Control of Oropsylla hirsuta, a plague vector, by treatment of prairie dog burrows with 0.5% permethrin dust.

Permethrin, a pyrethroid insecticide, applied on two plots with a pressurized hand-held duster at mean rates of 2.3 and 4.0 g per burrow, was used to determine control levels for Oropsylla hirsuta fleas, a vector of bubonic plague, in black-tail prairie dog, Cynomys ludovicianus, burrows in northern Colorado during the summer of 1988. Burrows were sampled by "flagging" at day 0 and weeks 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 to determine the mean number of fleas per burrow and percentage of burrows with at least one flea. The 4.0 g per burrow rate was highly effective (P less than 0.001) in controlling fleas for a period of 3 mo, whereas the 2.3 g per burrow rate was not.