Author Description

As the global climate changes, scientists anticipate that the distribution of animal populations and disease vectors will expand. In the case of arthropods, such efforts hold immense significance as they have the potential to increase human mortality and suffering from arboviruses above current levels. The 238th American Chemical Society National Meeting and Exposition in Washington, D.C. on August 16-20, 2009, offered an opportunity for researchers to present and discuss new findings in invertebrate repellents research, regulations, and technology development. Recently efforts have been made to understand the role of chemicals in arthropod behavior, and screening programs are starting to incorporate repellency testing into their battery of bioassays. The lack of standardized protocols for measuring and comparison of repellents has remained a significant obstacle in arthropod research. Oftentimes studies report variable measures of success, and comparison of results across studies is not always consistent. Progress in the standardization of arthropod test methods for repellents would be valuable to many groups including academic researchers working in the field, contract labs supplying test results, government research laboratories, regulatory bodies in the process of developing guidelines for product registration, as well as companies looking to invest in new technologies. Perhaps one complicating factor in this process has been that research and technology haven>'t moved fast enough to meet the demand for effective arthropod repellents. Issues such as pest arthropod resurgence and insecticide/repellent resistance to chemical can create new challenges and add pressure for researchers. The collection of chapters in this book covers a range of applied and basic research on arthropod repellents. An overview of the state of arthropod repellents research is provided at the start. In the chapters that follow, there is a selection of papers demonstrating research on new r