Is Pest Control Safe Around Children?

It is natural for parents to be concerned about the safety of having an exterminator over when they have young children in the house. After all, the methods exterminators need to use for their pest control processes can occasionally involve the use of chemical products and sprays.

More concerning, however, are the health risks associated with infestations that go left unchecked. In general, it is far safer for parents to call for pest control to remove unwanted pests from the home than to let the problem sit, or to try to resolve the problem themselves.

Is pest control in Alaska safe for kids? Here’s an overview of what you should know.

Don’t bother with the DIY solutions

You’ll find a lot of over-the-counter solutions to pest issues at local home goods and hardware stores. While ant and mouse traps can be effective at removing smaller problems, you can’t really hope to resolve an infestation of any significant size with pellets or aerosol treatments you purchase from the store.

In most cases, these products aren’t particularly effective, and they can also pose some serious health risks to people within your home, because they are designed to be cheap and thus attractive to homeowners. This means you actually present a greater risk to your children by using these types of products than by calling in the professionals.

Part of the risk that comes with these DIY solutions is that homeowners tend to use far more of a product than is necessary, and can spray chemicals all over the place in much higher doses than are actually required. This can result in too much chemical being left on surfaces, which can then pose a danger to young children who come into contact with it.

Many of these easily available solutions also feature certain types of “scheduled poisons,” which take an extended period of time to kill an animal and can also result in “secondary kills” or illnesses. For example, a dog that eats a mouse killed by poisonous pellets could suffer the same fate if there is enough of the product in the animal’s system.

Professionals provide more reliable results

Professional treatments will be applied in very strategic and controlled amounts and measurements with equipment that has been specially designed for precision and safety. This means no chemicals left behind on surfaces and nothing that could pose a danger to your children or animals.

The kinds of products and chemicals pest control specialists use have also vastly changed over the last several decades. The pesticides they use now avoid organophosphates, which are highly toxic. Studies showed there were significant health risks associated with the use of these chemicals, so now pest control specialists use much safer and more environmentally friendly products at lower dosage levels.

These are just a few of the reasons why it’s beneficial to work with a professional pest control specialist, especially if you have kids. For more information about pest control and babies and whether or not your pest control method in Alaska is safe for kids, contact the team at Pied Piper Pest Control today.

Categorised in: Pest Control, Questions & Answers

This post was written by Writer