France is bitten by a fear of bedbugs as it prepares to host Summer Olympics
Source: Associated Press
France is bitten by a fear of bedbugs as it prepares to host Summer Olympics
BY ELAINE GANLEY
Updated 12:58 AM EDT, October 5, 2023
PARIS (AP) — 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 Friday 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.
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Read more: https://apnews.com/article/france-bedbugs-olympics-7ff56cbeed2cbe83e3f623b326a08892
