Bright Future for Urban Pest Control

Insect pests in the urban environment transmit diseases, threaten the structures in which we live or simply annoy and irritate us. They have adapted to and thrived in human habitations where abundant food, comfortable shelter and few competitors are found. The battle against urban insect pests has been waged for centuries, using physical barriers and weapons, inorganic products, natural repellents and insecticides and, of course, synthetic chemical insecticides.
    Many of the pesticides developed for use in agriculture have found their way into the armoury of chemicals used against urban pests, yet until recently, few products were developed specifically for the urban entomology market because of the high cost of product development and the relatively small market in comparison with the agricultural sector.
    Recent developments in urban pest control indicate a change in the way products are developed for this market. Highly specific insecticides, attractants, repellents and growth regulators as well as biological control agents have been or are being developed to deal with urban pests. By the very nature of their specificity these products have a limited or no market in the agricultural sector.
    At the beginning of July 1993, the 1st International Conference on Insect Pests in the Urban Environment was held as St. John’s College in Cambridge University. The recently published proceedings of this conference document the spectrum of innovative and technical research and development in the field of urban pest control.
    At the low-tech and least toxic end of the spectrum lies the highly successful use of polystyrene beads floating on the surface of latrine pits and water tanks to control disease carrying mosquitoes in India and Egypt, as reported by C.F.Curtis of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. Contrasting with this approach is the development of computer based spatial analysis tools for monitoring cockroach populations, as reported by Richard J Brenner of the US Department of Agriculture, Medical and Veterinary Entomology Research Laboratory. Use of these tools allow strategies using repellents, building management and maintenance and subtle environmental changes to be used to manipulate pest populations.
    The trend demonstrated by these two papers as elsewhere in the proceedings is that the pest control strategy which relies on large-scale use of chemical pesticides to eradicate pest populations will become a thing of the past. Future urban pest control will rely heavily on an understanding of the ecological characteristics of pests and pest populations. It will build on integrated approaches which manipulate the environment and alter the behaviour of the pests, while gradually causing populations to move elsewhere or to be reduced to unviable levels.
    Malaria and filariasis transmitting mosquitoes, cockroaches, allergy causing mites, ants, timber consuming beetles and termites, flies, fleas, carpet beetles and other urban pests are featured in the conference proceedings. Control methods discussed include the effective use of conventional insecticides as well as novel chemicals such as insect growth regulators (IGRs) pheromones and repellents. The knowledge that this information is available and published with the aim of making it accessible to a wider audience is encouraging. The hope is that the methods and materials reported will also become widely available to practitioners.(MD)

Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on Insect Pests in the Urban Environment, K.B. Wildey & W.H. Robinson (Eds.), ICIPUE, Draycott, Church Walk, Bletchley, Milton Keynes, MK3 6DQ, UK, £30, 498 pp.

[This article first appeared in Pesticides News No. 22, December 1993, page 20]