PestWorld educational sessions offer plenty of choice

Dr Miller started her presentation by asking her audience to ‘Calm down dears!’ By which she meant that the industry has a huge role to play in stopping the public ‘freeking out’ about bed bugs. She didn’t see how the protocols which insist that people must undertake extensive preparation work before treatment and also make residents destroy all their personal stuff is helping.

In her experience many elderly or disable residents cannot do the preparation and therefore decide to live with the bugs. And destroying people’s stuff she felt was equally abusive, especially for those who can ill afford to replace their things. It’s even worse for people with dementia.

She concluded that not all infestations are the same and pest professionals need to assess the situation and tailor their approach and price to suit.

Dr Dini Miller asked us all to ‘calm down’

On a practical level, Dr Miller and her team have been looking at the role of vacuum cleaners and small-scale heat treatments against bed bugs. They have concluded that vacuuming can play a much greater role in bed bug treatments, even if it is just to clean up the dead bugs after treatment making follow-up inspections so much easier. Vacuums are also effective against live bugs, first instars and even eggs. Dini suggested using panty hose (tights to you and me) to collect the bugs inside the cleaner so that they can easily be removed and destroyed. Small scale heat treatment also got the thumbs-up.

Nothing new!
Dr Mike Potter from the University of Kentucky provided a guided tour of our long and bloody war with bed bugs in his paper Stakes and silver bullets: Battling bed bugs through history. Bed bugs have certainly been the scourge of man for many millennia as his talk began with pictures of the first bed bugs ever found in mattresses 70,000 years old – so hardly a new pest! From here he charted the progress of this pest right through to the problems of today. For those who missed his talk, much of the material will be appearing in a book currently in production and being organised by Stephen Doggett from Australia.

Surprisingly, the educational programme included just one session on Zika. Entitled Zika and the threat of emerging mosquito-borne diseases it proved very popular with standing room only. The threat from Zika is very real in the USA with a total of 4,091 cases reported so far (as of 26 October), 139 of which were locally acquired mosquito-borne cases. Surprisingly too, whilst there were plenty of companies in the exhibition listing mosquito control as part of their business, far fewer than you might have expected were majoring on Zika. One of the few who did so was Central Life Sciences.

Rodents on the agenda
A gathering of pest professionals is never complete without some information on rodent control. The educational programme contained several papers including one that we deliberately didn’t attend – Building a better mousetrap: Research into rodent bait station architecture. This was not because it wasn’t relevant but because we had already reported on the research by Grzesiek Buczkowski from Purdue University in Pest Issue 43: February & March 2016.

The positive effects of rodenticides on public health and the environment stood out as a must hear session, if only because the programme summary stated that it would ‘review the latest in rodent management strategies and technologies that promote effective rodent management while mitigating the risk of pesticide exposure to people and non-target wildlife.’ In other words, what the USA is doing about rodenticide stewardship. On the evidence of this session Europe is a good way ahead of the US. The only change discussed to the way anticoagulant rodenticides are used was to consider using non-toxic monitoring baits. However In the question and answer session it became clear that NPMA is already in discussion about stewardship with the UK’s Campaign for Responsible Rodenticide Use (CRRU).

The session on Rats as sponges for pathogens – An update from the Vancouver Rat Project by Kaylee Byers from the University of British Columbia was both fascinating and disturbing. It is too early for widespread conclusions to be drawn from this project which is being conducted in the downtown Eastside district of Vancouver. This is an area in the heart of the city, close to major tourist areas but populated by down and outs, many high on drugs and, by all accounts, with a massive rat problem. The project has already established that these rodents are capable of carrying and transmitting not just the diseases we normally associate with rats but also infections such as MRSA, Salmonella, E. Coli and C. dificile. However, the risk of infection varies considerably within the district as the rats live in discreet groups and some groups carry far fewer pathogens than others.

For UK visitors, the session was disturbing on two counts. Firstly that, in a rich country like Canada, such poverty and depravation exists and, secondly, because the public authorities do not accept that rats pose any sort of health threat. This is what the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority is saying publicly: “In Vancouver… we know that because we aren’t getting human disease where the vector is known to be rats, we know they are a nuisance, but they are not a public health concern in our area.” Really?