From fumigator or pest management operator to IPM professional: an urgent evolution
Technical note on from fumigator or pest management operator to IPM professional: an urgent evolution, with a focus on diagnosis, prevention and criteria applicable to professional pest management.
When pest control in urban environments began as a productive activity, the experience of eliminating insects, plants or others that represented damage to human property was taken advantage of. Many affirm that pest control is a “very noble business”, that makes it attractive and that is why more and more people adopt it as a source of income, with or without authorization or license from the health authorities, with or without technical or commercial preparation, with or without organization. This in turn makes the market increasingly competitive, generally based on price, which results in the detriment of the union's image and its profitability.
For their part, potential clients of pest control companies are increasingly demanding, either due to regulatory or normative pressures, or due to a greater demand for results focused on the real benefits of the service rather than just killing pests. It is a well-known maxim that says “knowledge is power” (Scientia potentia est). It is easy to read, but this is true depending on the quality of the knowledge and the power sought. There is no doubt that one of the best investments will always be training. To do this, it is necessary to understand what training really means, what it means to make someone capable of carrying out a task or function.
On the walls of the offices we can see countless records of attendance at talks on the same topics: rodent control, cockroach control, fly control, etc. The same or similar information over and over again, only changing the recommended product in each case. It is contradictory or illogical that these courses are often taken by the owner or director of the company, few by the technicians, under the still ingrained principle that "I do not train my staff, because I would be training my next competition." In these cases it is another misinterpretation of Francis Bacon's phrase, assuming that “knowing” more than subordinates is what grants “power”, hoarding their knowledge to the point of not sharing it with anyone. The true leader must not only be humble in the face of what he knows, but must also know how to take advantage of and improve the strengths of his staff, rather than trying to correct their weaknesses.
Definitely, knowledge is never superfluous, unless it is not useful. It has been said that nowadays there is access to information like never before thought, thanks to the Internet.
If we do not learn to have critical thinking, we can easily believe that termites can pierce metals, that insects transform into super-pests overnight, that a cockroach “lives” without a head or that an insecticide is better because it can be mixed in a larger amount of water. Sometimes data like this comes from supposed expert sources so eloquent that it is difficult to doubt its veracity.
Assuming that the problem of the boss's accumulation of information has been overcome and better training of operational personnel is sought, it is worth asking whether it is necessary for each technician to know everything about everything. How useful is it to learn the detailed life cycle of each insect, the chemical and electrical changes of nerve transmission, the metabolic processes involved in pesticide toxicity, the blood coagulation cascade related to anticoagulants against rodents, or the different mechanisms that result in resistance? Yes… and no. The point is not to know much, but to be able to take advantage of what has been learned in the work to be done.
There is a popular saying that says "jack of all trades and master of none", so it is possible to say that those who know many things are not always an intelligent person, but it is also true that those who have experience in more different areas tend to be more competent. Knowledge is useful as long as it can be applied, but it is unrealistic to think that a single person can accumulate and process everything.
The so-called “law of least effort” is often confused with being pragmatic and thinking that you should act before thinking is not the most practical. The “principle of parsimony” or “Ockham's razor” has also been misinterpreted by stating that the simplest solution is always the correct one, when rather it means that it should be the first to consider and evaluate. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that there are two ways of thinking, one fast and intuitive, and the other slow and rational. It is true that there are times when it is necessary to take almost immediate actions, that is when instinct acts; The problem is when this becomes an excuse and then a habit. Giving automatic responses is more “comfortable” for people, choosing to risk trial and error.
The enormous amount of data that can be received from the varied sources available means that the ability to discriminate truly useful information plays a predominant role. The lack of analysis also leads to the adoption of false, misinterpreted or out of context concepts. An example is the common, but mistaken, practice of identifying pest species by diagrams or photos contained in manuals or books that, although useful in their general concepts, have an extremely limited representativeness since they include only the most common species. There are those who think that there are only the three or four species of cockroaches or rodents that they see at every talk they attend.
A typical case is resistance management and rotation. The phenomenon of tolerance to doses of pesticides is real and, as a greater variety of substances was developed, the range of options to counteract them expanded, applying them interspersedly according to the pest's defense mechanism. Due to its widespread use during the first half of the last century, many urban pest control companies mistakenly assume that rotation is a rule or norm, and apply it without any analysis to support its application, combining more commercial brands than active ingredients.
Inspection is another aspect that requires good training and that, due to the lack of training in analytical thinking, is carried out in a poor and even biased manner and, therefore, useless. Like rotation, it is performed more as a requirement than as a tool. This makes it more convenient to schedule pesticide applications independently of the inspection, instead of analyzing trends which, if they are supposed to occur, are often confused with simple reports of incidents in different periods of time.
The “Office of Technology Assessment” of the United States published an analysis on the evolution of pest control, making an inverse correlation between knowledge and the use of pesticides. This is that the greater and better knowledge of pests, the less need to use pesticides. The control of pests with chemical substances that affect their survival or reproduction has been applied for centuries, and although resistance to them was discovered at the beginning of the last century (1908), pesticides continued to be the only tool through their increase in doses or the aforementioned rotation. Meanwhile, ecology began to develop and towards the 1930s, synecology or community ecology was born along with the emergence, a little later, of the concept of ecosystem, which has allowed us to expand the understanding of the relationship between pest populations and their environment.
Understanding the dynamics of pest populations has been a key tool in the so-called IPM or Integrated Pest Management, which involves, in addition to chemical strategies, those related to creating a hostile environment for the pest, with physical and biological strategies, later adding the cultural aspect by including the human factor. Many presume to use techniques based on IPM and these acronyms even become part of the name of the company or its advertising; But when reviewing their procedures, rotation tables and pesticide application schedules continue to be found, leaving the rest of the strategies in the hands of the client through general recommendations.
Once again, the knowledge remains in the courses without being applied in practice, basing the control or management plans of harmful fauna on the chemical products that they consider convenient according to the result of the sales work of the distributors or laboratories. As part of the forms of thought that are elementary, there is no doubt that the mathematical aspect is key. Using numbers allows us to establish measurements and indicators, reducing subjectivity. From preparing an insecticidal mixture to developing a business plan, addition, subtraction, multiplication and division are necessary, but not always used correctly. It is common for methods as simple as the so-called “rule of three” to be unknown, as well as other techniques such as correlation analysis or probability and statistics.
This is why pesticides are not used properly, manipulated arguments or partial data are accepted without question, buying products that “perform more” or “are cheaper”, or truly effective sales and promotion strategies are not defined, beyond intentions or marketing.
Global trends are moving rapidly towards the need for the person or company dedicated to pest control to go from being a pesticide applicator, which is reflected in the names by which they are known such as “fumigator” or “detector”, to a true professional IPM consultant for their clients. It is also urgent that the director establish management systems that allow him to better organize the responsibilities of his human and material resources, empowering his staff and developing true work competence based on training plans, evaluated and updated, also redesigning his structure with specialists in inspection, sales, trend analysis, advisors and, even, applicators, instead of multifunctional or "milusos" personnel.