PARIS – A plague of bedbugs has hit Paris and other French cities, provoking a wave of insectophobia and raising questions about health and safety during next year’s Olympic Games.
That’s broadly how the phenomenon has been described in the French – and now international – news media.
In part it is true. But in another part it isn’t.
What is the case is that the number of bedbug sightings has increased over the last weeks – and that upward trend goes back several years.
“Every late summer we see a big increase in bedbugs,” says Jean-Michel Berenger, an entomologist at Marseille’s main hospital and France’s leading expert on les punaises. “That is because people have been moving about over July and August, and they bring them back in their luggage. And each year, the seasonal increase is bigger than the last one.”
In Paris, to the long-standing fear of infestation felt by flat-dwellers (one in 10 of whom have experienced bedbugs in the last five years, according to official figures) have been added new sources of angst.
Reports that punaises have been recently seen in cinemas have not been proven, but are taken seriously. Likewise claims that people have been bitten on trains.
And now both Paris City Hall and the President Emmanuel Macron’s government are calling for action. It is a measure of how seriously they take the issue – and of how they need to protect the image of Paris ahead of the 2024 games – that they are not dismissing the bedbug panic as a social media invention.
Because that is also part of the story.
Scare stories are flashing across the internet so fast that they are turning what was once for newspapers a reliable slow-day chestnut into a national emergency.
Cinema-owners – already worried about declining attendance – are seriously spooked when videos circulate showing unidentified mites on a seat. People on metros have started checking their upholstery. Some prefer to stand.
“There is a new element this year – and that is the general psychosis which has taken hold,” says Berenger. “It is a good thing in a way because it serves to make people aware of the problem, and the sooner you act against bedbugs the better. But a lot of the problem is being exaggerated.” (BBC)
