Can these tiny creeps transmit HIV?

JeffreyATL

"...third world, low class, no-speak-English, no-education losers..."

Because all of _us_ were descended from visiting royalty, naturally.

I have occasional suspicions that the bedbug epidemic may be a form of financial terrorism. Allow me to adjust my tinfoil hat. We had to completely revamp our paper currency because of a well-funded, highly professional counterfeiting operation that the Secret Service traced to the Middle East. It was deemed a form of "unconventional warfare" by some in our government, since it was an attempt to destabilize US currency and because profits were funneled to various enterprises, including funding groups like Hamas and what we now call Al Qaeda. North Korea has also been a center for counterfeiting US currency. If the threat of destabilizing our currency - and thus effecting our economy - wasn't serious, would we have changed our currency?

Anyway.... pointing my tinhat towards the sun..... I note that the bedbug epidemic seems to have started in NY hotels. It would be easy formembers of certain groups to fly to New York with plastic containers full of bedbugs in their various luggage carriers and let 'em loose in the hotel one has booked.. particularly in fine hotels. Also, New York City is a home to many immigrants. An immigrant from a country which might seek to financially destabilize the United States might get a job in a hotel and help loose some of the biting buggers into a few rooms. The reasoning may be that NY's finest hotels may have to close for a time to debug, leading to financial loss in the tourist trade. Especially if the hotels kept getting reinfested with the bugs by nefarious means. The city is also a second home to many wealthy foreigners, who keep apartments here (you'd be surprised how many). If bedbugs spread throughout the city, maybe wealthy foreigners might leave. Their money is very important to us in NYC. (For one example, Park Avenue's legions of high-priced plastic surgeons and dermatologists would go out of business within a year. Wealthy europeans and South Amerians prefer to have their many, many cosmetic procedures done in New York, where the top tier of the world's most famous plastic surgeons reside.)

Anyway, that's my tinhat theory for the day. Bedbugs as a means of "unconventional warfare, " i.e., economic terrorism.

OK, I'm going to take my meds now.

You whack job! What the hell's the matter with you, anyway?? Foreigners aren't bringing bed bugs into the country...the bed bugs are aliens. They are plotting world domination....

...and I'M WEARING A HAMMERED TIN SOMBRERO!!!

I highly recommend studying hotel reviews online before booking a hotel room either in the US or abroad - it can help you avoid booking in one that has them or be extra prepared to do things like sleep with the lights on and quadruple check all of your stuff before you bring it into your house when you get home.

2 years ago right before I went to London I double checked the hotel reviews right before leaving (and after I had booked my hotel room and couldn't get out of it without losing my money) and discovered to my horror that the latest reviews that had come in after I booked mentioned bedbugs in our hotel. I researched them to discover what they looked like, etc. When we got there, I kept my luggage zipped up at all times, all extra stuff put away, and kept the lights on as much as possible (which I think really helped). The morning we left I found a bedbug on my nightshirt when I woke up and it was SO gross and scary. It hadn't bitten me yet and fortunately that was the only one I ever saw and I didn't accidentally take any bugs back with me home. Just out of curiosity, I checked the most recent hotel reviews for where I stayed and it sounds like the bedbug problem has gotten WAY worse and the hotel's still not dealing with it. So do your research before traveling and don't ever stay at the Regent Palace in London!

It is not only wise to check on the quality of every hotel but also check way in advance as to which college and crowd or sports team will be rocking the place, fighting in the rooms and halls and rapping the night until dawn -- even at the 4 stars where these people get FREEBIES for everything. Political Correctness should be exposed for the lie it is plus the woman who foisted this all upon us is still working her only card up in Wisconsin University where she is still known as the former Clinton Dirty Trickster Operative, Donna Shalala, the "professor."

It is not fun sleeping after a million bugs have dropped off the backs of Katrina welfare guests who went on to make all of Texas a exterminator's nightmare. God please have mercy on the rest of us as you know Houston deserves some of this peril, anyway. Send Prez. Bush a coupon to stay at his local Texas Marriott and see what happens, next! Another crisis, perhaps. We are weary of the devastation in the name of Global Warming, Immigrants deserve OUR America and Yet Another Run for Office by another inbred from the ranks of Clinton's Muzzie connections to Louis Farrakhan. How much can one good country tolerate? I would never vote for a candidate from Illinois in the first place so don't put that on us, Hillary. He's named after an event in Saudi where our sons were blasted off the planet while in their villas. Thanks a lot. Barracks O Bomba, duh. How nifty.

Those of you who persist in blaming the infestations on "immigrants," the poor, etc., I hope you don't think of yourselves as in any way progressive. I'm supposed to be the inbred hick here but I can read. You have been told several times that the resurgence in bedbugs has nothing to do with personal hygiene. It's worldwide. Katrina victims didn't bring them to your four-star hotel. I have heard several times that the experts aren't sure but they think it has to do with broad-spectrum insecticides being used less today and the bedbugs' natural predator populations being less.

Nice to see such ignorance in such a liberal mag.