Now with the record high amount of homeless in the street at the moment i'm pretty skeptical this is going to get any better.
Many of my friend have them also. Didn’t realize it was a problem on national level but it feels like it. Btw Germany has them also .
What would be stopping them?
They do a really good job of vacuuming up the smaller insects around my home. You can tell how well they're working by the density of crap in their webs. I go out of my way to not harm them if possible. I used to spray for everything but I think that just makes things worse in the long run.
But nonetheless around last september we had bedbugs in our main bedroom (France, but not Paris : rural south east of France). I couldn't find any but they were obviously sucking our blood at night: these weren't mosquitoes bites.
Thankfully that bedroom is "zen": one huge bed and that's it. So we bought all the chemicals needed to kill the bedbugs (yup, sorry for the planet about these chemicals but you cannot live with bedbugs) and I quickly repainted the entire room, figuring out that bedbugs probably wouldn't like it much to get both the anti-bedbugs chemicals plus brand new painted walls.
Chemicals, painting the whole room, washing the sheets, vaccuum cleaning. Rinse and repeat for two to three days.
No problem since.
So you can get rid of these little mofos but spiders alone aren't sufficient.
No need to use chemicals. Get a mattress bag (made special for bed bugs) and buy a hand steamer. Learn where they like to hide, and blast em with steam.
a) ivermectin and
b) permethrin, which I added to laundry and sprayed on clothing and bedclothing.
Permethrin could harm pets so I keep them away from any application until clothing is dry.
Ivermectin kills most bedbugs, fleas et al and stops the young from molting, but they have to bite you first usually. Nonetheless, there's something satisfying about being the bait and knowing that each bite means another bug dies.
1- create a green number with an automated response that tells you “you should have paid better attention”
2- blame immigrants
ps: this is not limited to paris , a friend of mine found one bug in her train near Cannes
To date, no published study has demonstrated a causal relationship between bed bugs and infectious disease transmission in humans. Also, we present and propose to expand on previous hypotheses as to why bed bugs do not transmit human pathogens. Bed bugs may contain “neutralizing factors” that attenuate pathogen virulence and, thereby, decrease the ability of bed bugs to transmit infectious disease: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5007277/
Why dont they say stop and not decrease ?
So they can transmit pathogens ?
How did this paper get published
Luckily a lifetime ago I was a licensed exterminator and got it sorted. Treating for bed bugs is not fun, though, and part of the reason I got out of the pest control game. It involves either laboriously treating with chemicals in hard to reach places or wearing a tin foil suit and literally blasting your bedroom with heat to get it to 140°F (60C) or so to kill all of the bedbugs.
It’s been a few years and I’ve never seen another one, but definitely felt like I dodged a bullet.
Do you mean in AirBnB’s or generally? Fwiw I don’t know or know of anyone in the UK that has ever dealt with bedbugs. They’re a thing I’ve only heard about in TV shows set in NYC.
I've never encountered them in NYC or Berlin either although I have spent comparatively little time there...anecdotally Paris is certainly an outlier.
airbnb being a really good propagation vector as you cannot have the same grade bug fighting than in a classic hotel.
Basically, all big international tourist destinations are at "risk" of no severe bug control is done (airbnb...).
What are we going to end up with? if hotel syndicates push mandatory severe bug control (aka expensive) in the regulation, that would make 99% of airbnb illegal?
We can but dream.
99% of the time, it is only a couple bed bugs, and you are not likely to find them before they bite someone.
I would take an Airbnb (with a superhost) over a hotel any day.
Steaming is an effective treatment but only reasonable if there is no clutter and minimal furniture.
You can rent out a property and have it go perfectly fine, sometimes you encounter Degens who trash the place.
The trick is minimising your risk upfront to get a better result.
As I mentioned here before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35699400), I prefer my "killing field" method, "The bugs infest your bed, reproduce, and spread out. To get rid of them you do the reverse—kill them on the bed with steam. Wait a day or two for the commuters to repopulate the bedding, repeat."
https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/stories/2019/world-deadlies...
[Edit: posted before your edit. Bonus points for the "suckers" pun :) ]
I have a hunch this might be a very useful and marketable skill in the near future…
Seriously, well done because as you say getting rid of them is no fun.
Last spring we stayed at an equally nice family place in the black forest (Germany) also with bed bugs.
My brother bought a nice wooden cabinet in London that turned out to be infested.
It's incredibly distressing cuz you don't want to bring them home. And I've spoken with a fair few people since who've had similar experiences in the past few years.
No idea where they came from, though. But the building is old and they might have crawled from a neighbour's bedroom.
Generally. In any case they get carried very easily in clothes or suitcases and you need only a couple of them to start an infestation somewhere else. If they are in AirBnBs, it means that there are also in a lot of houses.
I got some in a London flat. A friend of mine got some in Manchester. They are not that common, but they are on the rise, which is concerning. It’s like early COVID, nobody has it until everybody does.
See for example https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/aug/19/bedbugs-heat... from a couple of years ago, or https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/bed-bugs-epi... .
In here The Company (a paper factory) guaranteed home loans for employees, a ton of people got dirt-cheap loans and paid off their homes in record time. My aunt still lives in one of those homes, they've been debt free since before the millennium.
The Netherlands can't be the only country where it did work out.
I was born and raised in a beautiful company built neighbourhood. Small but decent houses, a school, some shops and enough room for some 'green'.
AFAICT the number of infestations grew 65% in a year in the UK. A couple of years at that rate and even if you’ve never seen any yet, you are likely to know them intimately.
This sounds like a Daily Mail or Mirror quote, where generally their source is a pest control person or other business attempting to scare people into buying products.
Obviously everywhere is at risk for bed bugs but I don't think the UK has some major shock infestation in the way you're trying to imply.
EDIT since every reply is the same: AirBnb operates 0 rooms. To be so willfully obtuse about AirBnb is wild.
Clearly the operators of these rentals are small businesses, the vast majority operating less than 10 properties. They use several major booking platforms for their rooms including AirBnb, Vrbo, TripAdvisor and a dozen other vacation rental platforms. Their rooms are not AirBnb's. Their service is not AirBnb's.
I don't even know how to begin to reply to someone who treats AirBnb, a booking platform that operates 0 hotels and 0 rooms, as the same as say a Marriot, who operates 1,423,044 rooms worldwide.
So the actual choice isnt between globo-monopolies and small business. It's between monopolies that don't spread bed bugs and one that does.
You're granting the hypothetical world of the upstream commenter where an anti-bed-bug regulation is put in place that's so bent towards hotels that only hotels could survive, but we'd need to see more details on that before we grant it. What would that even look like and would it be worth it beyond the HN knee-jerk of "lol Airbnb bad"?
People with enough money to buy homes to rent out as Airbnbs can buy or build small hotels with a little extra effort.
I don’t see how this can be true. A half decent hotel in even cheaper parts of the US is going to cost $100k per key, and in any popular city, multiples more. Plus, if you want to buy a franchise from Hilton/Marriott/Hyatt, they are going to ask one of the owners to already have another hotel as a credit check.
Buying a house or condo, on the other hand, only requires a few hundred thousand, outside of the most expensive areas.
And building a hotel is a completely different ballgame than buying an existing property. Cities long ago stopped approving small motels to be built, and clearing the permits/buying the land/getting a construction loan/ensuring your GC does the job on time is a whole lot of risk.
The most important causes is the massive increase in travel/tourism (airbnb is often pointed, but regular hotels are where it started) then come the increasing cost of labor (Baumol's costs disease) + higher safety standards for both the inhabitants and the workers (this includes DDT but not only) + higher living standards (people have bigger apartments with more stuff in it), which makes house decontamination much more expensive that it used to be.
Decades later with no comparable eradication strategy, and once world travel increased exponentially, they have been reintroduced from parts of the world where they have always thrived.
I seriously doubt this is the case in Paris
You can find quite a lot apartments that used to be two smaller ones that have been merged together, especially in the upper floors.
> AFAICT the number of infestations grew 65% in a year in the UK. A couple of years at that rate and even if you’ve never seen any yet, you are likely to know them intimately.
These are both sentences written in a highly emotional tone, that is attempting to fear-monger. It's hyperbole. Your reply is also again terse and unnecessary, I'm not your enemy, calm down and take a day off the internet if it's getting to you. Have a good day man, take care of yourself.
I obviously don't know the specifics but I'd bet Hilton is a million times more effective at pest management than some 60 year old dude who put up his second home for extra income. To whom does the cost of extermination act as a large deterrent?
I wish they had, but that's not true anywhere I've lived.