France’s growing bedbug crisis has sparked a political row as Paris city hall said the invasion of bloodsucking insects must be tackled before next year’s Olympic Games and the transport minister summoned train and bus operators to prevent the bugs multiplying on seats.
A wave of panic and disgust has spread across the country as travellers have posted photos and videos purportedly showing the insects on the Paris local transport system, high-speed trains and at Charles de Gaulle airport.
Some travellers on the Paris Métro or local trains have insisted they will stand up from now on, as they fear sitting on seats. Over the summer, when a Paris cinemagoer posted on social media about bedbugs, cinema companies issued statements about how they treated seats. Meanwhile, fumigation companies have reported an increasing demand to clear private homes.
The transport minister, Clément Beaune, said he would convene public transport operators next week “to inform them about countermeasures and how to do more for the protection of travellers”. He posted on X, formerly Twitter, that his aim was to “reassure and protect”.
Representatives from Paris city hall wrote to the prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, this week with a plea for a dedicated national taskforce to deal with what it called a “scourge” of the insects.
The deputy mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, told French TV: “No one is safe. You can catch them anywhere and bring them home, and not detect them in time until they have multiplied and spread.”
He said Paris authorities had received an increase in calls for help, and private companies had had an unusually high level of requests for fumigation in recent weeks. He said the government must coordinate action at every level of the state “as fast and as efficiently as possible”.
Grégoire said: “It’s hell when someone finds themselves confronted with this,” adding that it was worse for low-income households who could not pay the high costs of private fumigation companies.
Bedbugs, which had largely disappeared from daily life by the 1950s, have made a resurgence in recent decades and have become increasingly resistant to chemical treatments.
They can be present in mattresses but also in clothes and luggage and come out at night to feed on human blood. They also often cause psychological distress, sleeping issues, anxiety and depression. The newspaper Le Parisien ran a front-page article on the panic over bedbugs on Friday, calling the problem a form of “domestic terror”.
The French national health and sanitary body, Anses, found that between 2017 and 2022, 11% of French homes had been infested.
This week, a train driver on line 8 of the Paris Métro said he had seen bedbugs in his carriage. Transport authorities said there was no confirmed case of bedbugs but the train had been removed from service as a precaution and would be treated. Train operators have said that carriages and seats are regularly treated to prevent infestation.
Mathilde Panot, head of the leftwing La France Insoumise party in parliament, said bedbugs had “caused hell for millions of families in this country” and the government must act.
She said she had been laughed at when she called for an emergency national plan to tackle bedbugs as far back as 2019. She told French radio: “We want this to be recognised by the government as a public health problem. They must stop telling people to just deal with it themselves as if it’s an individual problem, while companies charge exorbitant tariffs to spray chemical products that bedbugs are resistant to. It’s a health problem, and it’s also a mental health problem, with people who can’t sleep, are traumatised or have to take antidepressants.”
She said the government should coordinate action across state bodies, fix the price of treatments, and ban certain chemical products that did not work.
