Getting Pesticide Information from the Web

If you are ever in need of pesticide labels or MSDS sheets for any product, the following websites will be useful. For both of these sites, you need Adobe Acrobat Reader, which I believe is free to download from the web (a ‘prompt’ usually appears if you do not have it and further prompts walk you through the steps to download the program).

The first site is part of the Health Canada, Pest Management Regulatory Agency (PMRA) website, which has a reasonably up-to-date listing of pesticide labels. I literally use this site every day for fast access to label information. There is lots of other regulatory information on the PMRA site as well. To find the pesticide label you want, go to the PMRA site and follow the instructions below:

Start by clicking on the ‘search ELSE’ button. On the next page, I usually ignore the ‘search field’ boxes and leave the ‘registration status’ in the default setting of ‘registered’. Then make sure to click the ‘marketing type’ to ‘commercial’ or else your search will bring up a large number of products that are only suitable for domestic use. Finally, type the product name or active ingredient in the ‘full-text’ box and click ‘Submit’.

A list of products will appear so look for the product that most closely matches what you wanted and then click on its number in the ‘Reg #’ column. The label will then appear in seconds. Once you get used to the layout of these pages, you can have access to a label in less than 30 seconds.

Labels are also available on the CDMS site but I use it mostly for Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS).

This one is easier to use, just type in what you are looking for where is says ‘Product (Brand name)’ and click the search button. If you know the manufacturer, it is sometimes quicker to click on their name in the list on the search page and a list of their products will appear.

Related Links

• Pest Management Regulatory Agency
• CDMS - Material Safety Data Sheets