Bedbugs in cinemas, on the TGV… They are everywhere, so much so that the city of Paris on Thursday requested a national plan to combat these little insects, which made headlines again in the 1990s .
The government will organize a meeting of transport operators at the beginning of October to address the proliferation of bedbugs. For its part, the city of Paris is calling for a national plan to combat these parasites, less than a year before the Olympic Games.
Bed bugs are small red insects the size of an apple seed that feed on human blood. They affect one in ten households today in France.
>> Bedbugs: eleven tips to protect yourself (and get rid of them)
However, in the early 1990s, we no longer talked about these pests. Bedbugs, which have lived with us since the dawn of time, were extinct since super-powerful insecticides like DDT were invented in the 1950s. This product, very harmful to biodiversity, had almost eradicated bedbugs in Europe.
They finally reappeared during the 1990s. This is linked to the ban on DDT in France in 1971. The survivors then mutated to the point of resisting authorized products. According to Stéphane Bras, spokesperson for the pest control industries union, their proliferation is mainly due to our way of life. Since the 1990s, we have traveled more, which implies a sort of “globalization” of bedbugs.
Fresnes prison infected in 2016
Stéphane Bras also cites a key event: the 1998 Football World Cup. Beyond the good memories it left in France, the mixing of the population brought in these little creatures. Little by little, barely ten years later, the first massive cases of infestations were recorded, such as at Fresnes prison in 2016.
Today, these bedbugs are everywhere: cinemas, airports, transport, or at home. In 2022, the union counted 1,095,000 interventions by professionals, compared to 200,000 in 2017. This corresponds to an increase of 15 to 20% per year for five years. In recent months, the infestation has been massive with entire buildings affected. For Stéphane Bras, the authorities let the problem drag on for too long.
>> Train, cinema, hospital… bedbugs invade public places
The bedbug boom happens between mid-August and mid-October because that’s where we travel the most, explains Nicolas Roux De Bézieux, the creator of the site Badbugs.fr. We must also take into account the rise of second-hand goods in recent years: bedbugs travel on the items we exchange. Those who hunt must therefore be vigilant, even if it means temporarily freezing their purchases.