October 6th - From Paris With... Bed Bugs?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 6 October 2023
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
My final podcast of the week is about the travel itch. And not in a good way. I tackle the apparent infestation of bedbugs in Paris, and what your rights may be if you are booked to travel there.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Friday the 6th of October and we have to talk about bedbugs. You may well have seen and heard many scare stories from particularly Paris that there is an infestation of these vile parasites, |
| 0:24.7 | and that they're popping up, for instance, on public transport. |
| 0:27.8 | There's a report today that one school in Paris is closed as a result of them. |
| 0:33.7 | And, of course, Paris being the capital of the world's most popular country for foreign visitors, |
| 0:43.4 | and also a very good place for us to go on holiday, |
| 0:47.3 | there's a lot of concern about whether people can, for example, cancel if they are unhappy about going to somewhere where there is such a big problem. |
| 1:00.6 | So I just wanted to look at that and tell you what they are and what you can do about it. |
| 1:04.8 | And spoiler alert, the answer is not very much. |
| 1:08.3 | Bed bugs, small insects, about a quarter inch, five millimeters long. They are |
| 1:15.1 | rarely happier than when feasting on human blood. They cause itchy bites that can be painful, |
| 1:23.1 | but very often you're not actually going to see the bite immediately. It could be days before it |
| 1:28.9 | appears and so you might not actually associate it with somewhere you have been to stay. |
| 1:35.0 | They are known as Cimex lectularius. They hide, according to the NHS, on bed frames, in mattresses, in clothing, in furniture, behind |
| 1:48.2 | pictures and under loose wallpaper. An interesting detail there. Detail, beetle. The US counterpart of |
| 1:56.6 | the NHS, the Centre for Disease Control, says bedbugs, a problem worldwide, are resurging. |
| 2:05.6 | And all the attention we're getting on, Paris suggests that they are resurging there, |
| 2:12.1 | an infestation taking hold, and some of these nasty creatures increasingly resistant to insecticide. |
| 2:21.4 | It wouldn't surprise me if there is an outbreak of bedbugs much worse than the kind of general |
| 2:30.2 | low-level number of bedbugs that there are pretty much in any any city in the world |
| 2:37.6 | because Paris is the capital of the world's most visited country and there's a fair chance of a |
| 2:44.9 | trip there if you stow away in somebody's luggage and they are very very good good at this. So we think there's a problem, |
| 2:53.4 | although a lot of it, I think, has been exaggerated by social media. What can you do about it? |
... |
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