Yahoo Finance France rushing to kill pests ahead of Paris Olympics after bedbug outbreak
French businesses have been scrambling to kill insects, rats and other pests ahead of the Paris Olympics, after an infestation of bedbugs in the city last year.
Pest control business Rentokil said demand for its services surged in France last year amidst the outbreak.
The London-listed company said its pest control revenues jumped by 21.8pc in Europe last year, naming France as a main driver of this, along with Germany, Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg.
Paris was overwhelmed by bedbugs last year, with reports of the insects swarming the seats of trains and buses.
The outbreak alarmed tourists and sparked fears that a prolonged outbreak could damage the success of the Paris Olympics, which begins in July.
Mathilde Panot, a politician with the France Unbowed party, brought a test tube full of bedbugs into the country’s parliament last October, warning about a “wave of panic that has seized the country”.
She claimed the insects were “proliferating in all daily living spaces: hospitals, schools, workplaces, retirement homes, prisons, trains and even cinema theatres”.
Clara Quinque, marketing manager at Rentokil’s French arm, said in an interview with industry publication Pest Control Technology last November that her company had seen a 60pc increase in requests for bedbug services in the French capital compared with the prior year.
Bedbugs are small insects that can live in furniture or bedding. They are parasitic, biting people and leaving itchy marks. The pests effectively hitchhike on people’s clothes into homes and offices, which they then infest.
Outbreaks are notoriously difficult to eradicate, in part because bedbugs have grown resistant to chemical treatments used to kill them over the last century.
As well as chemical treatments, bedbugs can be killed by raising the temperature inside a property until the pests suffocate.
France’s bedbug crisis sparked fears that the outbreak could spread to London after videos surfaced online claiming to show bedbugs on Transport for London services – although questions have been raised over their reliability.
Sadiq Khan, the Mayor of London, said last October that bedbugs were “a real source of concern” and that TfL was cleaning all transport infrastructure nightly to guard against outbreaks.
The Mayor said at the time: “We are speaking to our friends in Paris to see if there are any lessons to be learnt but for a variety of reasons we don’t think those issues will arise in London; but there is no complacency from TfL.”
The capital has suffered contained outbreaks over recent months. In November, Ealing Central Library in West London was forced to shut after staff members found bedbugs in the building. Rentokil was hired to exterminate them.
Last month, civil servants at the UK Health Security Agency in Canary Wharf were told to work from home because the building had become infested.
Rentokil’s revenues jumped by 45pc around the world in 2023. Shares rose by more than 13pc as markets opened on Thursday.
