Challenges

Cockroach control poses an increasing challenge for many pest controllers under the competing pressures of modern hygiene standards and economic realities, not to mention the great adaptability of cockroach populations.

The advent of cockroach gel baits in the mid-Nineties dramatically increased the acceptability of insecticide control measures, allowing entrenched problems in many areas to be successfully overcome through concentrated eradication efforts.

The parallel innovation of sticky traps played almost as important a role, providing controllers with a simple and effective way of monitoring the success of baiting, and allowing them to follow-up initial treatment with further targeted efforts to eliminate final pockets of infestation.

So much so that by the start of the new millennium many pest controllers were daring to believe they had seen the end of cockroaches as a serious public health problem.

Despite the fact that cockroaches in the UK generally occur in isolated populations without regular re-infestation from an endemic environmental reservoir, hopes that major problems form the past were a thing of the past have been dashed in recent years.

Current Control Problems >><< Approach