As France prepares for the 2024 Olympic Games, the city of Paris is facing an unfortunate issue: an outbreak of bedbugs.
Reports of bedbug sightings in Paris began surfacing this summer, according to the Wall Street Journal. Since then, the pests have remained a prevalent concern for both permanent residents and travelers. Sightings on public transportation, in movie theaters and inside the Charles de Gaulle airport have increased general unease surrounding the outbreak, according to Time Magazine.
Paris’ leadership addressed the issue as the outbreak continued through Fashion Week earlier this month. In a post on X, previously known as Twitter, Paris Deputy Mayor, Emmanuel Grégoire said, “No one is safe,” and urgently called for action from other Paris officials to work toward a solution. The outbreak poses “no threat to the Olympic Games,” according to CNN.
This is not the first time an outbreak of this sort has occurred, especially in a large city like Paris, but the widespread panic that comes with it is hard to ignore.
Some regard such outbreaks as common and inevitable. Associate Professor of French Briana Lewis is one of them.
“I’m sort of surprised that they’re treating it as new,” said Lewis. “I know that in most major cities it’s sort of an ongoing low-grade kind of issue that gets worse, gets better, gets worse, gets better, but isn’t totally gone.”
Lewis said she believes that due to the fact that bedbugs were found on “high speed trains,” a form of public transportation, this current outbreak is garnering “something of a panic.”
She described Paris as being in somewhat of a “push-pull,” because France, like other countries, has banned insecticides that harm humans and the environment — but those insecticides also eradicate bedbugs. Public transportation, though good for the environment, is also contributing to the panic over bedbugs.
As of Oct. 4, a combined 47 traveler reports of bedbug sightings were made, though upon inspection no bedbugs have been found on public transport, according to international news agency Reuters.
As a common host of large, globally attractive events and sights, Paris is a beacon of travel, which is known to be a potential cause of the spread of bedbugs. Lewis suggested that based on her research, this idea — combined with the travel patterns of this time of year — may be one of the contributing factors to this particular outbreak.
“It’s a really significant feature of French and especially Parisian culture that everybody goes on vacation in August,” said Lewis. “You go to Paris and it’s a ghost town in August because everybody’s on vacation and so everybody has just traveled a month or so ago, come back from their vacation, and now we’re seeing this.”
Paris is not the only place in which such an outbreak is occurring and its residents’ frequency of travel is not the only cause of a spread. Shared living spaces are also prone to such outbreaks.
Meadville Housing Authority’s Holland Towers, a housing complex in Meadville, has been battling a bedbug infestation as well.
The outbreak has been ongoing for over two years, according to the Meadville Tribune, and both residents and officials from Meadville Housing Authority have expressed increased frustration with the issue.
In an August 2023 article, the Tribune reported that, considering the vacancies in the complex due to impending renovations, “…nearly 25 percent of the building’s occupied units are currently being treated (for bedbugs) — a slightly larger percentage than in September 2021, when 32 of the 132 units were being treated for bedbugs.”
Various theories make up the supposed cause of the difficulty bringing an end to the issue.
Executive Director of the Meadville Housing Authority Vanessa Rockovich told the Meadville Tribune in August that a “harder approach” for tenants with infestations is the next step is getting the problem under control. Rockovich is referring to warnings being issued to tenants that are not complying with regulations on moving about the building while carrying bedbugs, and therefore spreading them from room to room.
“If we don’t start telling them they can or can’t, then the whole building is going to have bedbugs,” Rockovich said.
Residents can be evicted for not following rules on visiting other units or having their own visitors, according to the Tribune.
However, residents, including Holland Towers Resident Council President Jackie Commins, have said that local officials are the ones at fault for the insects.
“The Housing Authority needs to take responsibility instead of blaming us,” Commins said after a meeting in August. “It is their responsibility to get rid of the bedbugs, not ours for noncompliance. They cannot kick us out if we have bedbugs, and that is exactly what they are trying to do.”
Meadville Housing Authority Board member Tom Youngblood said that although the Board does not want to evict residents for noncompliance, the threat to do so may be essential to the eventual eradication of bedbugs, according to a September 2023 article in the Meadville Tribune.
The Meadville Housing Authority did not respond to multiple phone and email requests for comment.

Associate Professor of Communication and Media Joe Tompkins attended a recent meeting of the Meadville Housing Authority to “show support for some of the tenants there who are dealing with bedbug issues.”
“I think it’s not being handled very well by the Housing Authority,” Tompkins said. “The residents don’t think that the Housing Authority is doing what they should be doing to address the problem, (and) that they’re not following Housing and Urban Development guidelines,” Tompkins said, referring to the federal housing agency. “I’ve heard stories from residents of eviction threats from the Housing Authority if they complain too much or don’t follow arbitrary guidelines.”
Tompkins also said that the Holland Towers infestation was different from the Paris infestation in one key way; visitors from Paris are only in the city temporarily.
“Keep in mind they are going to get to leave eventually,” Tompkins said about Paris visitors. “These people who live in Holland Towers, they don’t have any options to leave, and they’re stuck there. So they’re left to deal with the constant stress of this bedbug infestation that doesn’t seem to be going away.”
The anxiety that surrounds a bedbug outbreak seems to contribute heavily to the way it is interpreted on a large scale over time.
Associate Professor of Biology and Biochemistry Margaret Nelson compared the public’s interpretation of bedbugs to that of other diseases.
“One of the things that re-entered the public consciousness with the time of the pandemic was being more careful about things like hand washing and, you know, not coming into work when you’re feeling unwell … that on some level public health people had been telling you for a very long time,” Nelson said. “Then we became more vigilant, so there are probably other things about the spread of these or other somethings that we should be more perhaps attuned to for good practice that we had just gotten a bit more cavalier about because for a long time it was seemingly not a problem.”
Nelson said that frequent cleaning and checking for bedbugs, especially when traveling or using second hand furniture or clothing will help in reducing the likelihood of an outbreak.
She added that  patterns of public consciousness seem to be impacting the interpretation of various outbreaks.
“Bedbugs have been a problem since at least the Egyptian times, so it’s not a new problem,” Nelson said, before adding that the use of insecticides from the 1950s lowered the number of outbreaks, and therefore social consciousness around them.
Nelson said that an increase in travel, the banning of and resistance to such insecticides within the last 20 years, and social media’s “amplifying effect” on the issue has contributed to panic that is spreading now.
“There’s a whole kind of area of this risk perception — somewhat unfamiliar things, things that are getting a lot of press, things that sort of seem gross to us … that weighs more heavily on us psychologically it seems creepier or scarier,” Nelson said. “We aren’t always rational about how we assess these things.”
Nelson brought this idea of dismantling a harmful stigma home to Allegheny students.
“Maybe you’re in more danger wandering across North Main while staring at your phone and not looking to see if there are any cars coming, than of the bedbug getting you in the dorm,” Nelson said.
Associate Professor of Biology and Global Health Studies Becky Dawson elaborated on this point.
“I think more than anything it’s like a fear epidemic,” Dawson said. “It’s kind of gross to think that there are literally bugs in your bed and they’re biting you when you sleep.”
She clarified, however, the limited extent of the physical danger of bedbugs, calling them, “a common pest.”
“They’re everywhere all the time,” Dawson said. “I think that that’s normal. I think that they’re a pest and a nuisance. I mean, they’re a health threat in that they spread really easily and you wouldn’t want bedbugs to get into a healthcare facility, but, to the best of our knowledge, they don’t transmit diseases.”
Dawson said that during an infestation, bedbugs can be found in crevices of mattresses, drapes, light sockets and “places where we don’t normally see them.”
One of the most effective ways to eradicate bedbugs from entire rooms is extreme heat or the use of steam-heaters, but according to Dawson, “It’s not like you can just walk into somebody’s house and heat it up.”
She said that before such a heat treatment, all plastic and some wood would need to be removed and that two treatments often produce the best results.
“If they’re in your bed,you need to wash your sheets at a really really high temperature and you need to scrub in your bed and then vacuum your bed repeatedly,” Dawson said. “They’re just hard to get rid of.”
She also commented on the reality of an infestation for people in shared residences.
“It definitely is an inconvenience for people that are living in communal spaces… if you’re in dorms, apartment, buildings, long-term care facilities, you’re depending on your neighbor, taking care of their stuff because they’ll (bedbugs) crawl down the hallway,” Dawson said. “They’ll crawl under your door. They are mobile, especially when they’re adults. They can move so it is really hard to get under control when you’re sharing space with other people.”
According to the Center for Disease Control, “bedbugs have been found in five-star hotels and resorts and their presence is not determined by the cleanliness of the living conditions where they are found.”
“We need to not stigmatize them and assume that this is something that has to do with self poverty, or people who don’t take care of themselves — that’s not the case whatsoever,” Dawson said. “I think we need to de-stigmatize it, acknowledge that they exist everywhere and work to get rid of them.”