Wash your pet's bedding once a week to ward off flea infestations. Store ripe fruit in the refrigerator, and never leave leftovers uncovered overnight.
Wash dishes and take out the garbage daily, and keep trash cans free of food residue. So mop up spills, and sweep and vacuum regularly. If you're cutting corners with your housecleaning, you have more to fear than gossipy neighbors. Stacks of old newspapers piled up in your garage? Recycle them before rats shred them and use the scraps to build their nests. Do you have holes in your floorboards? Replace the flooring before ants or termites can infest the rotting wood. Once you're fortified your home, the next step is to deny pests the shelter, food, and water they need to thrive. Remember: Vermin can chew through plastic, rubber, vinyl, and wood. Mice can readily wriggle through such small holes-but not if you seal them with cement, steel wool, or other metals. In the rest of the house, plug openings that are larger than ¼ inch wide. Seal bathroom and kitchen cracks with silicone caulk. The first line of defense with IPM is preventing vermin from entering your home at all. A single treatment of that type "was more effective than the regular application of pesticides alone," according to a 2009 Environmental Health Perspectives study. "Spray them and they'll just bounce back stronger." Seal it upĮnter IPM. "Bugs often grow resistant to pesticides," Rotkin-Ellman explains. Spray them on an ant colony, for instance, and it can spur the ants to divide into multiple colonies and ramp up reproduction. Just as they're sometimes ineffective, pesticides can also backfire and made bug infestations even worse. Meanwhile, human exposure to these chemicals can trigger dizziness, vomiting, and convulsions and have long-term effects on learning and behavior. Many of the chemicals used in conventional flea treatments target only fully grown fleas. Consider fleas, which take about a month to hatch from eggs and develop into larvae, then pupae, and then adults. "Pesticides can't always eradicate pest infestations because they can't kill them off at every stage of their life cycles," Rotkin-Ellman explains.
The worst part of insecticide overuse and poisoning is that these chemicals aren't always that effective. Of all the cases of pesticide poisoning in the United States, half of them are in kids under six. Kids are also less resilient to these toxic chemicals than adults, and their developing brains are more susceptible to neurological problems and learning disabilities caused by exposure. Pesticides are especially hazardous to children, who spend more time closer to the ground where these chemicals are often applied. These are chemicals that can trigger everything from nausea, vomiting, and headaches to more serious health concerns, such as lung damage, reproductive problems, and cancer. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says Americans now have an average of 43 different pesticides in their bloodstreams. Since they came into widespread use after World War II, these toxic chemicals have seeped into 90 percent of our streams and rivers. The problem with pesticidesįor the good of our health-and that of our planet-scientists say we need to reconsider our dependence on synthetic pesticides. It's a low-cost, environmentally friendly solution that has been proven in studies to slash pest-removal costs by one-third-and pest complaints by 90 percent. Integrated pest management, or IPM, focuses on preventing infestations before they start and using pesticides as a last resort.