For several weeks now, bed bugs have been pilgrims on the Camino de Santiago. Hoteliers from the Pontevedra municipality of Caldas have pointed to pilgrims’ backpacks and public transportation as the main way of transmitting these insects.
Thus, the manager of the Albor hostel, Yolanda Rey, explains to Europa Press that this year pilgrims are making more use of the backpack transportation service, so if there is a backpack that contains them, when they go all together, “it will automatically makes that contagion.”
Next, he pointed out that bed bugs “cannot be eradicated”, but that “they must be controlled.” In this way, when a pilgrim tells him that he saw a bedbug, he uses ozone, he removes all the textile elements where they can hide and uses an insecticide, in addition, that room is unusable until the problem is eliminated.
Another of the Caldas hoteliers, the owner of the La Posada Doña Urraca hostel, Jesús Fariña, has agreed with Rey’s words and has stated that bedbugs on the Camino “there have always been” and has stressed that although this year “it was more pronounced “It’s not a plague.”
Regarding pilgrims, Fariña has indicated that they believe they should be more aware of where they leave their backpacks throughout their journey.
The mayor of Caldas, Juan Manuel Rey, has pointed out that “a situation is being magnified” that neither in the City Council nor in the Local Police “there is” any complaint.
However, he recalled that a few months ago a hostel that had this problem closed, but currently the hotel establishments in the town “have everything at full capacity” and “they have nothing.”
Finally, he pointed out that if it were a plague it would not only affect the shelters but also the homes of the neighbors and he stressed that “there are” no complaints about this.
In Portugal, extermination companies warned that there has been an increase in requests to treat bed bug problems in the country, especially in large centers such as Lisbon, where they claim that there is a real “plague.”
“We cannot respond to all requests, because the level of infestation, especially in the Lisbon area, is very high,” the president of the Portuguese National Association for Urban Pest Control (ANCPU) explained to the EFE agency. , João Leitão, who detailed that this last summer there were “many more” cases.
Paris raised the alarm weeks ago with its infestation of bedbugs, which reached cinema seats and subway and train seats and caused the City Council to ask the French State for help, but these insects are not new to the inhabitants of Portugal and these days they star in articles in Portuguese media.
Their presence has increased exponentially in the last 10 years with the tourism boom, since bedbugs easily travel in travelers’ suitcases and end up settling in the mattresses and sofas of their destination city.
“In my company we did two or three treatments a year. Currently we do six, seven or eight a day,” said Leitão, who however clarified that at the moment he has not received reports of them being present on Portuguese public transport. .
They work in tourist accommodation but also in private homes, with “totally infested” buildings, because the bedbugs even manage to move from one floor to another.
The representative of the extermination companies did not hesitate to speak of a “plague”, despite the fact that, he regretted, there is no great awareness on the part of public entities about this problem.
“It has been us, the associations and companies, who have tried to raise awareness,” he said.
The Portuguese General Directorate of Health (DGS) recently assured, in a comment sent to the weekly Expresso, that it has “no formal report on possible bedbug infestations by the human health and animal health authorities, both at the regional and local level.”
While bed bugs wreak havoc, another insect from the same family, the Asian bed bug, has begun to cause alarmism in the country due to its increasingly frequent presence in homes, although experts assure that it is harmless to humans and animals.
“It is a totally herbivorous species,” says Hugo Gaspar, a researcher at the FLOWer Lab, a group from the Center for Functional Ecology of the University of Coimbra that tries to raise awareness among the population about this new insect.
It began to be sighted in Portugal in 2018 and since then there has been an “exponential growth”, because it tries to enter houses to seek shelter during hibernation, but does not present health risks.