On a humid August night, a masked figure dressed all in white sprayed insecticide into the darkest corners of gardens, sending cats fleeing and dogs barking.
It was 4:30 am on Tuesday, August 19, in a housing development in La Fare-les-Oliviers (Bouches-du-Rhône, southern France), and Frédéric Walh, an operator with the Entente Interdépartementale pour la Démoustication du Littoral Méditerranéen (EID Méditerranée, Interdepartmental Agreement for Mosquito Control along the Mediterranean Coast), was crawling through bushes in search of tiger mosquitoes. The air started stinging in his wake, and the acrid smell of deltamethrin – a pyrethroid insecticide – prompted the few bystanders to take shelter indoors.
Standing in his boxer shorts at his gate, Raymond Khayat, 78, who has lived in this house for 45 years, came out to meet him to let him in to the backyard, where a small pool was hidden behind the fig trees. From the window, his wife, Marie, worried: “And the figs? Are we not going to be able to eat them anymore?” According to instructions distributed earlier in mailboxes, they should wait two or three days and rinse them thoroughly.
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