A Fungus Among Us By Annette Stark

A FUNGUS AMONG US
Sudden Oak Death spreads, gets a name change, and inspires new federal rules that threaten to shut down California Nurseries

http://www.lacitybeat.com/cms/story/detail/?id=865&IssueNum=47

By Annette Stark
A growing national panic over Sudden Oak Death - the killer tree disease that first showed up in Northern California a decade ago and finally made its way to the Southern California-based Monrovia Nursery in March - took another fast twist last week with the delivery of a new set of USDA rules regarding the disease. The new regulations, the most stringent yet, beef up federal inspections to control the spread of SOD and validate controversial new methods for detecting it.
With the new rules, time-consuming lab cultures will no longer be necessary in certifying that a plant is infected with the fungus associated with the disease (Phytophthora ramorum). DNA testing will be used - which produces faster results - to simply indicate that a plant is carrying P. ramorum spores, even if it's still healthy. A positive DNA test will restrict movement of plants even outside the 12 Northern California counties originally quarantined. Also, as regards to confirmed SOD hosts, a DNA positive in the nursery on a confirmed host will cause all plants in the genus - for instance, all roses - to be tested and possibly subjected to quarantines.
The news was a crushing blow to an industry that is already struggling from financial losses totaling in the millions from individual state embargoes that preempted federal rules. Four states, including Florida, are still refusing to take any California nursery stock.
"Regulating on the basis of DNA is a dangerous precedent," says Don Dillon, chairman of the California Association of Nursery and Garden Centers (CANGC), indicating that false DNA positives can occur 10 percent of the time. "It's dangerous to put the whole genus on the list. There is no scientific basis for that."
Also last week, the American Nursery & Landscape Association (ANLA) announced that it has renamed the disease. "P. ramorum causes disease in certain trees and shrubs. ANLA has decided to call this disease 'Ramorum canker and blight' rather than the somewhat inaccurate and alarming term, 'sudden oak death,'" executive vice president of ANLA Robert J. Dolibois was quoted in Landscape Management.
It was the strongest move yet to control the SOD panic that some say is spinning out of control. Many are wondering nationwide if it might be too late.
In a letter leaked to CityBeat, dated April 14, UC Berkeley scientist Dr. Matteo Garbelotto took up the case for DNA testing. (Dr. Garbelotto and UC Davis' Dr. David Rizzo are credited with isolating the P. ramorum fungus as the probable cause of SOD.) "This is a serious ethical issue," Garbelotto warns. "I cannot close my eyes when I hear CDFA people at meetings make comments like 'DNA tests are not species specific,' when all of the scientific evidence proves the contrary." The letter was e-mailed to officials at the California Department of Forestry and Agriculture (CDFA) and to the National Phytophthora ramorum Program Manager for USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS), Jonathan M. Jones.
On the surface, the letter is alarming: "If this were polio," Garbelotto asks in the letter, "would you feel confident letting your non-immunized child play with somebody that resulted positive for polio through a DNA test?" It also reeks of political innuendo, with Garbelotto asking if this is "a crusade I have to start by myself" and referencing his political connections: "I can certainly talk with congress members who know me personally."
"What are we going to do," he asks, "allow the infestation to move on to the rest of the country?"
It's unclear whether Garbelotto's letter influenced the new USDA rules. The letter preceded the USDA regulations by only two weeks and the strict measures it demands are a close match with the updated rules.
Nurseries and growers, which comprise the state's third largest industry, are alarmed by these fast-moving events. They now feel they are in serious jeopardy from statements like those made by Garbelotto and the national press. Is this rhetoric, they're asking, or does Dr. Garbelotto actually believe this is a killer epidemic?
If actions speak louder than words, the answer might be in the steps Garbelotto followed about reporting the wood rose as a confirmed SOD host on April 1. If you missed the importance of this discovery in light of the spreading SOD epidemic, Garbelotto was there to remind you. In a fuzzy press release dated April 1, 2004, he noted that P. ramorum had been found in a wild wood rose, and wrote, "Although no infected roses have been found in commercial nurseries yet, this finding should prompt surveys of roses sold commercially (especially wood rose) to ascertain their infection status."
The nursery industry took immediate issue: "That comment unfairly raised the risk and alluded to the fact that there would be a problem spreading this to commercial roses, which is unfounded," Dillon explains, "It was just a big 'what if?'"
But CityBeat learned that scientists had information about the rose host much earlier than they announced it, by nearly a year. In fact, according to the paper published by the Garbelotto team in the April issue of The American Phytopathological Society journal, isolates were confirmed in the lab on the wood rose leaves in May 2003, which probably would have qualified it for the Aphis SOD quarantine list of associated hosts. But Garbelotto didn't report it to APHIS until March 4, 2004.
"It is clear from the published record that Phytophthora ramorum was isolated from diseased leaflets of wood rose in May 2003" observed Dr. Lee Klinger, a noted plant pathologist formerly at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has postulated that mosses might be a possible cause of SOD. "So it's a good question why this species didn't make it onto the APHIS list of non-regulated hosts at that time."
Questions now linger over the timing of the appearance of the wood rose as confirmed host to P. ramorum. Klinger says it should have been on the confirmed list as early as December 2003. And in light of a federal quarantine, time would have been of the essence.
When first asked about the peculiar timing, Dr. Rizzo said: "Because P. ramorum is a quarantined pathogen, only APHIS has the authority to list hosts in any way. Our role is to provide information to them and then it is their decision to list a new host and/or release the information. The regulatory agencies have required us to have data peer reviewed in a journal and published."
But, according to APHIS, peer review in a journal is not one of their requirements. "I've posted other plants to the SOD confirmed host list that were not accompanied by any published papers" said Jonathan Jones of APHIS, who also wanted to make it clear that scientists did nothing legally wrong.
In other words, the reporting was left up to them. When pressed further, Rizzo then said, it was CDFA rules - not APHIS - they had decided to follow: "CDFA has always required peer review and that is the standard to which Matteo's lab adhered ... APHIS apparently does not necessarily require it for associated host status - I guess this is new to me." (Garbelotto did not respond to numerous requests for comment.)
APHIS, however, not CDFA, controls the quarantine list.
The upshot is that information about roses possibly carrying "Ramorum canker and blight" was held up for almost a year. Peer review was done and the paper was accepted for publication by January 23, which would have still prevented the "polio" from traveling on Valentine's Day roses. They didn't do that, either. Is this a group that's knocking itself out to control a deadly plant epidemic? Or, is this just so much hyperbole and politics - a way to keep the research funds flowing into the Garbelotto Berkeley lab? "It certainly raises the possibility that they (Garbelotto and Rizzo) don't think it's that infectious of a disease, which is what we've been saying all along," Don Dillon says. "We know there's a political aspect to the regulation of this pathogen and I guess there is always the possibility that the desire for power might be a factor. To me, it just brings up all sorts of issues about human nature."
Published: 04/29/2004