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Bedbug crisis sparks political row in Paris as insect ‘scourge’ continues
- brohee 3y agoWriting this article without mentioning AirBnB is quite the exercise in avoiding talking about root causes.
- sylware 3y agoDid they mention _american_ bedbugs? 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?
- lll-o-lll 3y ago> if hotel syndicates push mandatory severe bug control (aka expensive) in the regulation, that would make 99% of airbnb illegal? We can but dream.
- criley2 3y agoI get where you're coming from, but the idea that we should all rush to giant globo-monopolies to save us from the complexities of small businesses is just wild and disgusting. This is very much the "Microsoft/Apple, save me from Linux" vibe. 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.
- jddj 3y agoBit of a facetious take, but I think it has some value: Airbnb isn't a particularly small business, compared to your average hotel.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoAlmost all US hotels are owned and operated by smaller companies/families. Hilton/marriott/IHG/hyatt/choice/wyndham/etc sell their brand to franchisees.
- praptak 3y agoBut Airbnb is a giant globo-monopoly. 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.
- usr1106 3y agoAnd one of these nasty platform economy phenomenons: Take the profit, leave risks and bad labor conditions to others. Whether related to bed bugs or not, those blood suckers don't deserve our sympathy or business.
- hombre_fatal 3y agoWell, hotels spread bed bugs. 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"?
- Amezarak 3y agoAirbnb has 8.4 billion in revenue and 16 billion in assets. They are not a "small business." Hilton's revenue is 8.7 billion and they have 15 billion in assets. Hilton also doesn't cause rental and home prices to rise. People with enough money to buy homes to rent out as Airbnbs can buy or build small hotels with a little extra effort.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoIn my experience, there is no way to get rid of bed bugs without using controlled insecticides, and the room has to be left empty for a week or two.
- meepmorp 3y agoHeat - you close off the affected area and heat it to a bit over 50C for a few days. The bugs die through desiccation.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoThere is no such thing as severe bed bug control. The only way you know if there are bed bugs (unless it is somehow a severe infestation), is if a guest complains about being bit, and then the only thing left to do is call a pest control company and have them do their thing while the room is empty for a couple weeks. 99% of the time, it is only a couple bed bugs, and you are not likely to find them before they bite someone.
- zdragnar 3y agoLol, one hotel near me gave a friend bedbugs, and another have my sister in law scabies. Both hotels were "nice", not the cut-rate budget variety. I would take an Airbnb (with a superhost) over a hotel any day.
- eastbound 3y ago[flagged]
- actionfromafar 3y agoYour colleagues can’t afford AirBnB? Where do you people work anyway?
- wincy 3y ago[flagged]
- thelastparadise 3y agoThat's rude. I see no such "dog whistle" in his post and he makes a rather reasonable argument.
- jddj 3y agoIt's the left hand part
- jdiff 3y agoThat's the point of a dog whistle, to only be heard by some.
- rat9988 3y agoHe is very obviously doing it. What kind of "travelers" you think he is talking about.
- littlestymaar 3y agoHe confirmed it in his follow-up response though: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714981 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714981
- thelastparadise 3y agoHint: the phrase "you people" can be interpreted as hostile/divisive. In case English is not your first language...
- andrewstuart 3y agoWhy would you rent your home out with the risk of bedbugs?
- zer0tonin 3y agoMoney is used to purchase good and services.
- swarnie 3y agoRisk and reward. 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.
- blakblakarak 3y agoHomes? Nah they’re ‘investments’. I live in Brittany, France and new buyers, low earners etc are completely priced out of the market. My partner is a nurse and at her hospital they are closing wards because nurses, cleaners, healthcare assistants and even junior doctors can’t find, let alone afford accommodation.
- developer93 3y agoGonna go back to the days where the company owned your accommodation & you had a house as long as you had the job?
- sethammons 3y agoI'm hearing more and more about it. Company stores and company towns. Nope, nothing to learn from historically here at all.
- theshrike79 3y agoIt wasn't all bad. 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.
- throwaway290 3y agoIt mentions various downsides of bedbugs but doesn't mention blood borne diseases... Isn't that how it works, if it bit a guy with hepatitis then bit you, you will probably get it?
- unsupp0rted 3y ago* for some values of "probably"
- thelastgallon 3y agoWhile bed bugs carry a lot of stigma, they are not disease carriers. 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/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5007277/
- throwaway290 3y agoThis is awesome. Now I wonder if I'm similarly wrong about mosquitoes... (edit: those suckers do of course transmit, malaria and so on, but not sure about other diseases like hiv or hepatitis, haven't heard of mosquitoes as vector?)
- Cockbrand 3y agoUnfortunately not, they're considered "the world's deadliest animal" https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/stories/2019/world-deadliest-animal.html https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/stories/2019/world-deadlies... [Edit: posted before your edit. Bonus points for the "suckers" pun :) ]
- throwaway290 3y agoYeah I realized after posting that "do mosquitoes transmit?" is a silly question:)
- baz00 3y agoI've just removed that AirBnB weekend in Paris from my things to do this year list :)
- kergonath 3y agoIt’s not unique to Paris. It is a scourge in the UK as well, and an American friend told me that it was a problem in New York as well (I know, not a great source… I read NYT articles about that but they don’t immediately show up in my history).
- basisword 3y ago>> It is a scourge in the UK as well 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.
- 317070 3y agoI live in London and had bedbugs in my apartment 2 years ago. I knew what to watch for (colinear musquito bites), so got rid of them at the first sign. No idea where they came from, though. But the building is old and they might have crawled from a neighbour's bedroom.
- Kailhus 3y agoCan confirm, they are a thing in London.
- jinnko 3y agoLast year we were at a very well kept Airbnb in Cornwall that turned out to have been bugs. 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.
- laurent_du 3y agoMy grandmother dealt with bedbugs in 1950s Paris. I always thought of them as a thing of the past that couldn't possibly resurface in the present day. Clearly, I was wrong. Given that this is France, the likely solution is to commission a task force to spend five years working on a white paper that ultimately concludes more taxes are needed.
- unsupp0rted 3y ago> a thing of the past that couldn't possibly resurface in the present day What would be stopping them?
- onion2k 3y agoA likely candidate would be modern materials used in mattresses and bedlinen.
- raverbashing 3y agoAnd make the average Parisian replace their 60 old mattress?!? Nonsense! /s
- samastur 3y agoThey are not mites and happily live elsewhere.
- rat9988 3y agoWhich would have no effect on them actually. They aren't call bedbugs because it's their natural and only habitat.
- lotsofpulp 3y agoI assumed it was cancer causing insecticides like DDT or something.
- donpott 3y agoIndeed, they were on the brink of extinction until the worldwide outlawing of DDT, and have had a huge boom since.
- Yeri 3y agoQuite interesting video from Mark Rober about bedbugs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2JAOTJxYqh8
- w23j 3y agoGreat video! Thanks for the recommendation.
- Raed667 3y agoknowing the current french government, i would say their response is going to be: 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
- bratwurst3000 3y agoI am often on south France and yes they are there in abundance.
- SettembreNero 3y agoBedbugs have been a problem for years in Paris, but of course the government starts to think about it for the Olympics. Regular people can rot in hell for what they care
- bsaul 3y agofor sure, public transport would be different if politicians were using it.
- dvhh 3y agoThe risk of being either slapped or punched in the face on a daily basis, would certainly prevent most politicians to mingle with regular people.
- littlestymaar 3y agoMacron could take the public transport any day, he would just need to close it to the public.
- dvhh 3y agomontjoie st denis !!!
- bratwurst3000 3y agoSo true. I am very very often on France and had to throw away my bed and couch in France and Germany because of those shitbugs. We tried products and professional help but they came back or where still there. Since we changed interior and take precautions when we travel they are gone. But it’s hell. Because I also rent apartments for holiday, that I own, and there I change the mattress regularly and everything else is leather now. 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 .
- curiousgal 3y agoWell I lived in Paris for three years, sat on countless metro/train seats, hotels, shared appartments, hostels, and I have never had an issue with bed bugs.
- mongol 3y agoNot the same, but I recently have got problems with moths. So has my parents. This also used to be unusual.
- bsaul 3y agoParis subway is and has always been an horrible pathogen nest. My life in the winter changed when i stopped having to use it everyday, i basically stopped being sick. 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.
- prox 3y agoSubway ventilation can be really bad or badly maintained at least.
- thefounder 3y agoIsn't this a sanitary/personal hygiene issue?
- nathanaldensr 3y ago[flagged]
- unsupp0rted 3y agoPlease proceed to point out root causes for bedbugs
- kergonath 3y agoNo, it is not. They eat you, not your waste or byproducts. It is a human problem. Or do you think also for example that mosquitoes are a personal hygiene problem?
- Shaanie 3y agoIn what sense? Bed bugs don't care whether you're tidy or not, they drink your blood and hide during the day. You can have an absolutely spotless home and flawless personal hygiene and still have bedbugs living in your floorboards.
- thefounder 3y agoIn the sense that washing your clothes and bedding at high temperature plus washing all the spots where the bed bugs could hide should keep them at distance.
- kergonath 3y agoThe issue is that “all the spots where they could hide” is absolutely any kind of crack or tiny hole. Floorboards were mentioned, and you cannot really take that away to clean it each week. Same thing for wooden beds: those have lots of spaces where a bug can go but not much else, short of dismantling the whole thing. They can also be in sofas, bedside tables, cabinets, chairs… And these places are not dirty, they are just available space. Fumigation is a way of getting rid of them because otherwise it is impossible to access the places where they hide during the day.
- bob1029 3y agoThis is why I don't mind the spiders so much. 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.
- cf141q5325 3y agoIn case anyone is afraid of spiders, confrontation therapy does wonders. Doesnt have to be drastic, letting one set up a net in a visible area already does wonders.
- TacticalCoder 3y agoI always let the spiders in the house alone. I know they kill mosquitoes and the like. 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.
- xtiansimon 3y ago> “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).” 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.
- xtiansimon 3y agoOh. I just remembered. A friend of mine lives in an SRO. The owner of the property manages these pests with a room heater. They bake the room for something like 12 hours and supposedly this mitigates the problem. As I mentioned here before (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35699400 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."
- rayiner 3y agoParis could try being less filthy. New York has the same problem. After getting bed bugs from the Sofitel, the remediating of which involved plastic bagging literally everything and nuking the place with insect killer, I refuse to stay in Manhattan anymore. I stay in Westchester or sometimes Jersey.
- earthling8118 3y agoThis attitude is a contributor to the problem. Bed bugs have nothing to do with filth. They aren't cockroaches. They don't care how clean a space is. Only that they can find blood to consume.
- dctoedt 3y agoFunny, for years (apart from pandemic years) we've been going to Manhattan once or twice a year for museums and shows; we've never had problems with bedbugs or "filth."
- giardini 3y agoI encountered a bedbug-like problem and used a two-pronged approach: 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.