer, so they said, maybe we shouldn't pump DDT into homes anymore, and they were like, you know, that means bedbugs are gonna come back,

and they were like, okay, we'll just deal with that. I saw a mention somewhere, I think it was on a history article, I can't remember that some people didn't believe they were real, like generations who were born after they'd been basically eradicated, and had never actually seen a bedbug. I think they thought it was like a jackalope

or a snipe or something, right? Yeah, a sea monkey. Well, if you've been to New York or Philadelphia in the last like 20 years, there's a chance that you know firsthand that they're real, because those cities developed real problems with bedbugs, and they think that they came back for a combination of two reasons, one, the pesticides like DDT

that we were using were banned, not just discontinued, like straight up banned, you would be put in jail if you were a pest control person using DDT, and then secondly, international travel became more and more widespread. It wasn't just like a boat trip anymore, it was a plane trip, and you could spread bedbugs pretty fast, and the reason why they're able to spread

and become a real problem is because they are very, very tough to get rid of these days, since we've given up our number one enforcer against bedbugs, DDT, we'll get to some ways to get rid of them later, just suffice to say for now, they're very difficult to kill. Yeah, so bedbugs, if you listen to our shows on fleas and ticks, just get ready to be creeped out again,

because they drink your blood, they eat your body in your sleep. It's really horrifying, they call them bedbugs because you can find them a lot of times in your bed, but they're not exclusive to beds, they can be anywhere in your apartment, they can be in your couch, they can be in the walls, they can be in your clothes, they can be pretty much anywhere.

If you're living in an apartment or you're staying in a hotel and your next door neighbor has bedbugs, then chances are they're gonna make their way over into your place as well. Yeah, because they're real tiny, like adults are about a quarter of an inch long and they're real flat too. Yeah, like you can't, you may not even see bedbugs,

if you're like, let me look on my sheets, you may see their poop, which is a dead giveaway. It's rust colored. But these are tiny little things. Yeah, and so they get everywhere, they can hide very easily. And again, because you can't disfumigate, like baits and traps don't work,

most of the stuff we use to kill them, we don't use anymore, they're just really difficult to get rid of, but they're really easy to pick up. And one of the places where you pick them up is a hotel room, you can pick them up for everywhere from the mattress and the sheets to the luggage rack or the floor.

So you wanna be really, I think a lot of people investigate their hotel room before they unpack. And one of the things you wanna look for is along the seams of the mattress and in the folds of the sheets are looking for that rust colored poop or the former shells of these things.

Cause they scurry away pretty fast when they are found out. So you might not see them, but you can see those telltale signs of them. I have never looked for bed bugs in any hotel room. I haven't either, but now that I know all this, I don't know that I'm not going to in the future. Very certainly, yes you will. So while you're sleeping, they like a ticker a flea,

they will stick their little syringe in their mouth and they will stick it into your skin and they will suck your blood for three to 10 minutes. It's about all it takes. You're not gonna feel it necessarily, it's really an annoyance, it's not gonna like, it doesn't give you a disease, but it can give you like a rash and it can make you itchy

and it might swell up just a little bit, but a little anihistamine and you're probably fine. So it's not like some big disease vector, but it's still creepy nonetheless. No, but that's really important to say, like they've never traced the transmission of a disease from bed bugs to humans. We have never found it,

but they do, they are a pain and they are kind of mosquito bitey like you're saying because of that allergic reaction, but they're just kind of, I think one of the things that you're like, I don't want to live with bed bugs even if I'm immune. Some people are immune to their bites, but like they at least don't have an allergic reaction,

right, which I guess is the same thing, but nobody is going to find out that they have bed bugs and be like, well, what are you gonna do? I guess I'll just live with it. So you got to get rid of bed bugs. And like we said, it's really hard, but in true stuff, you should know spirit. We say never give up

and we're going to come back after this message and teach you how to get rid of bed bugs if you are an unfortunate soul who has bed bugs. And it's like it's a shoe up on shock. On the podcast, pay dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses

and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references

to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's vapor because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called

on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing.

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All right, so one thing we did not mention was that, uh, once a bed bug feeds, they can go a full year without feeding. So if you move into a place that like no one's lived in for eight months doesn't mean there aren't bedbugs there If you live in a place that's super clean that doesn't mean there aren't bedbugs there Yeah, because it might help if it's really gross and trashy, but it's certainly not a prerequisite if you stay in some fancy hotel There might still be bedbugs. Yeah, because I mean they're not associated with filth. They don't feed on filth or trash they feed on human blood and Those that trash or whatever gives them more places to hide but it's not a requisite for a bedbug problem, right?

So if you find out you have bedbugs And by the way, you can look up online generally and find out about hotels before you go into the room To inspect great you can do some googling and be like just type in bedbugs and like hotel blank Oh, I'll bet hotels take that very seriously. Thank you. Yeah, so if you do find bedbugs though in your home There's a lot of things you can try If you if you can bake your home in an oven, there's a thing. No, there's a thing at a hundred and twenty degrees They can come in there and and crank it up and essentially kill them with either heat or cold Above 120 or below 32 Fahrenheit. Yeah

So if you just have isolated a big bedbug infestation to like your clothes or your bedding or whatever You can throw it in the dryer on high heat for like a couple hours and you're gonna kill every bedbug in there In every stage of life But you can't do that with like your whole house or your couch or whatever So they actually sell machines that you can hook up to a house You seal the house and you pump heat into the house and you bake The contents of your house for a couple of hours and because you've raised the temperature of every nook and cranny in your entire house You kill every single bedbug that's in that house, but it's quite expensive to have done. Sure

If you want to go the cheaper route You should launder your stuff sure the dryer works, but I would wash it on if you have a sanitize setting Definitely do that all your clothes all your sheets all your towels all anything If you have like area rugs that you're not super attached to maybe just throw those out Sure, if you want to go through the trouble of cleaning them, that's fine You can also suffocate them. So you can seal a Rug I guess you can always do that with a rug or a mattress sealant and plastic and that will supposedly suffocate them If you have one of those euro sealers or vacuum sealer things that you like store

Blankets in under the bed if you have one of those that helps a lot Because those things can go for a while depending on when they last eight without, you know A lot of air and what seems like very small amount of air to us is a lot to a bunch of bed bugs So you want to suck as much air as you can out of the plastic and even then I didn't see anything definitive about how long They last or how long it takes to kill them. Yeah, that one seems a little like I don't know if I would depend on that one Okay Is like the the final solution, you know You can use you can do all this stuff in concert with insecticides if if you're down with that stuff in your house

That will help for sure There are dust insecticides which generally aren't as toxic There are contact insecticides with are way more toxic. I would say yeah ones made from Crisanta mums. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, I thought so too. Which one the contact the pyrothroids, okay? Yeah, the contact insecticide And then you could like if push comes to shove like you should hire a person if you have the means I Don't know if I would tackle this on your own if you have the money to hire a professional Just go that route and they'll do all this stuff

But those are some tips like if you want to go the less expensive route Yeah, and there's one other thing that we need to say If you throw out that area rug or if you're like, I just can't live with this this couch anymore Don't just like put it out in the curb because the people will come along and say that's a pretty nice couch I think I'll take that. It's a pretty nice area rug I think I'll take that and then they have a big bug problem of their own You don't want to wish that on anybody else. So it's common Advice that if you're going to throw this out throw out a couch or an area rug or whatever

You want to make it unattractive like slash it up throw paint on it do something to make it so that No one wants it any longer Maybe even write like bed bug infested or something on it so that people notice you're clear because you don't want to Transfer your bed bug problem. You're not that kind of jerky listen to stuff. You should know Yeah, I'm not gonna subscribe to that because I don't want to see furniture in a landfill So what are you gonna do hang on to it and just kill the stuff? Yeah, sure. Okay. I'm with you on that

Yeah, I'm not gonna put a couch in a dumpster. Let's just sure I'm with you man But for the people out there who are like I can't deal with this I have to get rid of it sure make sure you you make it so that no one would want that couch anymore Okay, make sure it has to go in a dumpster right, right basically Yeah Chuck you got anything else? I got nothing else. All right. Well, if you want to get in touch with us and say hey I really like these short stuffs. Here's why you can send us an email

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