Sterile Insect Technique - Drawbacks

Drawbacks

• As with insecticide treatment, repeated treatment is sometimes required to suppress the population before the use of sterile insects.
• Sex separation could be difficult for some species, though this can be easily performed on Medfly and screwworm, for example.
• Radiation treatment in some cases affects the health of males, so sterilized insects in such cases are at a disadvantage when competing for females.
• The technique is species specific. For instance, there are 22 species of Tsetse fly in Africa, and the technique must be implemented separately for each.
• Standard operating procedures of mass rearing and irradiation do not leave room for mistakes. Since the fifties, when SIT was first used as a means for pest control, several failures have occurred in different places around the world where non-sterilized artificial produced insects were released before the problem was spotted.
• Application to large areas should be long lasting, otherwise migration of wild insects from outside the control area could repopulate.
• The major drawback to this technique is that the cost of producing such a large number of sterile insects is often prohibitive in poorer countries.