US Goes to War on ... Bedbugs?

Wondering a bit about federal priorities “in an age of bin Laden and Ahmadinejad,” Dana Milbank headed yesterday to an Environmental Protection Agency summit on the blood-sucking menace of bedbugs, he writes in the Washington Post. With reps from agencies including the Pentagon on hand, an entomologist opined that the government must “allow the pest-control industry to go to war.”

This, Milbank reminds, is “an insect the size of an apple seed that has a painless bite and is not known to spread disease,” and one could think “the threat posed by the tiny insect might be rather manageable.” Not so, says the entomologist. “I’d like to take anybody who thinks bedbugs is not a big deal, and we’ll sprinkle a few in their house and see what they think.” (More Dana Milbank stories.)