Considerations for Design of Insecticide Resistance Monitoring Programs

Abstract

Monitoring is critical to resistance management, but there has been very little discussion in the literature about the statistical design of monitoring programs. Some general considerations show that the LD50, a standard measure for resistance monitoring, is very inefficient compared with diagnostic tests that accurately distinguish between resistant and susceptible individuals. Even with diagnostic doses, sample sizes at any given location must often be very large (on the order of hundreds of individuals per population) to reliably detect resistance when it is present at frequencies of <10%. For those species where it is difficult to collect large numbers of individuals, resistance detection may not be a practical component of resistance management.