Biologist USDA-APHIS Miami, Florida, United States
Generic doses have been proposed as a means to increase the number of pest-commodity combinations for which a phytosanitary treatment can be used. The current method for establishing a generic dose for a particular taxon typically involves making a subjective judgement as to whether an adequate portion of the taxon has been tested, and then selecting a treatment dose at or above the dose required to control the most tolerant member of the taxon studied. A major drawback to the current ‘subjective’ approach to generic dose setting is that there is a lack of information with regards to what portion of the unstudied taxa might tolerate the generic dose. Having an estimate of the taxonomic coverage of the generic dose will provide policy makers with a quantification of the potential risk that a member of the taxa will not be controlled by the treatment. We propose estimating the taxonomic coverage of a generic dose via the species sensitivity distribution (SSD) method, an approach in widespread use in the field of ecotoxicology. We introduce the SSD method as a tool for evaluating generic doses for phytosanitary irradiation treatments with a demonstration using available phytosanitary irradiation data for the dipteran family Tephritidae and the coleopteran family Curculionidae.
