ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the statistical methods used in commodity treatment bioassays that are done in the laboratory and that serve as the basis for confirmatory tests. It describes experimental and statistical procedures used to determine a treatment level for use in quarantine treatments and to estimate the efficacy of a given treatment by a confirmatory test. In quarantine entomology, statistical analyses are used to estimate the probability that a commodity treatment will succeed. Three interrelated assumptions are inherent in the probit 9 requirement. First, 99.9968% effectiveness is assumed to be the minimum level necessary for commodity protection. Second, the requirement implies that the probit model is always suitable for the analyses of data from commodity treatment bioassays. Finally, the probit 9 requirement assumes that no criterion other than death is relevant to the future establishment of the pest species in a new environment.
