Eradicating Bed Bugs in Paris

The Bed Bug Crisis Isn’t New

I can’t believe I’m updating this article AGAIN in 2023, but it’s hard to miss recent headlines like this one from RFI, “Paris launches emergency plan to fight spread of bed bugs”. Sadly, this isn’t the first time France has reported an increase in bed bug sightings.

Bed bugs, aka punaises de lit, were virtually eliminated from France in the 1950s using the toxic DDT spray. But with increasingly warmer winters, their new resistance to pesticides, and the proliferation of international travel (even post-pandemic), they have been thriving again for the past decade, at about the same time that New York, Montreal and London were hit.

When the bed bugs came back with a vengeance in February 2020 during an unseasonably warm winter, French politicians debated declaring it a national healthcare emergency. But that was just weeks before a whole different health crisis descended on the world, and the issue fell out of the news.

According to a public health report published in July, one in ten French homes reported bed bugs at some point between 2017 and 2022. In the past two months, in addition to residential cases on the rise, there have been bed bug sightings in movie theatres, trains, and buses, going viral on social media and causing a general freakout with locals and the tourism industry, which is trying to prepare for the Olympic Games in less than a year. So what’s being done about it?

The French Government Addresses the Bed Bug Redux

It’s hard to tell how much of the news is real and how much is social media hype (bed bugs typically only come out when it’s dark and quiet, not on busy metro cars). “I don’t think there’s a reason for general panic,” said the Minister of Health when interviewed on France Inter October 3, but admitted that “when you have bedbugs bed, it’s hell.”

The government is clearly taking it seriously. Bed bugs were discussed in the French Parliament (with the far Left parties using it as another excuse to attack Macron’s government), and this week the Ministry of Transportation convened the RATP, SNCF, Air France, and other transport operators this week to make sure they’re dealing with the problem, and will be publishing quarterly updates. Supposedly all reported sightings have been followed up with treatment or preventative measures if no infestations have been detected. Cinemas and hotels have been spraying and using special bed bug sniffer dogs to reassure the public.

Preventative Steps for Travelers to Avoid Bed Bugs

You may be tempted to cancel your trip, but if you take a few precautions, you should be okay. The size of an apple seed, bedbugs can’t jump or fly, and they don’t carry any diseases, but they need blood to survive, so they’ll nest in any human habitat they can find, regardless of how “clean” your home or hotel might be. Hygiene has nothing to do with the arrival of bed bugs, but thorough cleaning does make it easier to get rid of them.

They typically wait for you to go to sleep to feed, so their favorite places to nest are in pillowcases, mattresses, box springs, sofas, and parquet floors. They’re also attracted by your smell on recently worn clothing and your luggage, so this is where you can focus on protecting yourself on your travels.

• When you arrive at your vacation accommodation, check the mattresses (especially the seams around the edges), headboards, sofas, and armchairs for telltale signs of the bugs or the little dried blood droppings they leave behind. I always pull up the sheets before I even take off my coat. If you see anything, notify the hotel or owner right away, and request a different room or accommodation.
• Remember they have to crawl, so avoid putting your suitcase on the floor or on your bed. Use the luggage rack, a high shelf, or if there’s nowhere else, the bathtub is also a good backup spot. Be sure to keep it closed when not in use. Don’t leave your clothes, backpack or purse on the bed (hang them up if possible). It might sound a bit paranoid, but it’s best to keep your belongings together and avoid spreading out all over your hotel room or rental flat. Don’t give bed bugs multiple places to crawl into your belongings to hitch a ride home.
• When you do return home, it’s best to do a thorough cleaning of your belongings and the luggage. Carefully inspect every seam and closure of your suitcase, or give it the once over with a steam cleaner. Bed bugs and their eggs and larvae can’t withstand extreme temperatures, so in addition to steam cleaning, you can wash clothing in 60°C, or put delicates in the freezer for at least 72 hours to be on the safe side. If you have one of those big chest freezers in your garage (like many Americans do), just throw everything in there when you get home for three days.

What To Do If You’re Bitten

Bed bug bites usually happen when you’re asleep, and resemble a small cluster of three or four mosquito bites in one area of your body. Some people don’t react to bed bugs at all, so if there are two of you in a bed, only one of you might have bites. Before you panic, look for traces of the bed bugs or small dots of blood on your bedding (easier if it’s white, which is the case in hotels). If you don’t find anything, it could easily be mosquitos (yes, we have those in Paris, too).

If you’re in a hotel, I’d recommend discreetly informing the staff that you might have bed bugs so their cleaning staff can do a check. Try not to approach them all guns a-blazing, threatening to leave a nasty review. Allow them the chance to be professional about it. They do this for a living so they’ll be better prepared to know what to look for than you. If all of your belongings are in your suitcase or at least all in one place, it will be easier for them to move you into another room (or hotel) if necessary.

Unfortunately, it will be a bit more complicated if you’re renting a vacation apartment. The owner may be out of town, and in most cases you’ll have to find your own alternative accommodations if you do end up having to vacate. Try to rent through an agency with someone on call 24/7 in case there are problems.

If you live in France and think (or are sure) you have bed bugs, the rest of this article is for you.

Resources for French Residents

Luckily before Covid shut everything down in 2020, the French government did manage to create a dedicated informational website to help residents and business owners figure out how to prevent getting bed bugs and what to do if you do get them (in French):

• If you live in the Bouches du Rhône (13) or Rhône (69) départements, go to: stop-punaises.gouv.fr
• Everyone else in France will find information here: https://www.ecologie.gouv.fr/punaises-lit-letat-vous-accompagne

There’s even a dedicated hotline to call if you have questions: 0806 706 806. Needless to say, it’s all in French, so you’ll need to use an auto-translator if you can’t follow, but this should be the first place you go if you live in France and you’re worried you might have them.

Who Pays?

In France, the owner is responsible for pest control and informing the syndic of your apartment building of the infestation. In some cases, a syndic may decide the entire building should be treated and divide the cost among all of the owners (for example, my building has twice-annual rat and roach control check-ups in the caves that are incorporated into our monthly fees).

If you’re a renter, it’s your responsibility to inform the owner as soon as you suspect you have any kind of pest, as a failure to inform them could make the matter worse the longer you wait. You can send a registered letter and keep receipts of any expenses incurred if you don’t get a response and need to quickly take action yourself. Then you can pursue compensation or (hopefully you won’t need this) take legal action. What you CAN’T do is stop paying rent or break your rental contract, which would put you in the wrong, too.

Bed Bug Insurance

Last week, the first deputy mayor of Paris called on home insurance companies to take action. Unfortunately, most home and rental insurance policies (“assurance habitation“) don’t cover bed bug treatment (or any kind of insect or rodent infestation), which can cost from €200 up to €3000 to treat. One company, Badbugs, has taken advantage of the vacuum in the market by offering a specific bed bug policy for €2/month, which seems totally reasonable to me, as someone who has been through the bed bug experience.

It only covers €500/year of treatment, a maximum of €80 for one night in a hotel, and five online therapy sessions (or three in person). So it most likely won’t cover all of your costs, but they also have a hotline to call as soon as you suspect you have bed bugs, which could help prevent a bigger infestation. You have to be subscribed for at least three months before you’re insured, so don’t wait until you start spotting signs if you want to be covered.

My Own Bed Bug Horror Story

I wish that insurance existed back in 2014 when I got bed bugs in my old apartment. I still have no idea if I picked them up when traveling around France and the UK for a month, if my dogsitter brought them along after staying in a youth hostel, if something I picked up at the flea market was infested, or if they came through the floors from a neighbor’s apartment. That part wasn’t important.

What was important were the bites on my arms, the little red dots on my sheets, and — the final proof — the live specimen running across my bedroom wall when I awoke at 3am. I tore apart my entire flat (it was probably the first time I really appreciated how small it is), inspected every inch of my bed, the furniture, the books on my nightstand. I kept waiting to find a huge, ugly infestation. But I found nothing. I thought maybe they were hiding in the old wooden floors.

Step 1: Cleaning Everything You Own

I cleaned, vacuumed, washed all of my linens, steam-cleaned the floors (I rented a steamer on Zilok), and sprinkled the non-toxic Terre de Diatomée (or diatomaceous earth) around the baseboards. I spent three days going back and forth to the laundromat with my clothes in black plastic bags (my neighbors probably thought I had bodies in there), and bagged up everything else that wasn’t essential. I pulled the bed away from the wall, placed the feet into cups full of poison and wrapped them in double-side sticky tape. If they can’t eat, they can’t multiply, and I wasn’t going to let them eat me! 

I thought I was out of the woods, no more bites for over a week. Experts recommend setting an alarm to wake at 3am or 4am with a bright flashlight to catch them in action. If you’ve ever had bedbugs you’ll know you never need the alarm; sleeping through the night becomes impossible. So one morning at 4am I awoke and turned on my bedside lamp only to find one right there feasting on on my arm. I was so surprised I grabbed him and he popped like a little pomegranate seed, leaving a splatter of blood in my hand. MY blood. Sorry to gross you out, but this is why people who get bed bugs are so traumatized: you can’t sleep. 

Happily, I managed to eradicate the little suckers, but I didn’t do it alone. After the “splatter incident”, I decided to make an appointment first thing in the morning with professionals. I had been obsessively reading every single website about bedbugs since the first sighting, so I knew the regular aerosol bombs that people used for fleas or roaches wouldn’t work on bed bugs. Only professional treatments would do the trick. I knew this meant spraying my apartment with extremely toxic chemicals, but I tried my best to do it the non-toxic way and I was running out of time: my mother was coming for Christmas!

Step 2: Extermination Services

If the cleaning and steaming and other non-toxc methods don’t work out, you’re going to have to call in the pros. On the stop-punaises.gouv.fr site they link to the CS3D (National Union of Exterminators) website, which has a searchable database of private extermination companies throught France. Make sure any company you hire has the “Certibiocide” label for bed bug treatment verified by the Minister of the Environment (and it should be less than five years old). There are companies in Paris who have the bed bug sniffing dogs, companies that will heat up your apartment to cook them to death, and exterminators who will come multiple times to spray and fumigate (the chemicals they use are usually not available to the general public in stores). These services can be quite expensive (several hundred to several thousand euros), so be sure you have a full devis in advance so you know what you’re in for, and what they guarantee.

Inexpensive Municipal Extermination Services

I didn’t have any personal recommendations for a reliable exterminator, so I chose to go with SMASH, an affordable option guaranteed by the City of Paris. SMASH stands for Le Service Municipal d’Actions de Salubrité et d’Hygiène, a municipal health and hygiene service that eradicates pests like rats, roaches and bed bugs (they also treat mold, collect used syringes, and maintain defibrillators in public spaces) for businesses and individuals. This service is now called the Service Parisien de Santé Environnementale (SPSE), and the service for municipal insect control is now only available to low-income residents. If you’re a French taxpayer and think you qualify, check out their new website here for more information (or mention it when you call the Stop Punaises helpline listed above to get the information). I was really lucky I was able to use the service, which cost about €150, because at the time it didn’t even occur to me to ask the elderly owner of my apartment to cover the cost.

WARNING: In addition to the growing resistance bed bugs have to over-the-counter pesticides, they can be extremely dangerous to your health. So don’t be tempted to use hazardous chemicals yourself (especially on your mattress or pillows, even diatomaceous earth), get a professional.

Pre-Extermination: Prepping

This will likely differ depending on what service you go for, but for regular spraying, you need to bag everything that’s already clean, cover any electronics and artwork that shouldn’t be misted with the spray, and completely strip the bed and mattress. My guys came in HAZMAT suits. They assured me that I could sleep there that night, but to make sure and air it out a few hours before bed.

Post-Extermination: Toxic Fumes

The down side is that even after airing out the apartment for several hours the fumes were still too strong to sleep there, so I went to a neighbor’s for the night. The old wooden floors and my hand-stuffed wool mattress had been completely doused, and needed a further week with the windows open all day (in early November) to finally smell “normal”. They recommend waiting at least two months before mopping the floors to kill any bedbugs that hatch from eggs that didn’t get destroyed by the spray. I added a special bed-bug mattress cover, and continued to sleep with the bed away from the wall and its feet in traps for the next two months until I left for the US in January for a month. After that, with zero new bed bug sightings, I finally scrubbed the floors and put the apartment back to “normal”, but continued to be vigilant, both at home and when traveling.

Remain Vigilant

Years later, living in my own apartment in Paris, I still jump sky high if I mistake a little piece of black fuzz in my bed for a bug. Compared to some people’s experiences I got off relatively easy, but only because I acted immediately. I still use a bed bug cover on my mattress and inspect the entire bed carefully each time I change the linens. And when I travel I still check the bed first thing when I arrive. As soon as I heard bed bugs were back in Paris last month, I subscribed to bed bug insurance coverage. I’m hoping I’ll never have to use it!

If anyone else living in France has suggestions or resources for battling bedbugs, please leave a comment below.