# Reducing Close Encounters with Insect Pests and Vectors: The Past, Present and Future of Insect Repellents

## TL;DR

This paper reviews the history and development of insect repellents and highlights the need for new strategies to combat insect threats to health and agriculture.

## Contribution

The paper provides a comprehensive review of historical and modern insect control methods and emphasizes the need for novel, sustainable solutions.

## Key findings

- Insect resistance and climate change are increasing the difficulty of controlling insect pests and vectors.
- Current and emerging technologies include chemical, biological, and genetic approaches to insect control.
- Environmental and socio-political factors influence the effectiveness and adoption of insect control strategies.

## Abstract

Reducing close encounters with insects remains one of the most important efforts to protect humans from hunger and disease. Understanding the history and biology of chemical insect control strategies paves the way toward developing new long-lasting, safe and effective approaches.

Insects acting as agricultural pests or disease vectors represent some of the greatest challenges to global health, food security and economics. Diverse technologies to combat insects of economic and medical importance have been and are continually being developed. These include natural and synthetic chemical insecticides and repellents, mass-trapping approaches and, more recently, an increasingly wide range of biological as well as genetic manipulations of insect vectors/pests. The increase in biological resistance and cross-resistance to many insecticides and repellents, the rapid expansion of human populations, as well as escalating climate change have extended or shifted the active periods and habitats of many insect species, creating new hurdles for attempts to defend humans from insects. At the same time, environmental, ecological and socio-political concerns continue to impact the utility of both current interventions as well as newly emerging innovative strategies. The near exponential increase in insect-based threats highlights the importance of basic and translational studies to design and develop novel technologies to combat detrimental insect populations. This review outlines the history of these challenges and describes the evolution of chemical insect control technologies, while highlighting existing and contemporary approaches to develop and deploy chemical repellents to address this threat to human health and agriculture.