Paris Is Infested With Bloodsucking Bedbugs, and 'No One Is Safe'

• The French government has launched a campaign to rid Paris of a growing bedbug infestation.

• With the 2024 Olympics coming next summer, concerns grow as bedbug infestations have been increasing throughout Paris.

• Over 10 percent of French homes have been infested in past five years.

There’s a new “domestic terror” fear in Paris: bedbugs.

“No one is safe,” Emmanuel Gregoire, Paris’s deputy mayor, posted on X (formerly Twitter). “Faced with a bedbug infestation, coordinated measures are needed.”

With the 2024 Olympics rapidly approaching, the French government says that the growing concern over bedbugs can no longer be ignored. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore it anyway, as according to government data, more than 10 percent of all French households have been infected in the past five years. In addition, unconfirmed reports that bedbugs are surfacing across the Paris transit system and even at Charles de Gaulle International Airport have the public on high alert.

“You can catch them anywhere and bring them home,” Gregoire told French television, “and not detect them in time until they have multiplied and spread.”

Now, some officials want the government to coordinate fumigation efforts and not leave it in the hands of private companies. Gregoire noted that in the 1960s, any case of bedbugs was met with a government fumigation effort immediately.

The French government says that the problem was largely eradicated in the 1950s, but the current resurgence is a “reality” and blames international travel and the bugs’ resistance to insecticides.

“It is necessary to take strict measures to limit their proliferation until elimination,” a government notice says. “We can all be affected by bedbugs.”

“We are observing more and more bedbug populations which are resistant,” Johanna Fite of the French national health and sanitary body Anses, told CNN, “so there is no miracle treatment to get rid of them.”

The tiny parasitic insets live away from light, and are commonly found in the fabrics and mattresses of bedrooms and living rooms. But the bedbugs are seemingly expanding their housing options. Sightings have even been reported on the Paris metro, though the French Transport Minister Clement Beaune told CNN that there are no proven cases of bedbugs. Still, they take each sighting seriously, and trains are subject to treatment as they focus on staying “extremely vigilant on the matter.”

With the Olympics quickly approaching, Gregoire wrote that “the state urgently needs to put an action plan in place against this scourge.”

Part of that plan includes adding bedbug infestation treatments to home insurance policies, which Gregoire says would encourage low-income residents to call exterminators.

“We want this to be recognized by the government as a public health problem,” said Mathilde Panot, head of the La France Insoumise party, according to The Guardian. “They must stop telling people to just deal with it themselves as if it’s an individual problem.”

From beds to planes and trains, the bedbug attack is in full swing in France. Just how effectively Paris fights back remains to be seen.

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