Pinpointing the Challenges

Decreasing direct Local Authority involvement in housing and increasing economic pressures on housing trusts, associations and other landlords is leading to a switch away from regular preventative to one-off reactive pest control in many cases.

This reduction in control pressure is not being helped by increasing numbers of houses in multiple-occupation, growing economic pressures on small businesses and increasingly stretched environmental health departments.

In complete contrast, sectors like food processing and retailing are facing a different challenge, thanks to the progressive tightening of food safety and quality assurance standards. Their particular task is to sustain verifiably high levels of control throughout their operations day-in, day-out.

These industry factors are accompanied by a number of pest adaptation challenges – primarily pesticide resistance and gel aversion.

Physiological resistance to every widely-used insecticide, including those in all current gel baits, has been identified in cockroaches.

Furthermore, control in the USA in particular has been complicated by the emergence of populations with a clear aversion to gel baits.

While neither insecticide resistance nor gel aversion are likely to pose major immediate problems in most cases, they represent a clear challenge to achieving sustained cockroach control – especially where programmes are less effective or complete than they might be.

The fact that even control levels of over 90% may only temporarily reduce a cockroach population to a level which gives the impression of good control makes these challenges particularly significant.

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