Tag: infected

Tomato Blight Spreading

  • The blight hitting tomatoes is actually the same blight responsible for the Irish potato famine in the mid-19 century. (Photo by T. A. Zitter, courtesy of Cornell University)

If you’ve been waiting all season
for that quintessential taste of
summer – a juicy, ripe tomato from
the garden – you might be disappointed.
This year a tomato blight has swept
across the Northeast and is moving
into Midwestern gardens and farms.
Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

If you’ve been waiting all season
for that quintessential taste of
summer – a juicy, ripe tomato from
the garden – you might be disappointed.
This year a tomato blight has swept
across the Northeast and is moving
into Midwestern gardens and farms.
Julie Grant reports:

Walk around this outdoor farm market in Cleveland and just say the words ‘tomato blight’ – nearly anyone in earshot has a story to tell.

Susan Myers says her home garden has given over to what she thinks is late blight.

“But it’s pretty serious. I mean, it’s like wiping out everything. I have lots of tomatoes and all the leaves are dropping. I’ve never, ever had that before.”

It doesn’t look like the farmers here are having trouble with tomato blight. Most tables are piled high with bright reds and yellows.

Skip Conant has a beautiful display of heirloom tomatoes – but he’s not sure how many more weeks he’ll have fruit to offer.

Conant: “We definitely have tomato blight. It’s been a cool, wet spring, so, yeah. There’s a fair amount tomato blight.”

Grant: “What does it look like?”

Conant: “You’ll see a yellowing and curling on the leaves and then the stem will turn brown. The plant will become a very brown. Die from basically the inside out or the bottom up.”

It’s hard to tell yet if these Midwestern growers are starting to see the same blight that decimated the northeast tomatoes.

Bill Fry is a plant pathologist at Cornell University. He’s studied late blight for 35 years. Fry says it looks like irregular shaped black spots, and can appear on the leaves or the fruit. It can destroy an entire crop in just a few days.

This is the same blight responsible for the Irish potato famine in the mid-19 century. Growers have seen late blight since then. But Fry says, not at these epidemic proportions.

“The fact that it’s just everywhere is, I think, is the major difference from previous years.”

This wasn’t the first cool, wet spring on record. So, why has the blight so bad this year?

It’s kind of ironic. Fry and his colleagues have been studying the problem and think it’s probably because so many people are gardening. Millions more than just last year. And lots of those people bought tomato plants at stores like Home Depot, Kmart, Lowe’s and Wal-Mart.

“Infected plants were sold throughout the northeast in the box stores. They were transplanted to home gardens and from there the pathogen disbursed to other home gardens, to conventional and organic farms.”

Fry says you might not even notice at the supermarket. Commercial tomato growers spray lots of fungicide to keep away the blight. But organic tomatoes are getting harder to find.

But chefs and tomato lovers who’ve waited all season for those locally-grown heirloom – and especially organic – tomatoes aren’t finding what they want in markets in the northeast.

Back at the Cleveland market, chef and restaurant owner Karen Small has been waiting for tomato season – and it finally hit. She depends on this market for her produce and stops at just about every stand.

But as Small hears farmer after farmer describe what they think is late blight – she’s worried about the weeks to come.

“We’re accustomed to having tomatoes well into September, and maybe that’s not going to happen this year.”

Small plans to go home and rip out the tomato plants in her home garden – after hearing late blight described so many times, she’s pretty sure her tomatoes are infected.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Salads Causing Sickness

  • Vegetables in the produce section of a supermarket in VA. (Photo by Ken Hammond, courtesy of the USDA)

During the past 35 years, people have been getting
sick from contaminated produce more often. That’s according
to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

During the past 35 years, people have been getting
sick from contaminated produce more often. That’s according
to a recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention. Rebecca Williams reports:

After hundreds of people got sick from contaminated spinach and
lettuce, researchers started looking back at three decades of disease
cases. They found that people are getting sick from contaminated produce
more often. Bacteria such as E. coli and salmonella are often the cause.

Michael Lynch is one of the study’s authors. He says Americans are eating
more salads, but that doesn’t totally explain why there are more disease
outbreaks.

“We were a little surprised that that didn’t entirely explain the increase
but what else is contributing to that is not clear.”

Lynch says contamination can happen anywhere between the farm and your salad
plate. He says it’s important to thoroughly wash lettuce before eating it.
But he says that might not be enough to avoid getting sick.

He says stronger controls are needed at every step to try to prevent
contamination.

For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Fish Disease Spreads to New Waters

  • The external bleeding on this freshwater drum fish is a result of VHS. The disease is spreading beyond the eastern Great Lakes region. (Photo by John Lumsden, University of Guelph)

A virus that’s been killing fish in the Great Lakes is spreading to
other waterways in the US. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

A virus that’s been killing fish in the Great Lakes is spreading to
other waterways in the US. Chuck Quirmbach reports:


Viral hemorrhagic septicemia has been limited to the eastern Great
Lakes region, but now it’s gotten into a forty-mile long lake in
Wisconsin. Lake Winnebago draws anglers from a wide area.


Mike Schmal is a local tourism official. He says the fish-killing
virus could be very disruptive.


“There’s numerous bait shops and numerous businesses that depend on the
lake and this is our summer leisure season… when the boating season
begins and when sportfishing begins.”


Scientists say it appears to be impossible to get the virus out of
infected waters, so natural resource officials are trying to stop VHS
from being spread to more lakes and rivers in other states.


It’s not clear how VHS got into the US, though contaminated
ballast water from international ships is one possibility.


For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach.

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Hunter Contracts Disease From Deer

  • Humans can contract bovine tuberculosis. In most cases, people get bovine TB from drinking unpasteurized milk. A spokesman from the Michigan Department of Community Health says contracting bovine TB from deer is rare. (Photo by Kia Abell)

In a rare event, a Michigan hunter has been diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis. Health officials are using the case to call for greater vigilance among hunters and farmers who could be exposed to the disease. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton
reports:

Transcript

In a rare event, a Michigan hunter has been diagnosed with bovine tuberculosis. Health officials are using the case to call for greater vigilance among hunters and farmers who could be exposed to the disease. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Tracy Samilton reports:


The northern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula has been under quarantine since bovine TB was found in wild deer in 1994. It was later found in some of the area’s cow herds. The strain of bovine TB in Michigan is unique to that state, and this is only the second time it has been found in a human. The hunter caught the disease when he cut his hand while dressing an infected deer. T.J. Bucholz is a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Community Health. He says humans are vulnerable to bovine TB, but this case is unusual.


“This does occur, most often in people that consume unpasteurized milk, people can also be infected when you’re in close contact with live animals. This particular hunter’s direct contamination through a wound, so it’s a fairly rare occurrence.”


Other states in the Great Lakes are currently considered bovine TB-free. The disease was found in 1991 in captive elk herds in Wisconsin, but those herds have since been destroyed.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Tracy Samilton.

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More Trees Lost in Ash Borer Battle

An invasive insect called the Emerald Ash Borer is spreading. It has already killed millions of trees in Michigan and Ontario, and the bug is continuing to spread into parts of Indiana and Ohio. Now, a team of scientists in Ohio has endorsed a new plan to counter the ash borer’s attack. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bill Cohen reports:

Transcript

An invasive insect called the Emerald Ash Borer is spreading. It has already killed millions of
trees in Michigan and Ontario, and the bug is continuing to spread into parts of Indiana and Ohio.
Now, a team of scientists in Ohio has endorsed a new plan to counter the ash borer’s attack. The
Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Bill Cohen reports:


Some ash trees in northwest Ohio have been infected with the ash borers… so the scientists are
supporting a plan by agriculture officials to order that ALL ash trees within a half mile radius of
the stricken trees be chopped down. Ohio insect expert Dan Herms is on the scientific panel
that’s urging quick action…


“12 million ash trees have already died in southeast Michigan, and so all these ash trees in Toledo
are inevitably doomed anyway. So the key is to try to get in front of this to prevent it from
spreading into the rest of Ohio and ultimately the rest of North America.”


Herms expects Ohio’s cut-down project to begin this winter. He notes ash trees are valuable as
timber… with Ohio’s crop having an estimated worth of one billion dollars.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Bill Cohen in Columbus.

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City Fights to Save Dying Elms

Dutch elm disease is killing dozens of stately old trees in the Midwest this summer. Many people say they regret losing the beautiful old trees. It changes the way a place looks and feels for years to come. Some people are willing to fight and pay to save the elm trees in one Chicago suburb. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jody Becker reports:

Transcript

Dutch elm disease is killing dozens of stately old trees in the Great Lakes region this summer. Many people say they regret losing the beautiful old trees. It changes the way a place looks and feels for years to come. Some people are willing to fight and pay to save the elm trees in one Chicago suburb. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jody Becker reports:


When Hollywood producers come looking for the perfect leafy suburb, they often wind up in Evanston, Illinois. This summer’s Tom Hanks flick “The Road to Perdition” was shot here. Filming almost hit a glitch…when Dreamworks suggested removing an old tree to make way for a driveway, the city balked. The scene was filmed; the tree stayed.


Evanston has dozens of trees at least a century old; and some even older than that.


Today, Evanston residents are even fighting a directive from the state’s Department of Transportation to replace obsolete traffic lights because it might mean uprooting some trees. So Evanston’s city Arborist Paul D’Agostino clearly has a rough job: he’s in charge of cutting down trees in a city of tree huggers.


“I’ve had to console people who were crying and hugging their tree and convince them that we were doing the right thing, that there was no choice in the matter.”


Like a handful of tree studded suburbs around Chicago and dozens of cities around the Great Lakes region, Evanston is experiencing a sad summer as Dutch elm disease claims dozens of trees more than half a century old and up to 70 feet tall.


Already more than one hundred Evanston elms have been found to have the killer fungus, and D’Agostino expects the toll to exceed two hundred. Once infected, a tree quickly begins to die…as the fungus blocks the vascular system that delivers water and nutrients to branches and leaves.


D’Agostino explains, standing near two dying elms in front of the Evanston Police Department…


“Both of these trees are in my estimation probably about 40 years old. These are pretty far along now in showing signs of disease…but the typical symptoms of yellowing and flagging leaves has now progressed to dead leaves and bare branches. We’ve got dying sucker growth along the main trunk which means the disease has spread into the main trunk and into the roots, so there’s no curing this tree at this point. The only way to solve this problem now is to remove the tree so it doesn’t spread to other nearby elms.”


(sound of sawing trees)


So five days a week, three crews of three men each are out on Evanston streets, taking down very old, very tall trees.


(sound of chain saw and crash)


For this relatively affluent, leafy suburb defined by its generous trees, the return of Dutch elm disease brings back bad memories of summers nearly 30 years ago, when hundreds of trees were cut down, destroying the canopies of tree tops that shade many of Evanston’s streets.


Still, there are 27,000 trees on city property in Evanston, and D’Agostino estimates three times that many on private property.


Today the suburb’s green and shade is created by a careful mix of hybrids and hardier trees, including Kentucky coffee, linden, gingko, honey locust and horse chestnut.


And the city is moving ahead with plans to continue replanting with diverse species to avoid future epidemics.


But ever a hotbed of activism, Evanston environmentalists of every stripe are on the case, badgering officials to do more than just identify and remove diseased trees.


Many want the city to inoculate the elms against the fungus.


“I’m a conservative republican, not at all a tree hugger. Al Gore and I would not mix ”


Virginia Mann has successfully organized the 13 other homeowners on her block to foot the bill to inject the elms on their street.


There are nine healthy elms on the block, and Mann and her neighbors have decided to adopt and inject three trees each year, at a cost of about $600 per tree.


“I know they add value to my community, I know they add value to my property, and I
know they keep my cooling costs down and I know there’s nothing I can do to replace them. So if you don’t take care of them, that’s it, they’re gone.”


While prognosis for the inoculated trees is excellent, there are no guarantees.
Dutch elm disease is spread both by beetles who carry the fungus on their hairs, and through root grafts between neighboring trees.


There is no way to protect the trees from root grafts. No one is sure why the disease is back and moving so aggressively.


Some citizens say, though inoculations can’t guarantee saving a tree, with only about 3,000 elms left in Evanston they’d rather try, than accept what the city officials seem to believe is the inevitable demise of the species in their suburb.
“Well, you can see my tree suffered an amputation this year.”


Mimi Peterson’s front porch on Ashland Avenue is shaded by a tall sturdy-looking survivor.


“It’s one of the few elms left on the block. You can also see across the street where we lost a really huge one. We’ve already lost nine trees on the block.”


She is well known in town for raising her voice as an advocate for trees; five years ago she hounded the city into more routine tree trimmings.


Now Peterson’s spearheading a group called TREE…To Rescue Evanston Elms, looking to suburbs like nearby Hinsdale…a place with more elm trees and a more aggressive Dutch elm disease prevention program.


Peterson says she agrees that diseased trees should go…but more needs to be done to protect still healthy elms.


Mostly Peterson’s group wants the city to spend more time and money looking for trees to save rather than trees to cut.


For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jody Becker.