France hits back at hysteria over bedbug 'invasion'

PARIS

They creep, they crawl, they feast on your blood as you sleep. They may travel in your clothes or backpacks to find another person worth dining on — on the subway, or at the cinema. Bedbugs go where you go, and they have become a nightmare haunting France for weeks.

The government has been forced to step in to calm an increasingly anxious nation that will host the Olympic Games in just over nine months — a prime venue for infestations of the crowd-loving insects.

Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne called a meeting of ministers for Oct. 6 to tackle the bedbug crisis. The country's Transport Minister Clement Beaune met this week with transportation companies to draw up a plan for monitoring and disinfecting — and to try to ease what some have called a national psychosis inflamed by the media.

“There is no resurgence of cases,” Beaune said, telling reporters that 37 cases reported in the bus and metro system and a dozen others on trains proved unfounded — as did viral videos on social media of tiny creatures supposedly burrowing in the seat of a fast train.

As well as dominating front pages, the reported surge in the vampiric pests has even become the butt of jokes on late night U.S. television talk shows.

But officials insist there is no scientific evidence to suggest any explosion in bedbugs, and that images posted on social media do not necessarily mean growing numbers.

"There is no increase in cases, no psychosis, no need for anxiety," the minister added.

Two schools -- one in Marseille and the other in Villefranche-sur-Saone outside Lyon in southeastern France -- have become infected with bedbugs and have been closed down for several days to be cleaned out, local authorities said.

Without any blood, “they can slow their metabolism and just wait for us,” said Jean-Michel Berenger, an entomologist who raises bedbugs in his lab in the infectious diseases section of the Mediterranee University Hospital in Marseille. The carbon dioxide that all humans give off “will reactivate them … and they’ll come back to bite you.”

For now, Berenger said, this much is certain: “Bedbugs have infested the media.”

Yet bad dreams are most often fed by a touch of reality.

More than one household in 10 in France was infested with bedbugs between 2017 and 2022, according to a report by the National Agency for Health and Food Safety. The agency relied on a poll by Ipsos to query people on a topic that many prefer to avoid discussing because they fear going public with a bedbug problem will stigmatize them.

But silence is a mistake, experts say. No social category is immune to finding bedbugs in their clothing, blankets or mattresses.