Bed
Chicken Pox or Bedbug Bites: A Definitive Analysis
By: John T Jones Ph.D.
Do you remember as a kid when the local board of health would send a man or woman to your house who would take a look at you and say Thats Chicken Pox all right!
Then he or she would put a sign in your window which said in big black letters CHICKEN POX.
Well if it wasnt chickenpox it was mumps diphtheria scarlet fever measles or the dreaded polio.
You dont remember
Well I guess you are not of my generation.
We got shots for some of the childhood diseases of our day but not for all of them.
There where seven kids in my house and someone always had something. My mother wanted everybody to have the same disease at once. Once she put me in bed with my little brother so that I would catch whooping cough.
I didnt catch whooping cough or anything else that came into our home except one day after a marvelous career of complete immunity I woke up with a rash.
Mother said John you got chickenpox!
Its just bedbugs. Thats all. The rash will go away.
I knew I couldnt catch anything because I always held my breath around the sick.
We had to fight bedbugs back then. Everybody in our neighborhood did. I dont know if the sparrows carried them to the rich side of town or not. But we had them.
We were continually tearing the beds apart scrubbing the springs with lie soap stomping killing maiming the bed bugs here and there. After such a cleaning you could sleep well perhaps until the next Thursday and then you had to go through the cleanup ritual again.
When I was in Korea before DDT was poisonous and softening the bird eggs and all we were continually harassed by medical guys shooting DDT into our britches. That was so we would not get Bubonic Plague from the fleas in our bunkers.
I never got the Bubonic Plague never saw anyone with the Bubonic Plague and never heard of anyone with the Bubonic Plague. (After seeing seeing the plague documentary on the History Channel Im very glad of that. http://www.historychannel.com/classroom/admin/study_guide/archives/thc_guide.0037.html)
The DDT did the trick.
Thats how we finally got rid of bedbugs forever.
We used DDT.
I went to http://www.naturalginesis.com/remove_bed_bugs_the__nontoxic_way_.htm. The pictures there of bed bugs made my skin crawl! I hated those things when I was growing up. The little buggers would suck the
blood out of you and swell up until they were the size of lady bird beetles except they were hideous lady bird beetles.
The reference site carries products to kill pest. Im sure they are not in competition with most of us so I used them as a reference anyway. One of their testimonials says:
I kept waking up with mysterious bites and on occasion found blood spots on my sheets suggesting they were the culprit. Sure enough I found some bed bugs upon further inspection the day after I bought your product. They were all over my apartment! I only found a few but one was in the living room one was in the bedroom one was in the kitchen and a baby was even in the bathroom! (The person who gave the above testimonial didnt have chickenpox!)
Vampires!
Thats what they call bedbugs at the reference site.
I agree! My skin is crawling from thinking about the little creeps.
My mother didnt believe me of course. Mothers seldom do in such matters. The man came from the health department put the sign on the window CHICKEN POX and left.
I said Momma Im going outside to play.
You cant go out not for 10 days.
I said Mother Im not sick. I want to play. These are bedbug bites.
It did no good. I never got a fever nor did I become ill but I did get quarantined like my paternal grandfather did at Ellis Island.
After much research Ive found that they had to have bedbugs on the Mayflower.
Im descended from George Soule who was the 35th signer of the Mayflower compact.
At http://members.aol.com/calebj/soule.html you will find that George was born in 15951602 England and he died 22 January 1679 Duxbury MA He married Mary Buckett in1626 at Plymouth and had nine kids.
I ought to know a bedbug bite when I see one.
The End
P.S. I want you to know that I restrained form using a great deal of profanity in describing the bedbugs in this article.
copyrightJohn T. Jones Ph.D. 2005
John T. Jones Ph.D. (tjbookshotmail.com)is a retired R&D engineer and VP of a Fortune 500 company. He is author of detective & western novels nonfiction (business scientific engineering) poetry etc. Former editor of international trade magazine. More info: http://www.tjbooks.com Business web site: http://www.bookfindhelp.com (wealthsuccess books / flagpoles)