Reply to the letter to the editor by Bouyer et al. (2013).

Who is really misleading decision-makers about costffective approaches to tackling tsetse flies? Bouyer et al. (2013) claim we have given misleading dvice in our paper (Shaw et al., 2013) on the costs of ontrolling or eliminating riverine or savannah species of setse using various techniques, singly or in combination. e suggested that the most cost-effective option is often setse control, rather than elimination. In contrast, Bouyer t al. (2013) focus on the importance of eliminating tsetse rom whole belts of contiguous tsetse infestation, and claim hat for riverine species the only means of achieving this is o rely on the sterile insect technique (SIT) to deliver the nal blow to populations suppressed by other methods. The focus adopted by Bouyer et al. (2013) accords ith their involvement in an SIT-based elimination proramme in Senegal (Vreysen et al., 2013). Given that SIT eals particularly poorly with the problem of tsetse invaion (Vale and Torr, 2005) it is not surprising that they ink the use of SIT to the aim of widespread eliminaion of tsetse up to the natural barriers to invasion – he so-called area-wide policy. Nor is it surprising that hey claim that SIT is essential for final elimination since he use of this complex, costly and protracted technique akes sense only if cheaper and simpler techniques canot perform the task unaided by SIT. To maintain their tance, they ignore evidence detrimental to their cause nd advance only weak arguments, which we challenge elow. First, Bouyer et al. (2013) criticise the model (Vale nd Torr, 2005; Torr and Vale, 2011) that we used to ssess conservatively the time for which various eliminaion techniques need to be applied. The criticisms levelled gainst this model and, implicitly against the model of argrove (2003), distract attention from the pertinent oint that no alternative model has shown anything mateially different. The only model that seemed to attempt his (Barclay and Vreysen, 2011a) considered technical fficacy alone, not costs, and was flawed in its structure nd parameters, as outlined by Hargrove et al. (2011) and