US Wheat Crop Shows Signs of Blight
Wheat fields across Kansas face immediate quarantine and aggressive pesticide spraying, after samples of the wheat blight Ug99 appeared in several batches of recently-harvested grain. The blight, which spreads easily in wind, was thought to be absent from the Western Hemisphere until last year, when an experimental wheat crop in Argentina was discovered to be infected. Given the distance, and the lack of intermediate blight infections, this outbreak appears to be unrelated. Nonetheless, the US Food and Drug Administration and Department of Homeland Security are treating this as potentially the first of many outbreaks of blight.
Discovered originally in Uganda in 1999, Ug99 blight spread slowly along eastern Africa towards the Arabian peninsula. A series of cyclones in the western Indian Ocean in the late 2000s and early 2010s is believed to be responsible for the appearance of Ug99 in Iran, India, and China. Strict export controls and a variety of experimental anti-fungal treatments seemed to keep the spread of Ug99 at bay, until the 2018 appearance in Argentina.