WHAT come to your mind upon hearing the expression: "Eliminate the four harmful pests" - mosquitoes, flies, rats and bugs?

Probably you will imagine groups of senior retired workers from neighbouring community centres spreading rat poison in public areas or distributing cockroach-killing chemicals house-to-house.

You would have been right over the past few decades, when the government paid all the bills for regularly carrying out "Patriotic Public Health Campaigns" nationwide.

But ideas about killing pests need updating, because pest control has developed into a professional service in Shanghai, as well as other cities in China.

Today, there is no need to scream if you see a cockroach running across the kitchen floor. Instead, you can calmly make a call to a pest control company. Leave all the annoying things to the professionals - fully equipped, dressed in uniforms and with a good understanding of the various common pests, including flies, mosquitoes, rats, cockroach, bugs, dust mites and termites.

Statistics from the Shanghai Pest Control Association show that by 2004, 175 companies with 2,285 employees had registered to provide pest control services in the city, fewer than 10 of them foreign-invested. In Beijing, the number of registered pest control companies exceeds 200.

For most of the period since the 1950s, pest control has been a national campaign wholly supported and financed by the government. With the deepening of economic reforms since the 1980s, however, this sector too has developed into a market-oriented and professional industry.

"More enterprises and individuals would like to pay for a better service themselves, and the pest control operation in a 'mass campaign free of charge' model can't meet the required technical standards," said Sun Cuidi, chairman of the Shanghai Pest Control Association. Statistics from the association show that in 1996, the average age of pest management workers in Shanghai was 56.7 years old and around 70 per cent of the group had only finished education to a primary school level.

"Given their poor educational background, they failed to adopt the new technologies required by the job. Pest management is not a simple matter of spreading poisons. It requires a thorough understanding of pests and advanced skills in choosing, preparing and using pesticides and pest-control devices properly," said professor Zhu Longbiao, a senior pest control expert at East China Normal University.

Zhu said that it took at least three years to train an advanced-level pest control professional in the techniques of designing pest control programmes, evaluating control effectiveness, taking pest samples and searching for relevant information.

Although the field has been well-developed in affluent countries for several decades, young people with higher education used to refuse to take the job in China because it wasn't officially recognized as a formal occupation until 2001.

Since that time all pest control professionals have been required to be trained and receive professional certification from the labour authorities.

"Since 2002, around 70 per cent of the city's pest control staff have received primary-level or middle-level training, amounting to a total of 1,578 trained professionals," said Xie Gufen, from the Shanghai Technical Training Centre for Pest Control.

"By introducing the training system, the general level of pest control professionals has been improved significantly."

Booming industry

During the first Pest Control Shanghai Forum held in the city last week, the number of participants from home and abroad far exceeded the organizer's expectation.

"We anticipated about 100 participants. However, during the two-day meetings, several hundred participants poured into the forum and the exhibition hall", said Tang Qiong, an official of the forum's organizer - the Shanghai Municipal Patriotic Health Campaigns Committee.

"I came to exchange information and seek business opportunities with peers in this industry," said Ren Changshun from a company developing new toxic cockroach bait.

The American National Pest Management Association recently reported that the professional pest control industry has an annual growth in service revenue over the last four years of 5.6 per cent with total revenues topping out at US$6.5 billion.

Comparatively, this industry is still at its initial stage in China. However, the potential of this sun-rise industry is great, with market need growing rapidly.

"Actually, professional pest control companies have been long engaged in pest control activities in major public places in Shanghai. Professionals have helped the Bao Steel Group, the Oriental Pearl Tower and Metro lines to eliminate rats, which can lead to huge losses or even disastrous results if they bite through electric cables," said Professor Zhu.

In Beijing, the pest control effort required for a series of major events, such as the 2008 Olympics, will be contracted to professional pest control companies that win the bidding.

In addition to the damage to public facilities, pests are more than annoying. They carry and spread bacteria and viruses widely - causing serious public health threats. In 1930, 10 million people were infected by malaria spread by mosquitoes. Three million died in that crisis.

"Economic growth is another factor stimulating the market as people have rising expectations of life quality. They used to ignore pests at home, but now they are willing to pay professionals to get rid of rats, cockroaches and other annoying pests," said Sun.

"Eyeing the potential of the pest control market in Shanghai, we started a company last June. Our major customers include restaurants, food manufactures, hotels and individuals," said Kim Eung Kown, vice general manager of CESCO (Shanghai) Co Ltd from South Korea.

"The competition in local market is much more intense than we had expected, and Chinese companies, especially community-based pest control service centres, have become our major competitors - providing similar services at a much lower price," he added.