\n<\/p>\n
The owners were convinced they had been infested by bedbugs again.<\/p>\n
They stripped their house of every piece of clothing, every last picture frame, every book and children\u2019s toy where a bedbug might hide and stuffed it all inside garbage bags to be stored outside, in a tent in their back yard in a village an hour east of Paris.<\/p>\n
As soon as they returned from work or school, they pulled off all their clothing in the garage and bundled it directly into the washing machine set for a bedbug-destroying 140 degrees Fahrenheit (60 degrees Celsius), before stepping foot inside the house.<\/p>\n
They hired professionals to spray all their furniture and surfaces with a bug-killing chemical.<\/p>\n
And then they called for a bedbug sniffing dog and its expert handler to assure them that all their efforts had paid off.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey are paranoid now,\u201d said Emilie Gaultier, co-owner of Dogscan, a French canine bedbug detecting company that has been inundated with messages from panicked residents over the past few weeks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Her dog Rio toured all three floors of the empty house and never once told her he smelled one of the small bloodsucking bugs, by putting his paws on her waist and then sitting down. That meant either all their efforts had worked, Ms. Gaultier determined, or had been an manifestation of extreme anxiety. She thinks they probably didn\u2019t have an outbreak in the first place.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis whole media thing, it\u2019s retraumatizing people who have had bedbugs,\u201d said Ms. Gaultier, \u201cand traumatizing others who never had it.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
Bedbugs are crawling across Parisian sheets and chairs, and they are infesting French minds<\/a>. While the number of pests may be up modestly in Paris, experts say, the explosion of national anxiety over them far outpaces their growth.<\/p>\n Social media transmitted videos of them in Parisian cinemas, trains and subways. The topic has proliferated across radio, television and newspaper pages. Politicians have made speeches and held news conferences. The country\u2019s leading bedbug expert, Jean-Michel B\u00e9renger, who has converted his basement in southern France into a bug lab, has become a household name.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet, as the phones of specialized bedbug detectors and disinfection services have been ringing incessantly, some of the callers don\u2019t even have bedbugs.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve never seen a panic like this,\u201d said Thibault Buckley, answering the phone from the office of the bedbug canine detection agency ATN in eastern France. As many as two-thirds of the calls to exterminators are from people who have seen something that \u201chas nothing to do with a bedbug,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Some 12 schools reported bed bugs last week, according to the Ministry of Education, out of almost 60,000 schools across the country.<\/p>\n The estimated number of calls to exterminators has increased by 9.7 percent over the past year, to 1,095,000 from 997,900, according to figures from the national pest control trade association. But that jump comes as travel has increased since the end of the Covid pandemic, experts say, so a boost would be expected.<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a real psychosis,\u201d said Mr. B\u00e9renger, an entomologist at Mediterranean University Hospital Infection Institute in Marseille, where he has been studying \u2014 and breeding \u2014 bed bugs for 10 years. \u201cThis is the first time people have called to ask me to come to their home to check for bedbugs when they haven\u2019t been bitten, they haven\u2019t traveled, but they are afraid they have them since they saw things on the internet.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Commonplace before World War II, bed bugs were all but eradicated by DDT \u2014 the deadly synthetic insecticide that was banned in the United States and France in the 1970s because of its persistent toxic effects on animals and humans. The flat brown bugs, which are the size of an apple seed and feed on human and animal blood mostly at night, made a comeback worldwide in the 1990s, propelled by pesticide resistance, the uptick of secondhand shopping and international travel.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cPopulation movement is favorable to bedbugs. They don\u2019t fly, they don\u2019t jump, they move with us,\u201d Mr. B\u00e9renger said.<\/p>\n In 2020, the national government set up a bedbug hotline and online information campaign<\/a> that helped people diagnose and solve the problem. It also began a national study, which was released in July<\/a>, revealing that an estimated 11 percent of French households were infested by bedbugs between 2017 and 2022.<\/p>\n Over the past decade, calls for detection and treatment \u2014 and accompanying news stories \u2014 have peaked in the fall, soon after \u201cla rentr\u00e9e\u201d \u2014 the regular French return home after August vacations, often with bedbugs inconspicuously stowed in their luggage, Mr. B\u00e9renger said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This year, the combination of the study\u2019s release, politics and the breathless media cycle has magnified the issue, he theorized.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a media frenzy,\u201d said Mr. B\u00e9renger, adding that his daily calls from journalists have turned to the obscure or hyper-specific, as they hunt for new takes on a story that has been exhausted. \u201cSomeone just called me to talk about essential oils.\u201d<\/p>\n The coronavirus pandemic changed things, too. The thought of picking up a bug in a public place and bringing it home rubs a raw nerve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cIt\u2019s true that the home has truly become the last fortified castle. The bed and bedroom are truly the last bastion of people\u2019s home. And it\u2019s true that bedbug infestation is very, very upsetting,\u201d Mr. Buckley said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cYou can be infested with fleas, lice, mites, but bedbugs come and bite you at night while you sleep,\u201d he said. \u201cIt perhaps brings back childhood nightmares \u2014 it\u2019s a vampire that\u2019s coming.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Gaultier has a different theory. She runs Dogscan with her older sister Julie, who brought an American dog trained to detect bedbugs to France in 2010, after reading in The New York Times about their detective roles during an outbreak in New York City. Over years, the women have found their jobs often veering into life coaching and therapy.<\/p>\n Bedbugs, Emilie Gaultier says, draw deeper problems to the surface and become their focus and symbol. She has worked with many couples for whom bedbugs were the final straw to break their unhappy marriages. Many women disclose they are in abusive relationships while she and her dog Rio search their homes, she says.<\/p>\n \u201cOne day, a lady said, \u2018If I have bedbugs, I\u2019m jumping out the window,\u2019\u201d said Ms. Gaultier, walking Rio, a ginger Portugese Podengo she adopted after he followed her for two days along a hiking trail. <\/p>\n For people who are already very unsettled, she said, \u201cbedbugs eat at their fragile mental states.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBedbugs have this magic ability to take any baggage or anxiety you have and focus it,\u201d she said. \u201cThey become the tip of the iceberg.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The hysterical action she has witnessed over the past couple of weeks \u2014 from tearful would-be clients \u2014 is a collective outpouring of anxiety over many unresolved social crises the country has faced over the past three years. She cited the Yellow Vest protests, the pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the French government\u2019s unilateral decision to hike the age of retirement despite massive protests and the current increase to the cost of living.<\/p>\n \u201cAll of the anxiety of all of the years that these social crises have been happening are coming up,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s becoming bedbugs.\u201d<\/p>\n Juliette Gu\u00e9ron-Gabrielle contributed research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n