I’ve blogged about ProMED before a couple of times. It’s advertised as a “global electronic reporting system for outbreaks of emerging infectious diseases & toxins.” But it is actually a bit more than that, as a recent piece on cassava brown streak disease revealed. There have recently been some stories in the Ugandan popular press about this disease. And one of the early ones made it to ProMED. That’s useful enough, but it also elicited a reply from Prof. Mark Laing of the School of Biochemistry, Genetics, Microbiology and Plant Pathology, University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. He noted that “that there is hope on the horizon versus both cassava mosaic disease (CMD) and cassava brown streak virus (CBSV)” and quoted a couple of breeding programmes that are having some success. That’s really how you want an early warning system to work. It should not only give warning of the problem, but also get people to discuss possible solutions. It doesn’t seem all that complicated to set up. Is it too much to hope for that there’ll be something along these lines for genetic erosion before I crawl away to my well-earned retirement?
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Crops, animals, wild relatives ...
Fresh Nibbles: May 18, 2012
: <- click to comment- Ancient olives not that old after all. But still attractive.
- Giving up tobacco – in favor of purple sweet potatoes?
- Kew is now as much about cooking as growing. Visit the 18th century kitchens.
- Linking small farmers to markets, video from a conference.
- The International Treaty’s SMTA made easy. Well, kinda. It would have been even easier if they had linked to the site. Good thing there’s us, eh?
Nibbles Archive: All that condensed goodness.
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Featured Comment:
Mark Nesbitt knows who the Director of Agriculture is Tanzania was in 1934:
The sorghum collection – all 956 accessions – was acquired by J.D. Snowden while working on his 1936 book (still in print!) “Cultivated Races of Sorghum”. It’s a perfect example of a collection that 20 years ago would have seemed useless (old seeds, mostly dead) but thanks to new techniques (DNA analysis) suddenly looks very interesting as a record of landrace distribution before the Green Revolution.
So, any gene jockeys out there interested in extracting DNA from old seeds? Just for information, there are 1058 sorghum accessions from Tanzania in Genesys. How much can it cost to run a bunch of microsatellites on 2,000 samples?
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- May 19, 2012: Tom commented on Where do bananas grow anyway?
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- May 11, 2012: Dirk Enneking commented on Nibbles: Warm weather, Invasives, Agrobacteria, Extension, Seed sales
- May 11, 2012: Dave Wood commented on Organic vs Industrial ag: lotta continua
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Paul Krugman answered this question in his New York Times column. Genetic erosion, like climate change, does not have a sense of urgency to it.
PROMED is great. But I don’t think it has enough correspondents to be really useful for crop disease monitoring (and it does not include pests if they are not vectors for a disease). Perhaps because there are too few incentives to participate in PROMED.
We need more programs like this one in Tanzania. This is cool. Just buy SIM cards and give people some minutes on their cell phones. You have to train them a little. Might not work. But bravo to the Great Lakes Cassava Research Initiative for trying.
Or you could use Twitter.