Richard Jones, our General Manager in Libya, has asked me to post the following comments in response to your recent query regarding which Cities we service in Libya.

“Many thanks for your kind words. Our contract with the Ministry for Public Utilities also covers Benghazi and I’m pleased to report that we are making good progress there and are about to double our headcount to widen our geographical coverage in the area. Our contract only covers Tripoli, Misratah and Benghazi so I’m afraid Tobruk is out of scope, however we did provide emergency support to Tobruk for a 6 week period during the tragic Plague outbreak in July 2009.”

Please do not hesitate to get back in touch with us if you have any further questions.

Kind regards

Caroline Mytton
Head of rentokil.com

Just wanted to say that it already seems to be a great job what your doing as i can already see a bit of difference and things look positive just one point i wanted to ask if the same effort is done in other cities in libya especially the east libya (bengazi ,and along till toubrouk and further towards) i hope the answer is yes. all the best with what your doing…..

Richard Jones, General Manager in Libya, has asked me to post the following in response to your question:

Our method for establishing a measure of infestation levels in the Cities we operate in is as follows:-

Each city is grid mapped into 1km x 1km squares and each of these is uniquely identified as a zone for treatment and reporting purposes

Each fixed monitoring point in that zone (bait stations and drain baits) are recorded on our database via a hand held computer with GPS capability

When a new zone is set-up, fixed monitoring points are established and are revisited 3 weeks later to establish which monitoring points have had bait taken by rats. It is clear those that have had rats take bait as the rats chomp through the blue grain and leave white exposed sections on the husks.

We replenish the boxes then undertake another inspection 2-3 weeks later. Rats exhibit a characteristic known as neophobia which is essentially apprehension around changes in their environment. For this reason, it may take them several weeks to pluck up the courage to start entering the bait stations and start feeding from them.

At this stage we establish what percentage of the total number of fixed monitoring points in that zone have had bait taken by rats e.g. if there are 100 fixed points in a zone and 65 of them have had bait taken then we say the zone is 65% infested at that point in time.

The frequency of subsequent visits is then driven by this %. The higher the number, the more frequent the follow up’s are. In the follow up’s, we use a range of treatment types applicable to the habitat and indications of rodent activity.

We record this peak infestation value for every zone we treat in each City then monitor improvements over time as our treatment plans start to take effect.
At the end of each month, we take a snap shot of the infestation data in every zone we are working in. We then compare the peak infestation for each zone with the current and calculate the averages of each of these measures at a City & Country (3 Cities we operate in) level. It is the latter we referred to in the previous blog.

There is no 100% accurate way to establish infestation levels but techniques such as this give a good indication and are a consistent measure.

I hope this answers your question but Richard is happy to provide further clarification if required.

Kind regards

Caroline Mytton
Head of rentokil.com

May I know how is this measured? Thks — “On a positive front, we have seen average countrywide infestation levels drop from a peak of 42.52% to 14.83% up until 31/01/2010.”