N.Y. RED OAK SHOWS SIGNS OF CALIFORNIA MALADY Date: 040801
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TREE DISEASE SPREAD?> By Patrick Healy, New York Times, July 30, 2004
>
> Oyster Bay Cove, N.Y. - A botanical mystery is playing out at the
> Tiffany Creek Nature Preserve, here amid rolling hills and sprawling
> Long Island estates. A single red oak tree at the preserve has tested
> positive for sudden oak death syndrome, a disease that ravaged forests
> in California, and scientists are trying to figure out whether the
> infection is a dire beginning or a false alarm.
>
> Scientists with the U.S. Forest Service and the Department of
> Agriculture are equally baffled and worried. Sudden oak death syndrome
> has killed tens of thousands of trees and cost governments and plant
> nurseries millions of dollars, but until now, it has only been found
> in trees in Northern California and southern Oregon.
>
> A knotty red oak tree standing in the preserve first tested positive
> for the disease last month, and scientists said Wednesday that they
> were running a battery of secondary DNA tests on tree samples to
> determine whether the tree truly carries the debilitating bug. Tests
> on trees in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire have yielded false positive
> results before, said Kerry Britton, a pathologist for the Forest > Service.
>
> "I'm still hoarding the hopes that it's not really there," Britton
> said. "If it is a positive, they'll have to declare a quarantine zone
> around the area and declare an eradication effort. They'll have to cut
> down that tree and trees around there. It's up to the state to decide
> how drastically."
>
> Environmental officials throughout the Midwest and the East Coast
> have feared an outbreak of sudden oak death syndrome ever since trees
> in California began dying from the disease in the mid-1990s.
>
> A fungus-like pathogen called Phytophthora ramorum hops from plant to
> plant by riding rivulets of windblown rain, scientists said. It can
> lay dormant in trees for years, and then kill them within weeks. Oaks
> are not the only trees affected. The disease has killed more than a
> dozen species of trees on the West Coast, and has prompted quarantines
> of potentially infected plants from California.
>
> Steven Swain, a researcher at the University of California at
> Berkeley, who has studied the disease, said early tests on East Coast
> oaks have shown them to be more vulnerable to the disease than trees > in the West.
>
> "If this gets loose on the East Coast, it could cause quite a bit of
> damage," Swain said.
>
> No other trees, ferns or plants in the Tiffany Creek preserve have
> tested positive for the disease.
>
> Scientists took 60 other samples from the suspect red oak and tested
> any tree within 20 acres that showed a passing sign of illness,
> officials with the inspection service said. They expect the test > results next week.
>
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> Copyright (c) 2004 Los Angeles Daily News
>