Pesticides

Paolo Recanati <consob [at] imj__org__il> writes

>Objects on loan or donated to our Museum may arrive from abroad with
>hungry termites, with paper eating silverfishes or just with their
>eggs, potentially contaminating other "clean" items. As a preventive
>measure, every single object (containing any kind of organic
>material) that enters our Museum, must spend some time in a
>"quarantine" room. Soon after, it is treated in a special sealed
>room with some chemicals such as Permetrin (sort of smoke) or in a
>"bubble" with Methyl Bromide or Phosphin (the latter not on metals)
>that can kill also eggs.

In general, any compound that kills parasites by poisoning them, is
not safe for human health; moreover all these substances, more or
less, have negative interactions with the materials of the
collections, There is a much much safer method for human health and
collection's integrity to fight insects pests and microrganisms:
VELOXY; please take a look to RGI's web site.

VELOXY was certified, for any kind of insect pest at any stage of
their life, through the EU project Save Art and it has been
successfully applied (100%) in a number of museums, archives and
libraries as you can see at VELOXY's References, ( consider that the
list is more than six months old). Through the DISIO project,
financed by the Italian Ministry of Research, it had been possible
to improve the system with new components that, once integrated into
VELOXY (in the next few months it will be done), will strongly
reduce the microbial activity (and damage).

One of the major feature of VELOXY is that it is a very easy to be
used machine; so it can be managed by the internal personnel of the
museum (after a short training).

It can  furthermore be used as a sort of pseudo preventive mean; in
fact, even if you are not sure about the the presence of parasites,
it can be applied because it has no negative effects to the
materials of the collections and, for sure it is no risky for health
of the people.

Dr. Ing. Ercole Gialdi
R.G.I. Resource Group Integrator s.r.l.
Viale N. Sauro 8
16145 Genova
+39 010 362 6002
Fax: +39 010 310 9440


                                  ***
                  Conservation DistList Instance 16:34
                 Distributed: Friday, November 22, 2002
                       Message Id: cdl-16-34-008
                                  ***