Bed Bug Apocolypse

The bed bug epidemic has reached epidemic proportions. The jury is still out, however, as to whether the world is ending because it is being overrun with bed bugs, or if humans will end the world in order to get rid of them.

This is the story so far:

• Bed bugs used to be a problem.


• Then we began covering the world in nasty toxic chemicals like DDT, and bed bugs were not a problem.


• But we were killing all other living creatures on the planet along with the bedbugs, so we stopped with the DDT.


• Then, 50 years or so later, all the bedbugs started coming back.


• The government basically advises barricading yourself in your home, avoiding contact with other humans, and sleeping in a bug zapper.


• If you find bedbugs in your home, you should abandon your home and all your possessions (which most of us are doing anyway because of the economic crisis), remove all your clothing, and move into a hermetically sealed bubble.

Unfortunately, according to media reports, people with bed bug infestations are starting to douse their houses with toxic chemicals or kerosene. Not a good idea.

In Cincinnati, an unlicensed applicator saturated an apartment complex in June with an agricultural pesticide typically used on golf courses. Seven tenants got sick and were treated at the hospital. The property was quarantined, and all tenants were forced to move. Authorities are pursuing criminal charges.

...

Authorities around the country have blamed house fires on people misusing all sorts of highly flammable garden and lawn chemicals to fight bedbugs. Experts also warn that some hardware products - bug bombs, cedar oil and other natural oils - claim to be lethal but merely cause the bugs to scatter out of sight and hide in cracks in walls and floors.

Superbugs will kill you in the hospital

Just when you thought the only kind of super bug that hospitals were trying to kill you with was Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), it turns out that they are adding a new one to the mix: Clostridium difficile, or C. diff as we say in the 'hood.

The Washington Post reports that C. diff is sickening about 3 million people a year, usually after they visit a hospital or clinic.

According to the article:

It can cause severe diarrhea and inflammation of the colon. It is deadly in up to one in 40 cases, particularly when it strikes the elderly and infirm, and contributes to 15,000 to 30,000 deaths annually, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Recent studies have shown a 25% higher incidence of C. diff than the better-known and more publicity savvy MRSA in 28 community hospitals tested by people in White Coats.

Once again, the main culprits appear to be over-prescription of antibiotics, and hospital staff not washing their hands:

According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, the C. diff germ has been cultured from bed rails, floors, toilets and windowsills, and it can remain in hospital rooms for up to 40 days after infected patients have been discharged. Health-care workers can hasten the spread. One study found C. diff on the hands of almost 60 percent of doctors and nurses caring for infected patients - a percentage experts said could be reduced dramatically if they washed their hands thoroughly with soap and water between patients.

Acetaminophin could give your kid asthma

According to the latest reports by people in White Coats, new studies suggest a correlation between kids who take acetaminophen (aka Tylenol) and kids who develop asthma.

According to a pair of reports in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine (slogan "Home of breath-taking research!"), there seems to be growing evidence that giving kids acetaminophen can increase the odds that a kid will develop asthma or other breathing trouble.

In one study, researchers followed 1,000 Ethiopian tots for three years.:

When the toddlers turned one, the researchers asked the mothers if their babies had breathing problems, and how much acetaminophen they had used.

About eight percent of the kids began to wheeze between ages one and three. Those who had been given acetaminophen during their first year -- before they had breathing trouble -- had up to seven times the odds of developing wheezing.

That increase held even after adjusting for fever and coughs, which in principle could have triggered both the wheezing and the use of painkillers.

Another study following 320,000 teens in 50 countries found that kids who took acetaminophin at least once a month doubled their odds of developing asthma, and seems to be associated with other breathing problems.

However, researchers helpfully point out that there may not be any good alternatives if your kid is in suffering. Ibuprofen (aka Advil), is not recommended if your kid already has asthma (although there nothing to suggest that it might do harm if your kid doesn't have asthma already), and aspirin is generally frowned upon.

Two popular alternative treatments include telling the kid "I'll give you something to cry about" and Worried Dad's brother's favorite method of pinching them really hard somewhere other than where they are currently feeling pain.

Bad eggs! Very bad eggs!

Chickens appear to have begun a massive uprising by infecting our nation's eggs with salmonella.

According to authorities, the rebel chickens are using two farms in Iowa that are the source for gazillions of infected eggs sent to stores in at least 59 states. The hens have funneled the tainted eggs through 87,000 front businesses that pretend to be from local farms.

Anyone finding eggs in their house should immediately call authorities and stomp the eggs on their kitchen floors before eating.

According to the rebel chicken leader, the felonious fowl demands include: The right to be shaken, but not baked, and the ability to cross the road without being interrogated.

Going to the gym will kill you

[The people in the above photo were found dead moments after this picture were taken]

My two main reasons for canceling my gym membership were that I was broke and I got tired of being a straight guy surrounded by naked men in the locker room. Plus, I'm lazy.

Thankfully, people in White Coats (working for people in running shorts) have given me a better reason: gyms are covered in nasty germs.

As the staid "Gray Lady" herself, the New York Times, soberly put it:

When you go to the gym, do you wash your hands before and after using the equipment? Bring your own regularly cleaned mat for floor exercises? Shower with antibacterial soap and put on clean clothes immediately after your workout? Use only your own towels, razors, bar soap, water bottles?

If you answered "no" to any of the above, you could wind up with one of the many skin infections that can spread like wildfire in athletic settings.

Well, sure, you say, that's why they call it athlete's foot, after all. What's the big deal? Well, that's what some guy you've never heard of thought, pal:

And if you think skin problems are minor, consider what happened to Kyle Frey, a 21-year-old junior and competitive wrestler at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Mr. Frey noticed a pimple on his arm last winter but thought little of it. He competed in a match on a Saturday, but by the next morning the pimple had grown to the size of his biceps and had become very painful.

His athletic trainer sent him straight to the emergency room, where the lesion was lanced and cultured. Two days later, he learned he had MRSA, the potentially deadly staphylococcus infection that is resistant to most antibiotics.

Mr. Frey spent five days in the hospital, where the lesion was surgically cleaned and stitched and treated with antibiotics that cleared the infection. He said in an interview that he does not know how he acquired MRSA: "The wrestling mat might have been contaminated, or I wrestled with someone who had the infection."

If it could happen to Mr. Frey, who said he has always been health-conscious in the gym and careful about not sharing his belongings, it could happen to you.

According to the CDC, if you insist on going to the gym, you are advised to wear a full body protective suit, refrain from touching anything, and keep a bottle of alcohol-based disinfectant to spray at anyone who comes within ten feet of you.

B Vitamins won't prevent death

According to the latest reports from people in White Coats, taking vitamin B, vitamin B6, vitamin B12, or folic acid supplements won't prevent heart attacks, as previous research had suggested.

It's unclear whether getting vitamins through food still does any good (Worried Dad's daughter, Cinderella, believes that vitamins only come in ice cream), and even if they do, they don't even have as much vitamins as they used to.

Sitting will kill you

According to the latest study by people in White Coats at the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences (inventors of the Swedish Bikini Team), people who sit in chairs all day die faster and more gruesome deaths than people who don't. According to lab rat Elin Ekblom-Bak, "After four hours of sitting, the body starts to send harmful signals." She explained that genes regulating the amount of glucose and fat in the body start to shut down. People who sit, whether at home, in the car, or at work, are more likely to be fat, have heart trouble, and die early deaths than those who don't sit.

"No problem!" you say. "I often get up from my chair and walk to the water cooler to discuss the latest happenings with my office chums. I must be in the clear!" Sorry pal. You're still dead. Even a twenty-mile jog to the office won't do you any good. According to the Swedes, you'll just have a more muscular corpse as you lie decomposing next to the other ex-desk monkeys.

Interestingly, the inscrutable ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld may have had a key breakthrough about this problem years ago. In the wake of the revelations about US-military torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Rumsfeld was widely criticized for pooh-poohing one particular practice -- forcing prisoners to stand for hours at a time. According to declassified documents, Rumsfeld wrote on the margins of one torture memo "I stand for 8-10 hours a day," Rummy scrawled. "Why is standing limited to four hours?" Who knew he was just looking out for their health?

Bisphenol A Now In Cans!

I've previously reported on that nasty stuff Bisphenol A (also known as BPA) that poison-mongers like to slip into plastic stuff like baby bottles.

Since I can never remember which number on the bottom of my cereal bowl is supposed to be okay, and which is supposed to consign me and my offspring to a slow, torturous death, I have switched the family to eating everything out of tin cans (well, aluminum).

Bad move.

According to a new study by people in White Coats at Consumer Reports, the

latest tests of canned foods, including soups, juice, tuna, and green beans, have found that almost all of the 19 name-brand foods we tested contain some BPA. The canned organic foods we tested did not always have lower BPA levels than nonorganic brands of similar foods analyzed. We even found the chemical in some products in cans that were labeled "BPA-free."

Now if you can't trust a label on a can, what can you trust???

According to the Civil Eats blog,

Federal guidelines currently put the daily upper limit of safe exposure at 50 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight. But that level is based on a handful of experiments done in the 1980s rather than hundreds of more recent animal and laboratory studies indicating that serious health risks could result from much lower doses of BPA. Several animal studies show adverse effects, such as abnormal reproductive development, at exposures of 2.4 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, a dose that could be reached by a child eating one or a few servings daily or an adult daily diet that includes multiple servings of canned foods containing BPA levels comparable to some of the foods Consumer Reports tested.

And then

Given the new findings, Consumers Union sent a letter to Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Margaret Hamburg reiterating its request that the agency act this year to ban the use of BPA in food- and beverage-contact materials. FDA is expected to announce the findings of its most recent reassessment of the safety of BPA by the end of this month. Bills are currently pending in Congress that would ban the use of BPA in all food and beverage containers. Industry has been waging a fight against new regulations, and California Assembly members recently voted not to ban BPA from feeding products for children under three.

Consumer Reports is advising those who are concerned that they might be able to reduce, though not necessarily eliminate, their dietary exposure to BPA by taking the following steps:

Choose fresh food whenever possible.
Consider alternatives to canned food, beverages, juices, and infant formula.
Use glass containers when heating food in microwave ovens.

Wouldn't it just be simpler to lock regulators and lawmakers in a room with nothing to eat nothing but bisphenol-laden food until they ban this stuff?

Your showerhead is spraying you with bacteria

Sometimes it seems that researchers just want to mess with the heads of OCD germaphobes. Case in point: People in White Coats at the University of Colorado at Boulder looked at the gunk inside of showerheads in 45 sites around the United States. They put the showerheads inside a big centrifuge (or whatever it is scientists do) and discovered that every time you shower, you are covering yourself in filth.

It turns out that the showerheads had seven billion microbes per square liter -- or about ten times the number found in tap water. It gets worse. The microbes that the Boulder gunkologists looked at included teeming masses of Mycobacterium avium, which besides having a scary sounding Latin name and being written in italics, can cause respiratory illness.

The good news is that the microbes are harmless if swallowed (like in tap water) unless they are turned into an aerosol mist and inhaled... like, you know, when you're taking a shower (eep! eep! eep!)

Experts recommend the following steps:

* Switch to metal showerheads (the problem only appears in plastic ones).

* Hold your breath for the entire duration of your shower.

* Take baths (the soap scum appears to counteract the evil bacteria).

* Fill your water tanks with Purell.

* Go French and stop bathing altogether.

It's all downhill from here

I was born 39 years ago today. My own beloved Dad was 39 that day.

The above photo was unearthed by one of the middle school classmates that seem to make up about 70% of my Facebook friends today.

And now for today's public service announcement on aging...

According to a couple of people in white coats at the University of Virginia, your brain starts to deteriorate at the age of 27. In a series of cognitive tests on 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60, researchers found that people aged 22 scored the highest, and saw a significant downward spiral into blubbering idiocy starting at age 27. People started doing noticeably more poorly on memory tests starting at age 37.

Did I mention that today is my birthday? Note to self: write about this on the blog.