A meeting for schools AND PMPs

Past TIPMAPS meetings have included presentations by
Regulatory officials such as then TDA Assistant
Commissioner of Pesticide Programs, Jimmy Bush.

This November will mark the fourth year that Texas school IPM coordinators have gotten together for their annual TIPMAPS (Texas IPM Affiliates for Public Schools) networking and educational conference on integrated pest management for school facilities.  If you want to talk with an enthusiastic group about IPM, this is the place to be.

A handful of PMPs have attended this meeting in the past, but the doors are open to much wider participation. TIPMAPS welcomes pest control contractors to attend and become members, and the meeting could be a great way to make contacts with new school districts as well as building stronger relations with the districts you are already servicing.  In addition, I guarantee that you will gain insight into how school IPM programs operate under the Texas school IPM rules and regulations. Associate membership for pest control professionals, manufacturers and other vendors is $100 per year.  Click here for an application.

The 2012 TIPMAPS meeting will be held November 14-15 in San Marcos, TX at the Embassy Suites.  Vendor booths are two for one this year ($500 for both the Facility Masters and TIPMAPS meetings), and regular registration for the two-day TIPMAPS meeting is $125. The facilities are top-notch, the speakers are engaging, and CEUs are offered; so if your business is involved in servicing Texas school districts, this may be one meeting to get on the calendar early.  Hotel rooms will be limited, so it's recommended to make your reservations early (by Oct 22 to get the group rate) by clicking on this special link, or when calling the hotel directly, by mentioning the group name TASBO/group code TAI (phone 512 805 5340).

To learn more about the conference go to http://www.tasbo.org/about-the-conference-mao-tfm To learn more about TIPMAPS, visit their website at http://tipmaps.org/

Bed bug control in public housing

Last month the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) published its official guidance for public housing authorities and managers of Section 8 (federally subsidized) housing.  If you do pest control work for public housing, you should be familiar with this new document.

Click here for the guidance notice PIH-2012-17 and here for guidance on prevention and safe removal of bed bugs.  Thanks to Allison Taisey and her blog on IPM in multifamily housing for this update.

Gee, I love my job

Today's IPM Coordinator training class at
Plano Independent School District.

As I write, I'm sitting in a mostly dark room listening to my Texas AgriLife colleagues Don Renchie and Janet Hurley walk a group of almost 40 school IPM Coordinators through a long list of rules and regulations about how pesticides must be used in Texas public schools.  In between jokes, back-and-forth banter, and scribbling pens, learning is taking place and it's a beautiful thing. 

Given a choice, I suspect most of us would probably not choose to spend our day watching a PowerPoint slide show and listening to speakers for hours. But there is little boring about this session between a group of eager learners and an entertaining speaker (and if you know Dr. Don Renchie, you know what I mean).  I know the efforts made by Janet Hurley to keep this training interesting, relevant, and interactive.  A wireless audience response system gets students interacting with us trainers, and shows both the class and the trainers how well the message is being conveyed.  Refreshments are handy and (at least today) the chairs are comfortable. Life is good.

I've found few things more satisfying that imparting knowledge to a motivated group of adult learners.  Some of my personal best friends are teachers and find great fulfillment in teaching children important life skills. Personally, give me a group of adults.  Sure kids are cute, and their innocence and naivete is engaging; but adults need education just as much as the kids. Adults are easily bored, often critical, sometimes prejudiced and usually forgetful; but nothing in my book is better than giving adult learners skills that they need to excel in their jobs and/or life. The rewards outweigh the pains.

School IPM coordinators, and the PMPs who work for them, are given the weighty responsibility of keeping  school districts pest-free while balancing pesticide risks.  This isn't easy.  Coordinators have to first master a dozen or so pages of laws and regulations; they have to learn tongue-twisting pesticide names and their properties; they have to organize reams of records; they have to fight for scarce  budget dollars; they have to counsel frustrated principals, teachers and sometimes parents; and they have to be ready for unannounced visits from state inspectors.  Few of them asked for their jobs as IPM coordinator, rather they were assigned the position usually on top of several other jobs. 

Watching and listening to classes like this respond to speakers and ask intelligent and probing questions is highly satisfying.  Over the years I watched some of our IPM class and PMP alumni work their way up through the food chain in their school districts and pest control companies.  I've seen people who were initially reluctant to be assigned the job of "bug killer" only to embrace the position and take great satisfaction in their new job. I like to think that I and my colleagues have played a part in the pride and high performance of more than a few of these men and women.  And that's why I love my job.

CEU Opportunity in Dallas next week

Live in north Texas and still need your CEU credits for 2012? Our office at the Texas AgriLife Center at Dallas will be offering a 5-hour training next week on Thursday, March 1.  Speakers will include Melody Lee (TDA), Dr. Jim McAfee (Extension), Micah Pace (Texas Forest Service), Rob Cook (US EPA) and myself.  You can preregister through Monday, or register the day of the training (you save $15 by pre-registering).  

To register online, go to   https://agriliferegister.tamu.edu/events/index.cfm.  Search on the keyword "IPM" and select the link for 2012 Spring IPM Seminar at the Dallas location.  When you get there, click on the Enroll Now button.  A flier with the schedule, titles of talks and location is available by clicking here.

This is always a good conference, and the food is good too. I hope to see some of you next week.

Pyrethroid label changes hit the streets soon

You can recognize a pyrethroid insecticide by
reading the active ingredient list.  Pyrethroid
common names end with  the suffixes "-thrin"
(such as bifenthrin) or -ate (such as esfenvalerate).

The past few years has seen a major shift in the insecticides the pest control industry uses to provide long-term, residual control of general insect pests.  In the 1990s and early 2000s, chlorpyrifos, diazinon and assorted other organophosphate (OP) and carbamate insecticides dominated much of the pest management professional and consumer pesticide markets. Passage of the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act, and a conscious effort by U.S. EPA regulators to wean the country from OPs, created a regulatory environment that favored pesticides with lower toxicity potential for human and wildlife. Indeed, a recent study by Alison Clune and colleagues from Emory University provides experimental evidence that levels of OP metabolites in human urine decreased significantly between 1999 and 2004.

This decline in OP and carbamate use in pest control opened the door for increased use of pyrethroid insecticides. For the most part, pyrethroids have proven to be good substitutes for the older insecticides; however in recent years there have been growing concerns that pyrethroids might not be as environmentally safe as originally thought. Specifically, pyrethroid residues are increasingly being found in sediment at the bottom of urban streams and rivers, where they are toxic to some aquatic insects and other invertebrates.

What this means for the average pest control technician is that there will be changes over the next few months in wording on all pyrethroid labels to minimize the risk of stormwater contamination from structural pest control.  PestWeb just published a nice summary of the new rules and timelines for implementation, and the Pyrethroid Working Group (a pesticide industry coalition) also summarized the upcoming changes and offers the opportunity to sign up for email alerts on changes to regulatory alerts on pyrethroid insecticides.

It's always important to read pesticide labels, but this change means that all PMPs should be especially alert to changes in the labels of these commonly used products.  The biggest changes will be in how pyrethroids are applied to outdoor impervious surfaces. All applications made to sidewalks, driveways, patios, porches and structural surfaces (such as windows, doors, and eaves) will be limited to spot and crack-and-crevice applications only (around windows and doorways this is defined as a spray band no more than a one-inch wide). In addition, if you are in the habit of using pyrethroid insecticides to treat sewer lids or walls for cockroaches, this type of application will be specifically prohibited.

Insect Superbowl Ad

I may be one of the few Americans who didn't see this ad when it came out during the Superbowl (I missed the first half), but since one of our pest management agents forwarded it today, I am now up-to-speed.

The animation on the ad is impressive, and the artists obviously did their homework in designing their lovable bugs. I identified a caterpillar, bumble bee, ants, grasshopper, lady beetles, a praying mantis, dragonfly, and (the star of the lineup, in my opinion) a jumping spider--all rendered pretty accurately from an anatomical perspective, if not a behavioral one.

It's fun to see insects being included in popular culture, especially when people are encouraged to see the world from a new (insect) perspective.  But in real life cars are not especially kind to insects.  Some of you may remember that about a year ago Dutch biologist Arnold van Vliet decided to estimate annual insect mortality due to cars.  After enlisting 250 drivers and counting insect mortality on a small part of each car (the license plate), he estimated nearly a trillion insect fatalities caused by cars every six months in the Netherlands alone.  Extrapolated to the U.S., where we drive our 200 million cars about 2.5 trillion miles annually, blogger Stephen Messenger estimates this would mean we're killing around 32.5 trillion insects on the front grills of our Tahoes, Camrys and Ford F-150s each year.

Chevrolet may be doing the insect world little good by introducing its fancy new sports car, but at least its ad is clever.

CDC publishes Morgellon's Study

Skin lesions and fibers on patients with unexplained
dermopathy. (from  Pearson et al. PLoS ONE)

Yesterday the Centers for Disease Control officially released their long-awaited study of people suffering from a condition that has come to be called Morgellons.  Preferring to use the term "unexplained dermopathy," researchers provided no scientific support for the condition, leaving open the possibility that many such cases may be psychological in origin.

While the conclusions of study may be shocking to members of the media, public health experts and entomologists who regularly see people with non-existent bug problems are not surprised. A smaller study published last May found no connection between similar unexplained dermopathies and skin parasites.  And professional entomologists who regularly interact with the public are very familiar with samples of supposed biting insects and far-ranging descriptions pests that fit no profiles of real insects or mites. As I discussed in a post last year, some of these samples come from people with a special kind of delusion called delusory parasitosis, while others come from people experiencing allergic reactions, drug side effects, or other medical conditions. All of these can produce sensations closely resemble tiny bites or creeping sensations on the skin like a plague of bugs.

In recent years, some people with these unexplained skin conditions have sought an alternative explanation for skin lesions and the accompanying itching sensations.  The name Morgellons is a lay term supposedly originating from an obscure 1690 reference in a medical monograph referring to a similar condition of the time called "the morgellons." Though the condition is poorly defined, it usually involves seeing unidentified fibers associated with the skin, and many feel it is related to some as-yet-undescribed parasite.

The findings of this week's study in the online journal PLoS ONE, include:

• Approximately 50% of patients who underwent clinical examinations had fibers in or on skin lesions (open or crusted sores). However, when the fibers and other particles collected from participants were photographed and analyzed, they were found to be either hairs, cellulose, or polyester.  There was no evidence that the fibers preceded the lesions, caused the lesions, or occurred in normal skin.
• Evidence of prior drug use (i.e., from amphetamines, barbituates, benzodiazepines, cannabinoids, cocaine, opiates or propoxyphen) was found in 50% of clinical participants.  Drug use could account for some cases of unexplained dermopathy--formication (the sensation of tiny bugs, like ants, crawling on the skin) is a well-known side effect of drug use withdrawal.
• Over 75% of case patients reported some exposures to solvents through hobby activities. The  prevalence of such exposures among the healthy adult population in the U.S. is unknown and not enough data on type and duration of solvent exposure was collected to draw conclusions.
• The rate of functional impairment and disability found in case-patients was higher than the general population and similar to that detected among people with serious mental illness.

Prevalence of cases with Morgellons-like symptoms was low in the California study group, approximately 3.65 cases per 100,000 people (or one in 27,000 people).  While being the largest, most comprehensive study of  unexplained dermopathy to date, the study had limitations.  It lacked a control group and was mainly descriptive in nature.  Nevertheless the researchers say that they could find no unifying of definitive cause of the condition among people reporting Morgellon-like symptoms. The authors were unable to confidently say whether unexplained dermopathy represents a new medical condition or is another manifestation of delusory parasitosis; however a peer review panel concluded that in the absence of a single, well-described, published case with fibers emerging from intact skin, "it will be difficult to justify the resources needed to start a new study."

Ultimately this study will not end the debate over unexplained dermopathies, like Morgellons. People who believe they suffer from the condition will point to the inability of the researchers to definitively say that "there is no such thing." Dermatologists, physicians and mental health experts will point to the lack of evidence for the condition, the innocuous origin of the "fibers" seen in Morgellons cases, lack of any parasites in skin biopsies and data that suggests a correlation of the condition with psychosomatic illness and drug interactions.

The study concludes with the recommendation that, given there is still no definitive explanation for unexplained dermopathy, sufferers may benefit from standard medical therapies or those recommended for treatment of delusory infestations.  For sufferers of the latter I find the recommendations of Misha Heller and colleages especially humane and sensible. In their letter published in the Archives of Dermatology, they note that the most important step toward successful treatment of delusional patients is developing a strong doctor-patient relationship of trust.  Without adequate rapport, they say, patients are unlikely to comply with prescriptions for anti-psychotic medications, which can make all the difference in the life of someone suffering from delusory parasitosis.

All of this can be baffling to pest management professionals. After all, we're not doctors, nor are we trained to diagnose medical or mental health conditions in patients. Nevertheless, this is an issue that affects nearly all of us at some time over our careers.  When you encounter a customer who claims to have Morgellons, or who points to tiny pests that can not be seen, it's important to stick to what you know.

• Don't allow yourself to be persuaded to apply unnecessary insecticides to control insects that cannot be detected or do not exist. 
• Advise your customer to seek medical assistance for bite-like symptoms (Keep in mind, however, that many doctors are not well informed about pests or even delusory parasitosis. If you know a local MD or dermatologist who is informed about this condition, refer them). 
• Inspect the home, making use of sticky cards and pitfall traps, to ensure it is free of bed bugs, biting mites, and other biting insects. Remember, providing a customer assurance that their home is pest free can be as great a service as pest control itself.