You may have heard there are bedbugs in Paris. Loads of them, apparently. In the past month, shaky-cam, out-of-focus footage of the creatures crawling on bus seats, in airports, and in cinemas have proliferated online. There have also been a lot of international people in Paris just lately, because of Paris Fashion Week and the Rugby World Cup and so on. So much noise has been made about bedbugs by these and other tourists that it has caused people as high up in French government as the deputy mayor of Paris, Emmanuel Grégoire, to issue statements to media like: “No one is safe. You can catch them anywhere and bring them home, and not detect them in time until they have multiplied and spread.”
Bedbugs aren’t something you hear about all that much here in London. Before this year, I couldn’t have told you what they look like or how you’re supposed to treat them. But in recent weeks, I’ve noticed that they’ve been coming up in conversation. The fear is that all these tiny bastards in Paris are going to hitch rides on travelers and take over London next. There is a direct train line from Paris that runs 15 times a day, as well as eight direct flights. Already, you can find evidence of people seeing them in London: a video of what looks like a bedbug on the Victoria line on the underground has spread like wildfire online, and people are busily declaring their intention to boil all their clothes. A post on Reddit captioned “and so it begins” shows someone with the very tip of a kitchen knife pointed at a fat red bedbug.
Over the last couple weeks or so I, too, have started to upset myself with this: believing that I needed to be vigilant against these invaders. I went to a party one Saturday night and decided to moderately tank the vibe by bringing up bedbugs. A few people immediately began shouting about how they weren’t sitting down on public transport, how one of them is due to go to Paris in three weeks and is considering canceling her trip. Others looked nonplussed, but gradually became uneasy: “I wasn’t worried at the beginning of this conversation, but now I’m freaking out,” one said. Someone else said the whole bedbugs thing feels a little like the naïve weeks before coronavirus was taken seriously. “Is it going to be that thing of everyone thinking, It won’t be us, up until the moment it’s everybody?”
Let’s take this as an experiment, though. I brought up bedbugs with, say, eight people, some of whom were worried about them because of what they’d seen online. After the conversations, everyone was worried. All these people have now gone away from the party with an increased awareness of bedbugs and the understanding that bedbugs are on the rise. Because I mentioned them.
Why did I mention them? Because I saw some videos online mentioning them. Why did those video-makers mention them? Same reason. It was only after the party that I looked up any data associated with bedbugs. And as soon as you look into it, there’s no evidence that there are more bedbugs in Europe than there ever were. The French national health body Anses reports that 11 percent of French homes had been infested between 2017 and 2022. That’s a high number, but it’s not a new number. (There’s a reason that number is so high versus 50 years ago, say, if you want to torture yourself with this information.)
What we seem to have is a new infestation of bedbug content rather than bedbugs themselves. I get it. They’re nightmarish, and therefore gripping. An almost invisible insect that feasts on your blood as you sleep, that could potentially cost you thousands and endless hours of stress to eliminate. But the truth is probably that if enough people were shoving camera phones into the creases of mattresses before the past few weeks, we’d be seeing just as many bedbugs online then as we do now. To paraphrase a saying I thought until this week came from, like, the Bible, but is in fact a Jordan Peterson tweet about a bottle of Evian water: There are bedbugs everywhere for those with the eyes to see.
I guess it’s not the worst consequence for people to know a bit more about a common pest and how to take reasonable precautions against them. But it is an interesting example of how a panic can be algorithmically generated. The good (bad) news is it seems that bedbugs are no more or less prevalent than they were before Paris Fashion Week. There are lots of bedbugs in Paris, and in pretty much all major cities with a high turnover of visitors. But of course if you’re reading this in 2024 while the whole of London is under a fumigation tent, I never said any of this.