Now that the U.S. House of Representatives has pretty much stopped functioning — lacking, as they currently do, anyone willing to be Speaker of the House — we journalists have to look elsewhere for interesting subjects to write about.
Many of us have found an interesting subject in the bed bugs of Paris. Paris, France… the potential site for the 2024 Summer Olympics.
This disturbing subject has been covered recently by Fox News, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, Aljazeera, Bloomberg, Reuters, The Washington Post, NPR, Travel and Leisure, Forbes, and of course, The Paris Review.
And now, the Pagosa Daily Post. I like to keep up with the global trends… unless they entail cash expenditures. Or mask-wearing.
Luckily for me, no one has yet proposed mask-wearing as a solution, to stop the explosive spread of bed bugs around the world.
Especially, the explosive spread in Paris. According to the French Union for Pest Control, “France’s bed bug problem has seen the number of cases go from 180,000 to 400,000 in just two years”.
So a bit of background. From Forbes:
Bed bugs were almost wiped out in the 1950s after increased use of pesticides and insect repellents including DDT. Almost ten years ago, Scientific American reported a huge increase in bed bugs globally, announcing that they could now be found in every U.S. state, and in the decade since, they haven’t gone away. Bed bugs are becoming increasingly resistant to chemicals, so — as is increasingly common with many insects — it is the stronger bugs which survive and stick around; we are creating new breeds of ‘superbugs’ generally, not just bed bugs.
Bed bugs have proliferated in many countries in recent years. In 2017, The Guardian reported “an exponential increase in bed bug infestation” across the U.K.
At the same time, Le Parisien reported an explosive increase in Paris, which has been struggling to keep numbers under control ever since. And utterly failed, it seems.
The name “bed bug” is very accurate. These are bugs that live in your bed, especially if your bed is located in Paris, France. But I gather that bed bugs look pretty much the same everywhere, and live on the same basic diet. Human blood.
They are about this big:
The female bed bug, after a nice meal, lays about 5 eggs a day, resulting in cute little baby bed bugs also looking for a nice meal.
Large infestations of bed bugs will reportedly acquire a “buggy” smell which has been described as something obnoxiously sweet. Some people have likened it to raspberries. If that were the worst of it, the folks in France wouldn’t be in such an uproar. But then, there’s the biting.
The bed bug crisis has certain financial implications in Paris, because they’re hoping to host the Olympics next summer. (We will emphasize the word “hoping.”)
Can the French Union for Pest Control outrun the bed bugs? The situation doesn’t look too promising.
When I was a kid, my mom used to tuck me into bed at night, with a little rhyme that I assume she learned from her own mother.
“Good-night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”
I didn’t know what a bed bug was, nor did I have any idea how, exactly, I would stop them from biting me. But it was a comforting little rhyme, nevertheless.
And I guess, based on the stories in the mainstream media, you can’t easily prevent them from biting you, once they’ve found a cozy home in your mattress.
But maybe we can bite back?
As some Daily Post readers will probably attest, we’re in the middle of a biodiversity mass extinction… and also in the middle of a climate crisis… while also needing to somehow feed a growing global population.
Eating bugs is a possible solution to all three of these challenges.
From BBC.com:
Around 2,000 insect species are eaten worldwide, in countries across Asia, South America and Africa. In Thailand, heaped trays of crisp deep-fried grasshoppers are sold at markets, and in Japan, wasp larvae – eaten live – are a delicacy. Insect cultivation uses a fraction of the land, energy and water required for traditional farming, and has a significantly lower carbon footprint.
Of course, the footprints are extremely tiny.
Crickets, raised as food, produce 80% less methane than cows, for example. (I have been unable to find information about methane production by bed bugs, but I assume it’s similar to crickets.)
I look forward to the day — in the not-too-distant future — when a climate-conscious crew member at McDonalds asks me:
“Would you like fries with those bed bugs?”
Or, if I were in Paris:
“Tu veux des frites avec ces punaises de lit?”
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.