PHENOMENON
The Roach That FailedNYTimes.com > Magazine, July 25, 2004 (no reg url)
.... Casting about for other uses for an odorless, tasteless agricultural insecticide called hydramethylnon, they decided to try it on German roaches....''We would find greater than 90 to 95 percent reductions in cockroach populations, across the country.''...with the name Maxforce. (Combat, the consumer version, came out two years later.)
....Sales of off-the-shelf bait exploded in the 90's, rising to as much as $80 million per year. Then the bottom fell out. The market for all roach-control products -- not just bait but also the more common roach aerosols -- began to shrink in 1996, according to retail data cited by Clorox, which now owns Combat. ''It appears that they may have been so successful that they dried up the market,'' says Ken Harris, a founder of Cannondale Associates, a marketing consulting firm.
By the end of 2000, Pest Control found itself running a column titled ''Are Cockroach Baits Simply Too Effective?'' The U.S. consumer market for roach control continues to shrink by 3 to 5 percent a year, says Derek Gordon, vice president for marketing at Clorox. ''And if we actually manage to drive ourselves out of business completely, frankly we'd feel like we did the world a service.''
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"Hydramethylnon"
Brandname: MaxForce Roach Gel, Combat, Siege
EPA Registered: Yes
Registered use in: Australia, Canada, India, Netherlands, New Zealand, Philippines, South Africa, Tanzania, US
EU: Not allowed to be used after July 25, 2003
Japan: Listed since Nov 15, 1991, as a Designated Chemical Substance. A substance which, either in itself or one of its degradation products, is not easily degradable or which may be harmful to human health when ingested continuously....
