Don’t let the bedbugs bite
Apparently the French are not sleeping well at night—for fear of bedbugs. The little vampires are wreaking havoc from Paris to Poitiers. Who knew?
The French are in a tizzy over the growing swarm of bedbugs invading their country even though few have actually seen them or suffered any consequence from the alleged infestation.
Homeowners are returning from work, disrobing in their garages, and immediately throwing clothes into 140-degree water to kill them. They’re spraying furniture and taking other precautions to kill the pesky apple-seed sized bloodsucking insects—if they’re there at all. Better safe than sorry?
According to The New York Times News Service, many homeowners are convinced they have bedbugs. Politicians are making speeches about it and have held news conferences on the matter. And business for companies like Dogscan, a canine bedbug-detecting company, is booming. Yes, there is such a thing.
Crazy? Maybe. Or maybe there was no problem in the first place. The real pest may be social media. Videos have been posted of the bugs in Parisian movie theaters, trains and subways, and anxiety is reportedly at extreme levels.
“This whole media thing, it’s re-traumatizing people who have had bedbugs, and traumatizing others who never had it,” said Emilie Gaultier, Dogscan’s owner.
Leading bug expert Jean-Michael Berenger, an entomologist at Mediterranean University Hospital Infection Institute in Marseille, has become a household name in France. He says, “There is a real psychosis. This is the first time people have called to ask me to … check for bedbugs when they haven’t been bitten . . . . ”
And then there are those who see the matter as more deeply embedded than bedbugs biting. Some believe the media frenzy surrounding the phenomenon has drawn deeper problems to the surface and have become a focus, or symbol, for other problems in an individual’s life.
Emilie Gaultier believes it could be a collective outpouring of anxiety over many unresolved social crises the country’s faced over the past three years from yellow-vest protests, the coronavirus pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the government’s decision to raise the retirement age, etc.
“Bedbugs have this magic ability to take any baggage or anxiety you have and focus it,” according to Thibault Buckley at ATN, another canine bug-detection agency.
If social media does one thing really well, it spreads information (true or false) widely. When information doesn’t necessarily match up with reality, a strong case could be made that ignorance is bliss.