Penn State Celebrates Plum Pox Docs

August 30, 2013

This year, Penn State University’s Department of Plant Pathology and Environmental Microbiology is celebrating its 50th birthday by recognizing the unheralded plant scientists who help to keep your fruits and vegetables disease free. Recently, they celebrated one of their juiciest successes.

It all started in 1999. That was when the plum pox virus was discovered in Pennsylvania. It’s a disease that affects all stone fruits (peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots). First, most trees lose their entire crop of fruit, and then, says Dr. Frederick Gildow, the head of the department, "the virus after two or three years, or four years, will kill a tree."

There is no cure for plum pox virus, meaning that the state's peach crop was in grave danger. The only solution was the extermination of sick trees.

"The control strategy is simply to identify every tree that has the virus and you destroy it," Gildow says.

It was a heroic effort, and by 2006 Penn State and the Department of Agriculture, eliminated plum pox virus from the state. Gildow says that while the department has now moved on to other issues like protecting the state’s mushroom crops, they're still keeping an eye out for the virus.

"It’s prevalent in Canada, and we have to be on guard to make sure it doesn’t move back into the United States," he says.