Moving from the old to the new: Insecticide research on bed bugs since the resurgence

Abstract

The scarcity of bed bugs in many countries over the last 50 years has resulted in a lack of modern research into the toxicology of this pest. Although bed bugs resurged in the late 1990s, published research related to insecticides has lagged behind and only began to appear in 2006. The difficulty in controlling bed bugs triggered the interest of both private and academic sectors to determine the value of currently available insecticides. What follows, is updated information on effectiveness of products, studies on insecticide susceptibility, identification of mechanisms of insecticide resistance and chemical strategies proposed to overcome resistance in modern bed bug populations. © 2011 by the author; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.