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Repellents: Wave of the future?
1 Sep, 2004 By: Norman Cooper Pest Management ProfessionalThere is a significant change happening in the thoughts, plans and laboratories of the people who create the new products we use. It's still too early to tell whether this change will mature into what historians will call a "paradigm shift" (a decidedly overused term). That will depend upon whether this change results in better products and a more effective and successful way for us to conduct our business. But if these ideas can come to market as effective products, our industry will benefit from a more effective and lower risk tool arsenal.
Over the past few years, we have seen two trends negatively impact our ability to control pests:
1. Increased pesticide regulation — This has been a trend that shows no sign of stopping soon. It is offset somewhat by foot-dragging in the execution of regulatory prohibitions because these agents, while toxic, are necessary. Without effective replacements, the benefits gained by stopping their use is offset by the economic consequences of withholding them. This catch-22 will become worse before it gets better. Regulatory attempts to ban these products will be met with acceptance only if effective replacements are available.
2. Resistance — At the same time, recognition is growing that killing individual pests might not be the best model for controlling the pest species. In this sense, pest control has a lot in common with medicine. In the area of infectious disease, drug companies have found themselves in a constant battle to develop new antibiotics as microscopic bugs evolve into resistant strains that no longer respond to the treatments. Fortunately, the pharmaceutical industry has been able to keep up, but the problem they face in the future is not the ability to develop products that will kill microbes, but the ability to do so without also killing the patient. Life, if it is to survive, overcomes toxic threats by evolving into resistant strains that no longer respond to existing treatments, and the increasing toxicity needed to control disease-causing microbes becomes too toxic to use. Sound familiar?
REPEL VS. KILL
What is emerging from current pest control research is the recognition that you might not be able to kill all the pests, but you might be able to repel them. Repellents have been around for longer than the toxins we commonly use, but until recently, have been relatively ineffective when compared with modern pesticides.
They are much safer, because the doses need to repel are less than toxic, thus eliminating the environmental toxicity issues that plague regulators. And because they are nontoxic, they are not subject to the emergence of resistant strains — thus enabling them to remain effective indefinitely. The challenge now is to evolve agents with repellent properties that keep pests away as well as the control agents we now use.
At the PestWorld 2003 show in Dallas, I saw the future in that regard. Capsicum, which makes peppers hot, is used to make pepper spray. It has also been used as a repellent for insects, mammals, birds and other species for centuries. In fact, in the years before the modern chemical pesticide industry, capsicum was among the best pest control agents available.
NTI International (609/734-8484), a New Jersey company, has taken capsicum and complexed it with other food-grade ingredients to increase the repellency of capsicum until it works as well, if not better, than the pesticides currently accepted as perimeter control agents. The product, NouGuard, increases the irritancy of capsicum because its ingredients have an attraction to cell membrane components and the outer surfaces of insects. It persists outdoors in the wet Florida climate for more than three months per application.
In a conversation I had with a colleague, an owner of a major pest control company, I learned that he not only uses the product but believes it's the wave of the future. And in conversations with researchers and suppliers, I have learned that most believe repellents hold the most promise for the future of pest control. Having done some research for NTI myself, I tend to agree.
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