The Importance of Pest Control: Protecting Your Home and Health

Pests are a nuisance and can cause property damage. Some, such as cockroaches and rodents, pose health threats.

Keeping the environment around structures and homes clean helps prevent many pest problems. Eliminate debris that provides hiding or breeding places, regularly empty water-holding containers, and keep garbage sealed in plastic bags. Contact Pezz Pest Control now!

Pests cause damage, contaminate food and increase health risks. They also reduce productivity and increase costs. Safe pest control is everyone’s responsibility, starting with preventing pests from entering the facility in the first place.

Prevention can involve many activities, including pest exclusion, sanitation, harborage elimination and inspection to avoid importing pests into the facility. In addition, it includes identification of conducive conditions to correct before pests develop and preventive treatments to keep some perennial threats at low levels.

Pest exclusion involves limiting access to the area where pests live and breed. This may include keeping trash cans tightly closed, removing garbage on a regular basis and sealing up cracks and crevices. It can also include removing wood mulch from around buildings to reduce the attractiveness of roosting and nesting sites for rodents.

Sanitation is important to prevent the spread of pests and their diseases. It is important to establish a Master Sanitation Schedule and adhere to it. Cleaning should be monitored and documented as a part of the MSS. Leaking pipes should be fixed. Food processing facilities should not leave spilled or discarded product lying around and should be clean and dry at all times.

Harborage elimination is important to prevent the development of some pests, such as ants and beetles. It can include storing food in sealed containers, keeping garbage in closed and secure trash cans and removing rubbish regularly. It can also include repairing rotten walls and floors to remove attracting materials such as wood.

Some pests are migratory and recur periodically, so monitoring is important. This can be done by scouting, identifying the presence of pests and determining the extent of their damage. Monitoring can help identify trends and determine if controls are working or need to be changed.

Some pests have developed resistance to common pesticides, so it is important to use integrated pest management techniques and rotate the types of pesticides used. These methods can also reduce the amount of pesticide that is needed, and they can help minimize the development of resistant populations of pests. Pest control technicians must be knowledgeable about these methods and be able to identify the type of pests they are dealing with in order to select an appropriate control method.

Suppression

Pest control involves reducing the number of pests to an acceptable level without doing significant harm to other organisms or the environment. It requires careful consideration of costs and benefits, especially when the goal is to preserve food, property or natural resources. Preventing pests from causing problems should always be the first priority.

In general, the methods used for preventing pests are much less costly than controlling them after an infestation has occurred. Prevention includes taking steps to keep pests from entering buildings, such as keeping garbage in tightly closed containers and removing it regularly, fixing leaky pipes and maintaining screens on windows and doors.

Rodents are the most common pests in both homes and commercial properties, but ants, fleas, bedbugs, wasps and bees can also cause problems. Pest control techniques for these creatures usually involve setting traps or baits to catch them. Insect infestations are more difficult to deal with, but pest control methods can include sprinkling insecticide or baits in places where they are found.

Mechanical or physical controls include devices such as traps, barriers, fences, nets, spraying machines and radiation. These can be used in conjunction with other strategies or on their own to control a specific pest species. Control methods that alter the environment also can be effective, such as irrigation, changing soil conditions, adding mulch and introducing predators or parasites that affect pest populations.

Some factors, such as climate, naturally influence the population of many pests, allowing them to rise and fall in response to changes in their environment. The presence of natural enemies, the availability of shelter and the amount of available food can also affect pest numbers. Natural barriers such as mountains and large bodies of water restrict the spread of many pests.

Some pests are more likely to be controlled by chemical means than others, but only when the appropriate type of pesticide is used in an appropriate way. Many pesticides are volatile and can contaminate food, utensils, clothing and living areas, so precautions must be taken to prevent exposure. When using chemicals to control pests, it is important to follow all label instructions and safety warnings. Chemical pest control methods can range from ultra-low volume (ULV) fogging to fumigation, which involves sealing a building and filling it with an extremely toxic fume to kill off all pests inside.

Eradication

Pest control is all about keeping pests away from people and their property. That’s because pests can spread disease, contaminate food and damage structures. There are several ways to control pests, from physical exclusion to chemical applications. The method used depends on the kind of pest and its environment. For example, baiting is more effective for rodents than trapping is for cockroaches. Pest control companies often use multiple methods to deal with a single infestation.

The ultimate goal of pest control is eradication, which means that the microbe responsible for a disease can no longer be transmitted in a given area. Eradication is difficult, and the process must be repeated over a large geographic area to ensure that the disease does not return once control measures are curtailed.

To eradicate a pest, the population must be reduced to very low levels. This can be accomplished through natural predators, such as birds or fish, or through biological controls, such as nematodes that feed on the roots of infested plants. In this way, the pests are killed without harming the host plant. This technique is a powerful tool for managing pests, especially those that pose a threat to human health or the environment.

Chemicals are one of the most common methods of pest control. They usually come in the form of a spray that can be applied directly to the surface of a suspected pest problem. When applying chemicals, make sure you read the label carefully to understand the directions and risks involved. You should also be careful to dispose of any leftover pesticides properly. Some chemicals are toxic to humans, so you should only hire a pest control technician with a license and insurance.

Other kinds of pest control are less obvious but still very effective. For example, parasitic nematodes can help control pests such as fleas, grubs and ants by killing them at the source. Nematodes are microscopic worms that live in soil. There are many different species of nematode, some of which are helpful and others that are harmful. The roach-eating nematode Steinernema carpocapsae, for instance, can be sprayed on gardens to kill off unwanted pests without harming the garden or its inhabitants.

Biological Control

Biological control is the use of living predators, parasitoids, pathogens, or competitors to suppress pest populations or reduce damage to crops, plants, and animals. Biological control is an important component of integrated pest management (IPM) programs. NIFA supports research in biologically-based pest management that seeks to reduce our dependence on synthetic pesticides.

Biocontrol is generally regarded as the most natural, environmentally safe, energy self-sufficient and economically viable method of pest control. However, the practice is not without problems and can be challenging to implement successfully. Biological control involves one of three approaches: the importation and release of exotic natural enemies to establish a permanent population (classical biological control); conservation of resident or introduced beneficial organisms; and mass rearing and periodic releases of natural enemies, either on a seasonal basis or inundatively.

Classical biological control was first used in the late 1800s to control citrus pests, and is a successful example of the success of biological control in reducing pest populations below economic threshold levels. For example, the alfalfa weevil, a serious introduced pest of forage crops in the United States, was eliminated by introducing several predatory insects and parasitoid flies.

Conserving native or introduced natural enemies to enhance their numbers and activities may be as simple as leaving a patch of untreated weed in the middle of a sugarcane field, to provide nectar for a local population of a species of wasp that attacks white grubs damaging sugarcane roots. This practice conserves the wasp population, reduces grub damage to sugarcane, and provides an alternative to the more damaging application of herbicides.

Inundative releases of natural enemies are most often used to quickly knock down pest populations, rather than to establish a long-term balance with the population of their hosts or prey. This approach can be very effective when the natural enemy is specific to the pest, for example, when a fungus is released to control diseases of citrus trees. Inundative releases can also be more efficient than spot applications of larger, more mobile agents such as predatory mites and parasitoids. However, the presence of a natural enemy can be adversely affected by certain soil and water conditions, and by climate-induced changes in the biology or habitat of the target pest or its natural enemies.