As we’ve seen worldwide, I’m not sure how well turning a public health problem into a political issue will work out. No matter your political slant, politicians just aren’t the solution to public health issues, as much as they’re needed to administer the legal solutions.
As well as the fact that bedbugs are spreading more and faster due to climate change since they thrive in warmer environments. This problem has been growing and will continue to grow. I worry about when it reaches my own city.
Solutions for such a wide outbreak are scarce, but viable solutions I think would come from the scientific community about effective treatments and long-term changes to keep them at bay. However, as we’ve seen with COVID, there will be a number who will resist efforts to control the pests as some form of social control, infringing on their right to be scruffy bastards, I suppose.
I do wish Paris the best in finding a long-term viable solution to this, it’s a terribly difficult problem to be facing. Especially with intent to host an Olympic games.
The assumption that you could ever treat such a crisis as “apolitical” requires the existing power structures to not be designed to literally kill off whole segments of the population (poor people, disabled people, old people, immigrants, anyone defined by capitalism as “burdens”).
It’s political because they won’t act (like they haven’t so far) until it threatens the economy they depend on to maintain their power and/or rich households, at which point their solutions will only ever be in defence and service of those things, not the general population.
So sure, in utopia it wouldn’t be political and the obvious thing would be that we help society and everyone in it, but that’s not the reality we live in, and those in power aren’t going to just put their entire ethos to one side to do the right thing, and expecting them to, at this point in time, and especially fresh out of a pandemic that isn’t actually over, is extremely naive, at best.
Unless you tent and fumigate the entirety of Paris or heat treat it, meaning bringing the temperature of Paris to ~118° for 90 minutes, the other options are…middling in effectiveness.
Also, neither of those treatments keep bedbugs from reinfesting a second after the treatment concludes. (There are no treatments that do. Zero. Ziltch.) And since bedbugs are hitchhikers that can also hide in the tiniest of cracks and crevices, such as fitting between your wall and socket cover, total and permanent eradication is unlikely. The only possibility is if a bait treatment similar to those used for roaches that alters the DNA of the next generation so they can’t reproduce is created and actually attracts bedbugs more than a nice blood filled human.
In dense population centers like Paris total elimination at this point in time is incredibly unlikely. They could with continuous effective treatments bring it under a semblance of control but they will always be there. The Olympics will almost certainly exacerbate the issue.
bringing the temperature of Paris to ~118° for 90 minutes
Ah, so global warming will take care of the problem for us! Finally some good news. /s
Let’s hope they dont turn violent, like the Krogan after the genophage.
Nice reference
There’s no other solution than to treat them the way we did the first time — with DDT.
Bedbug populations are not necessarily increasing but returning to normal pre-DDT levels.
There’s btw no reason not to use DDT. The cancer fear was overblown. Obviously it’s not a substance that should be available over the counter, but there’s no reason why qualified and trained personell shouldn’t be able to use it.
Sorry Hoss, but DDT doesn’t work anymore. http://npic.orst.edu/factsheets/bb-ddt.html
If that is true then the only recourse will be antiparasitic drugs. Ivermectin seems to kill bedbugs but not for very long. Fluralaner seems promising.
It’s very interesting that when we treat animals for parasites we treat the animal itself but for humans we believe that something as nebulous as “treating the space” is actually possible.
When the world is ready to actual solve bedbugs it’ll solve them through a pill you take.
I agree. To think that all those suffering Lyme might not have contracted the disease if we had continued offering a Lyme vaccine…
I’ve been thinking about this and it seems developed and developing countries have some kind of an ideological thing against ectoparasitic medications. There’s a common delusion that stuff like lice, fleas, bedbugs, etc, are very rare because everything and everyone is so clean these days.
But it’s not really true. All these parasites circulate, especially now that people travel so much for business and pleasure. Also, none of these parasites really care how clean your body and your house are, all they “care” about is drinking your blood.
I really think if we could get over this wrong idea, and we could start actual government-funded research into effective and safe ectoparasitic drugs for human use, we’d stand a much better chance at ending bedgbugs and other stuff once for all. Environmental treatments have been proven ineffective time and time again. They work for a while and then the bugs develop resistance. We need a way to make our blood unpalatable to them.
the invasion of bloodsucking insects must be tackled before next year’s Olympic Games
Are they talking about politicians here?
Our national Tucker Carlson tried to pin it on immigrants. So, I’d say people like him before our politicians.
Maybe he needs to be pulted with water balloons with bugs inside
What’s a “political row”?
Row (pronounced like wow) is another word for argument or disagreement. It’s most commonly used in the UK. A “political row” just means politicians are bickering with each other.
It’s most commonly used in the UK
Also common in Australia
Also Canada. Basically the US is the odd one out here.
Oh. That’s one of those words I’ve only ever read (generally in brit lit), and thought it was pronounced as row like row a boat. Thank you for the correct pronunciation!
This is interesting because this word does get used in American English, but it’s pronounced like “row your boat” not like wow.
Ah, “row” like “rowdy” not “row yer goddamn boat up the river.”
otherwise known as a weekday
Thank god the olympics are coming or they may never have had such a push to have this solved. Kinda strikes me as a problem that should have been important before inviting the world over. Like, I had an apartment and we got the buggers. Sucks. So we got on top of it, and delt with it.
Didn’t wait until we invited people over to start worrying about it.
I’ll be honest, there are a lot of things I personally don’t deal with properly until I’m expecting company. But bedbugs should take priority 100% of the time.
Dude, totally. I have no shame in some ways until moments before company. Kinda live alone, so it happens.
But yeah. Bed bugs are one of those things that are an immediate situation. Some may call us picky, but yeah. Ew.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
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.
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 newspaper Le Parisien ran a front-page article on the panic over bedbugs on Friday, calling the problem a form of “domestic terror”.
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.
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.
The original article contains 636 words, the summary contains 195 words. Saved 69%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I have a theory that you could transfer bedbugs by putting them in water balloons right before you fill them with water and tie them off, that way you could throw them and have them pop then due to how durable bedbugs are they would probably survive to breed
When did you wake up and choose to be evil?
Well maybe if people didn’t have easy access to bedbugs such as a mass infestation crisis they wouldn’t be spread around so easily
Does this work for ducks too
You need a bigger balloon
well they are free to take but I think their size would cause them to get hurt when the balloon break on impact, the smaller the creature the less it could be hurt I’d guess like how a mouse can fall off a building without really getting hurt
What about a spy balloon? If you put some bedbugs in a huge, high altitude balloon would some of then survive being shot down with an air-to-air missile?
you know what it’s possible as long as they didn’t get squished or burned but this all just theory
In hungary we have bedbug invasions in govermental hospitals… apart from missing plastering, toilets, toilet paper, food, and medical devices
So how lo g will it be before there’s a riot?
Every weekend! You finish work, you drive to Paris, you protest!
Dont let random people sleep in your bed. Probably hard for the people of paris
Bro you can get them just from going to a theatre. They hitchhike anywhere. They’re a menace.
Bedbug is frankly a misnomer. They will go anywhere people are inactive for periods of time - beds, couches, chairs, benches… any and all furniture.
Oh, and vehicles. You can get them from an Uber, a taxi, or a bus too.
You mean like AirBnbs?
How about the seats in the theatre, cinema, bus, metro, train…
