Quarantine security for Tephritid fruit flies pests in citrus

Tephritid fruit flies are serious pests of citrus. They cause direct fruit damage through oviposition and larvalfeeding, and warrant regulatory restriction on the movement of citrus fruits across national and internationalboundaries. Current quarantine mitigations for fruit flies in citrus include fumigation, high-temperature forced-air, vapor heat, cold, and irradiation treatments. Cold treatment appears to be a treatment of choiceby several citrus producing countries, with a multitude of schedules and combinations of low temperatureand treatment duration, depending on species of citrus and the guild of associated fruit fly pests. Participants are encouraged to join the discussion on evaluating current quarantine treatment schedules andexploring measures of achieving quarantine security other than Probit 9, including possibilities of integratingless than probit 9 treatments in developing systems approaches to mitigate risk of fruit fly pests. Probit analysis is a statistical method for determining a dose-response relationship and calculating theappropriate dose for a specific response. The probit 9 mortality response estimates 32 survivors, or less, from1,000,000 treated pest individuals. At the 95% level of confidence, the probit 9 statistics predicts no survivorsin a minimum of 93,613 test insects. The probit 9 efficacy (99.9968% desired response, e.g., mortality) is the unofficial obligatory de facto standardof treatment efficacy for high risk pests in highly susceptible hosts adapted by the United States and manycountries. For naturally poor hosts, the probit 9 standard may be too rigid and impractical, and treatmentefficacy lower than probit 9 may be sufficient to achieve the desired quarantine security. In the alternativetreatment efficacy approach, risk may be defined either as the number of survivors or as the probabilityof a mating pair being present in a shipment, rather than as the effective mortality of the treated infestingindividuals. The less tha