Date: Mon, 19 May 2003 17:14:06 -0700
Reply-To: Bulletin Board for Bird Collections and Curators <AVECOL-L@LISTSERV.LSU.EDU>
From: Bulletin Board for Bird Collections and Curators <AVECOL-L@LISTSERV.LSU.EDU>


I'm surprised that you can still buy "no pest strips."

Some plastics may be resistant to dichlorvos but the stuff is tough on just
about everything else, including specimens, paint, many metals, and
people. One fellow I know spent a few days in the hospital after
photographing a drawer of skins in front of an open cabinet. I think it
was Gary Stiles that also got very sick from exposure to the stuff. Some
SPNHC members (Stephen L Williams & ?) did some research on what it does to
specimens. As I recall, they exposed various materials to Vapona,
including bare metals, painted metals, wood, teeth, fur, feathers and bone,
for relatively short periods, (weeks or months). They analyzed chemical
residues deposited on surfaces, and found a lot of noxious stuff including
some really corrosive acids. They did other tests to determine if the
materials were weakened, etc. And the thing that blew me away was the
before and after photomicrographs of damage unseen by the naked eye. Don't
know if they published their findings. I went home from the SPNHC meeting
and told Lloyd we had to quit using "no pest strips". His father, a
chemist, said to use some silica gel to remove the residues. And so we
bought big barrels of silica gel and put open jars of the stuff in each
cabinet. It rather quickly (a few weeks?) turned dark brown, so we kept
replacing with fresh silica gel. After a while it was obvious that there
wasn't much left of whatever we were removing so we considered the job
done...

http://pmep.cce.cornell.edu/profiles/extoxnet/carbaryl-dicrotophos/dichlorvos-ext.html

Sam
Avinet