Verify it yourself: the source map
A science desk that asks to be trusted should hand you the means to check it. This page maps the source landscape — who publishes what, and what each kind of source can and cannot settle.
| Source | Who they are | What to check there |
|---|---|---|
| Cooperative Extension services | The outreach arm of land-grant universities, with offices serving local counties | Species identification, local pest timing, and practical control guidance written for your state and climate. Your state's land-grant university runs its extension service; its pest-management publications are the first check for any local claim. |
| University entomology departments | Academic researchers, largely at land-grant universities | The primary literature itself, extension fact sheets, and urban-entomology programme pages — the layer where study summaries like ours should be traceable to real work. |
| NPIC — National Pesticide Information Center | A cooperative service based at Oregon State University, supported by the US EPA (npic.orst.edu) | Plain-language, evidence-reviewed answers about specific active ingredients, exposure, and health questions — including by phone, for US readers. |
| US EPA | The federal pesticide regulator (epa.gov) | Whether a product is registered, what its label actually says, and regulatory decisions on active ingredients. The registration record, not the advertisement, is the document of record. |
| State regulators | For Pennsylvania readers: the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture (agriculture.pa.gov) | Applicator licensing, label enforcement, and state-specific restrictions, which can be stricter than federal ones. |
| IRAC | The Insecticide Resistance Action Committee (irac-online.org) | The mode-of-action classification itself — every group number in our Explorer can be checked against the current IRAC chart. |
| US CDC | The federal public-health agency (cdc.gov) | Vector-borne disease guidance: tick attachment and transmission timing, disease surveillance, and prevention recommendations. |
How to use the map
Match the claim to the layer that can settle it. A mode-of-action group is settled by IRAC. A transmission-timing claim is settled by CDC guidance and the primary literature behind it. A "works in houses like yours" claim is settled by nobody's brochure — it needs field evidence, and our Reading the Evidence page gives the study-design tests to apply. Where a claim traces to none of these layers, treat it as marketing and weight it accordingly — including claims you find on this desk. Our corrections policy, on the About page, is the standing invitation to hold us to this map.