Training site has big ambitions

I just had the opportunity to check out the new distance learning website sponsored by PCT magazine.  I think it offers a good training option for PMPs, and has tremendous potential as a way to ensure your technicians are familiar with labels of products used by your company.

Under the Find A Course pulldown window you have
the option to take any of over 25 different label modules.

According to the site's author, Stoy Hedges, the site became active last August and will be free to anyone for the first two years.  After that time, the site should have a good mix of vetted training courses, and PCT will begin charging a modest monthly fee in exchange for offering courses for CEU credit in your state.

Right now lessons simply consist of label review courses.  So for example, if you want to ensure that your technicians are familiar with the Bayer Suspend® Polyzone label, have them take the review course and exam.  A certificate they print out after completing the course provides proof that they have read the label (possibly several times) and have passed an exam to show comprehension over the label contents.

Eventually the course will expand to include most of the popular pesticide labels and other subject matter including the contents of the PCT field guide series.  Hedges envisions 40 courses alone based on the PCT Field Guide to Ants.

"We have 400 current subscribers; but there are 100,000 pest professionals out there that we want to reach," he said. Hedges designed the site for training new and experienced technicians, but the current label modules are a great way for any pesticide user to learn a new label or get a refresher course for an older product.  The reviews are so thorough that one user reported that after taking the class he better understood his own company's insecticide...for which he wrote the label!

Wave of the future?

It's yet to be seen whether this type of training format will come to dominate the way we do continuing education in the future.  Online courses are certainly not the same as having a human instructor. But it does offer rigor that is sometimes missing from a one-hour continuing education class.

In Texas the Structural Pest Control Service does not yet allow online training classes to substitute for face-to-face CEUs.  But this may slowly be changing.  The Structural Pest Control Advisory Committee last year gave favorable input to the idea of allowing online CEUs for PMPs at least every other year; however I notice the new regulations filed in the Texas Register on September 4 (and open for comment until October 18) did not address any rule changes in this regard.

No one has a bigger stake in face-to-face training than me and my colleagues. Our entomology department faculty offer CEU classes to thousands of applicators every year.  These classes provide us with a personal connection to the industry, not to mention some financial support for our programs. But we support online training, and don't see it as a threat to the many conferences and face-to-face classes we offer. I don't think any online course can fully replace sitting with trained experts sharing knowledge and personal experiences and answering questions in real time.  But I like the idea of allowing applicators to get CEUs online every other year as a nice compromise.  It would make getting CEUs quicker and more convenient for many who choose that technology, but would preserve face-to-face training.

For better or worse, the wheels of change can move very slowly in our state. Perhaps in two years, by the time the PCT site is up and fully running, Texas will catch up with the rest of the world.  Meantime, sites like the PCT Distance Learning Classroom provide a great way to hone your skills and make sure your technicians know pesticide labels as well as if they had helped write them.

Risks and pesticides

I was reading a new product label this morning and came across a phrase that caught my attention. The label stated that "It is impossible to eliminate all risks inherentlyassociated with the use of this product."

This phrase, undoubtedly drafted by a lawyer and--I suspect--ignored by most users of the product, reminded me of a profound principles of pesticide toxicology and safety testing--one that I think few of us fully understand or appreciate: "It's impossible to prove that a pesticide is absolutely safe."

Science is a wonderful process. It allows us to discover useful things about our world. It forms the basis for new technology, answers our deepest questions about the universe, and brings wonder into our lives. Science, however, has it's limits. One of its limits is that it cannot prove absence of harm with complete certainty. It's the old "you can't prove a negative" argument.

Let me give an example. If my job is to test the safety of a new pesticide, I may expose a variety of organisms to my product to see if anything bad happens. Toxicologists routinely do this in laboratories with mice and rats and bacteria. Some tests are designed to measure acute toxicity, others look for evidence of mutations, others for cancer or other chronic disease. Suppose in the course of my testing all the rats develop cancer. This would be alarming evidence that my pesticide might be a human carcinogen. Evidence is strengthened if there are epidemiological studies that show a pattern of elevated cancer rates in humans exposed to the pesticide during its manufacture or use.

Now suppose there are no signs of cancer or other illness in my animals. Have I proved that my pesticide is safe? No. Science, because of physical and economic limitations, cannot prove safety with absolute certainty. For example, pesticide toxicology studies are not generally performed on people for ethical reasons. And people, despite our many occasional similarities, are not rats. Also, we cannot rule out all possible genetic, environmental or health factors that might influence carcinogenicity.

We know of cases, for example, where pesticides have proved exceptionally toxic to people taking certain prescription drugs. In these cases the drugs interfered with the user's ability to detoxify the pesticides, making them more toxic.

If we insisted that science provide absolute proof of safety, the science would become almost infinitely expensive. The best we can do is require a robust set of testing requirements, and base our decisions on the best available science. In addition, there should be a system of reporting suspicious patterns of health complaints associated with pesticide manufacture and use.

This is exactly what we do in the United States. The U.S. has, arguably, one of the best pesticide registration and approval processes in the world. New pesticides are incredibly expensive to register, in large part because of the safety testing required by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The biggest beneficiaries of this regulatory process are those of us who work with pesticides on a daily basis.

So what's a pesticide applicator to do? Follow the label. The answer is so obvious that we often forget to do it. Labels are written to provide wise protection from the admitted limitations of our science when it comes to safety testing. From the precautionary statements, to the requirements for protective clothing, pesticide labels provide uncertainty protection.

Though they can be extremely uncomfortable in heat (especially in our part of the country), gloves, respirators and chemical resistant clothing, when required on the label, are essential to our safety. It may be necessary to explain this to a customer who balks at an applicator wearing gloves or breathing filters. They can be told that the extra protection is required by law (the label is the law) because, unlike them, applicators are exposed on a daily basis to our pesticide tools. It's not an admission of toxicity; it's a common sense precaution. It's an acknowledgement that we don't take unecessary chances with ours or our customer's health.

We should remember that there will always be risks working with pesticides, as with nearly any other consumer chemical product. That's the surprisingly wise message of the pesticide label.