What makes integrated pest management “integrated”?
According to Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann, “Integrated pest management means pesticides are not the silver bullet. You have to do many other things all together to control insects. And it makes perfect sense. When you’re talking about mice in the home, you can’t just rely on rodenticides. You have to clean up food. You have to close up openings or else you’ll never get rid of the rodents. The same sort of process or philosophy applies to almost all pests.” In its home application, the IPM process she mentioned involves investigating, preventing and eliminating the pests that are in your home. The steps boil down to this: • Investigation: Know if you have a pest or not, and identify what kind of pest it is. Assess how bad the problem is. “In truth, one spider in your house is not going to cause any problems other than your emotional problem,” said Dr. Gangloff-Kaufmann. • Prevention: Find out why and how pests are entering the house. Eliminate whatever food source they are entering for. Dr. Ga
