Bedbugs. There's a Solution, But EPA Doesn't Like It

Frankly, the solution to the bedbug problem is a tactical nuke....... dropped on EPA headquarters.

...We used Ficam (which killed bed bugs on contact and as a residual by the way) successfully and safely for many years in this country, but the manufacturer pulled their registration. So why would they do such a thing? Well, first of all this happened before bed bugs exploded in this country and the manufacturer wasn’t selling enough to justify meeting the EPA’s demands.

You see, the EPA requires pesticides to be reregistered after fifteen years. That means more unnecessary and expensive testing. It costs around $300,000,000 to bring a new pesticide to market. Manufacturers want to make sure that re-registration is worth it to them before they spend millions of dollars more on re-testing. Further testing for what you might ask? Who knows [?], because after a product has been on the open market for fifteen years you absolutely know what, if any, hazards it represents to humanity or to nature. Most importantly after fifteen years these products have probably gone out of patent. That means there is less value to the primary registrant, and in this case, there was no value incentive for the manufacturer to spend millions of dollars more to retest

That's not the only one.

Organophosphates, such as Dursban absolutely kill bed bugs; on contact and as well as a residual. But in 1996 the Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) was passed and that changed all the rules again. There had always been a hundred fold safety factor tied up with pesticides. FQPA arbitrarily changed it to a thousand fold. I have tried to find out what science they used to decide that this massive change was necessary…and no one seems to know, because it is all based on assumptions.

And there's more!!

We used Baygon (propoxur) for over twenty years in this nation and it was available to the general public as well. What terrible things happened? According to the Ohio Department of Agriculture; nothing terrible happened in Ohio! But when you change the rules arbitrarily you change the toxicity issues. To arbitrarily change the safety factor from one hundred to a thousand fold safety factor may not make much sense, but it makes it easy for EPA to claim that it is too toxic to use

You may note that EPA has been using the "Green Goddess" methodology long before AlGore graduated from college.  Invent 'standards' based on ........the angle of the dangle divided by the heat of the meat (or something) and then enforce the standards.

Real world be damned.