A radical decision. But it still needs to be enforced. A mayor in the Loire has issued an order banning tiger mosquitoes from flying over his municipality, “on the grounds that their repeated, low-level or circular flights and their bites are likely to cause annoyance and exasperation”.
The text, signed by the mayor of Saint-Just-Saint-Rambert, dated 1 September and revealed by the TL7 Loire television channel, states in the most serious of terms that “any tiger mosquito that fails to comply” with the guidelines “risks prosecution”. “It’s a subject that’s both serious and trivial, but these little things can make our lives a nightmare,” added Olivier Joly, who heads the town of 15,000 inhabitants. “When I came back from holiday, residents came at me saying, ‘We can’t even have a drink outside anymore!’ So there was a need to re-engage the public on local measures,” he explained to AFP.
The town hall states that, to date, it has already allocated a budget of 45,000 euros towards mosquito traps, bat boxes, tit boxes and solar-powered perches for swallows, which are voracious mosquito eaters. Furthermore, in its order, the council is therefore urging the public to remove standing water from buckets, flowerpot saucers and old tyres, to maintain guttering and drains, and to cover or treat ponds. At this stage, “no mosquitoes have been arrested or fined,” jokes the mayor.
As a result of global warming, the tiger mosquito – once confined to tropical and subtropical regions and first detected in mainland France in 2004 – is steadily gaining ground. It is expected to spread to almost the entire country by 2085, with the exception of mountainous areas, and the risk of locally transmitted dengue could affect a significant part of the country, according to a recent study by the French National Research Institute for Development (IRD), CIRAD and the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics.
An article written by franceinfo (Radio France), initially published on 4 September 2026, 08:55 (CEST)