Bed bugs in Paris have become global news
Just nine months before the opening of the Paris 2024 Summer Olympics, the French capital is battling an invasion of bedbugs. Days after the tiny pests were first reported in hotels and vacation rental apartments across the city there were sightings in movie theaters - even reports of bedbugs crawling around on seats in both national high-speed trains including the Paris Metro system, Charles De Gaulle Airport and schools, municipal libraries, and French households.
Bedbugs are good hitchhikers. The bedbug infestation blamed on French travelers carrying the critters across Europe, forced part of a hotel in Athens to close has been. Unlike the scores of immigrants who travel by boat to enter France, these critters have jumped ship – to Morocco. Port authorities in Tangiers found bedbugs on a passenger ferry that arrived from Marseille in southern France.
Yes. Paris is a big city, and while the infestation is being widely reported, its not as if the city has been overrun by the bugs and the likelihood of any country issuing a travel advisory against visiting the city is very remote.
South Korea has become the latest country to declare war on bedbugs following a wave of outbreaks in major cities such as Incheon near Seoul and the southeastern city of Daegu.
Bugs will not deter people from traveling from one city or country to another. However potential travelers can now only check with any hotel prior to arrival, to ensure they don’t currently have an infestation and what measures are in place to help guests. Going one step further would be to trawl TripAdvisor and the like, to detect customer reviews complaining about bedbugs. Stands to reason!
For most hotels replacing bedding is expensive. Usually, when there is a bug problem, measures taken before it can spread include chemical pesticide or heat treatment pest control, where the walls in the affected rooms will be misted with pesticide, which will residually infect the bugs over time as they come out, usually during the night.
A recent inquest in the UK heard about how a British couple, who stayed, next door to a room treated with the pesticide, referred to as Lambda to kill bedbugs, at lunchtime, fell ill in the early hours and died the next day. In August 2018, John Cooper, 69, and his wife, Susan, 63, who were holidaying, with their daughter, (Kelly Ormerod), their three grandchildren and family friends, died while staying at the Steigenberger Aqua Magic Hotel in the Red Sea resort of Hurghada, Egypt.
Ormerod’s daughter, Molly, then aged 12, was staying on a single bed in her grandparents’ room, which she said had a “yeasty smell”. At 1am, John Cooper rang to say Molly was feeling a little unwell and he escorted his granddaughter to her mother’s room on the upper floor. The next morning, the Coopers failed to emerge for breakfast. Ormerod went to their ground floor room to discover the pair was seriously ill. CPR was attempted but John Cooper was declared dead on the hotel room floor and his wife was taken to a clinic at the hotel where Doctors treated her for 4 hours before calling an ambulance –too late though.
On the first day of the two-day inquest hearing, a statement from a German tourist (Dominik Bibi), said he reported a bedbug infestation of the room assigned to his mother-in-law, next door to the Coopers room. “On entering I immediately noticed a funny smell, like that of mould or damp.“There were a lot of bedbugs in the bed and under it.” He said a cleaner and night manager came and apologised and his mother-in-law took his and his wife’s room, further down the corridor.
Later when he saw three men entering the bug infested room, two wearing the hotel uniform and the other with a two or three litre pesticide canister which he assumed was being used to kill the bedbugs. After five or 10 minutes they left the room and used masking tape to tape up around the door and seal the room. “I would not say the job was very professional,” Bibi’s statement added.
The inquest determined that possible exposure to an “infectious biological agent or toxic chemicals” caused their deaths. Lambda may have been mixed with a toxic solvent, dichloromethane (DCM), also fatal, if inhaled and which produces carbon monoxide when broken down by the body.
This sad incident highlights the amateurish efforts of fumigating the room – control measures such as fumigation sealability was poor; the hotel was guilty of not showing any concern of moving the guests from the proximity of the area being treated with pesticides (more so as the Coopers room and the fumigated room had a connecting door). The hotel should have offered them alternate accommodations—including a room at another hotel if the property is fully committed. Sadly, it cost the lives of two who came to enjoy a holiday.
Source; External
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