29 November 2010

The bed bugs of New York City flip up in BBC studios

Infestations of bedbugs have unfold throughout New York and no-one understands exactly where they are going to turn up following.

In current days there continues to be a buzz of exercise in the UN's corridors of electrical power: intensive discussions in the hallways, reporters conferring in hushed tones, a flurry of e-mails.

Are the Palestinians about to declare statehood? Will be the Safety Council about to authorise a military strike on Iran? Is civil war breaking out again in Sudan?

Nope. Some thing of substantially better import in case you are a UN correspondent: a creeping infestation of bedbugs.

This is a scourge at the moment afflicting New York, using the bugs working rampant as a result of accommodations and, if one particular believes the fairly hysterical media protection, spreading in an uncontrolled contagion to buildings this kind of as theatres, stores, eating places and houses.

Bloodsucking pests

Now, bedbugs are not unsafe or life-threatening, though their bites itch and sting.

The true ache is, when a place is infested, a significant and high priced fumigation process is necessary to obtain rid of them.

A month back, the UN as a final point admitted it had been battling the blood-sucking pests in different parts of its sprawling workplace advanced for greater than a 12 months.

So their eventual discovery in the UN media centre had an air of grim inevitability about it.

There exists only one technique to sniff out bedbugs - with canines. If a canine smells a bedbug, she or he will bark.

So at the demand from the UN press corps, Rover (or some model of him) was enlisted, and we waited with bated breath for your success.

The e-mail came at midnight and yes - in contrast to the renowned Sherlock Holmes story during which the canine will not bark in the night time time - this time, it did (in two studios, no much less).

And one particular of them was ours. Oh the disgrace. Oh the horror.

Stigma

But what to perform?

At first we had quite peaceful conversations about fumigation, attempting to delay the unavoidable publicity. It was hopeless.

We agreed that worse than the BBC getting bedbugs would be for your BBC to cover up getting mattress bugs.

In any case, absolutely everyone previously knew. That is one particular from the banes of working in a media centre exactly where journalists have a Rover-like nose for stories.

Some turned it into a joke.

A single threw caution to your wind and knocked on our door to express solidarity: "I know what it appears like to become stigmatised," he mentioned, "I've had bedbugs."

But most gave the BBC workplace a wide berth.

In panic, I turned to my husband.

He was dismissive. This terror of bedbugs is ludicrous, he mentioned. It really is all aspect from the culture of concern in America, the most recent model of "reds underneath the bed". Initial it was communists, then Obama the Islamist terrorist, and now bedbugs.

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