07/07/20
Crop disease pandemic coming ‘sooner rather than later’
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Crop disease pandemic coming ‘sooner rather than later’
经过：劳拉·欧文斯（Laura Owings）
A healthy wheat crop in Uganda, just weeks from harvest, turns into a tangle of black stems and shrivelled grains. As much as 80 per cent of the harvest is lost, a fate that destroys the farmer’s investment in the fields and damages the livelihood of the family.
Soon wheat fields in Kenya, Ethiopia and Egypt experience the same fate. Iran follows, along with India, Pakistan and Lebanon. Then countries in Asia and Europe show signs.
The culprit is wheat stem rust. A plant disease that has been known for decades, a virulent new strain, Ug99, emerged in 1999 to ravage wheat production across the globe — and was spread by the wind.
"Plant disease can be very cryptic and look like water stress or nutrient deficiencies. These tools enable someone to diagnose it effectively where it may have been missed before."
Stephen Parnell, spatial epidemiologist, University of Salford
小麦茎生锈只是植物害虫和疾病的一个例子，全球农民和农业专家正在战斗。它们是对粮食安全的沉默威胁，负责40 per cent of global food crop losses, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
While crop pests and diseases can be spread by environmental factors, such as the wind, they also move into new places via global trade, traffic and transport. As the world prepares to feed its expected population of more than nine billion people by 2050, preventing plant disease outbreaks is becoming more urgent.
Indeed, this has been recognised on a global scale with the United Nation’s declaration of 2020 as the International Year of Plant Health. But experts say more research has to be done — and quickly — in order to prevent a global crop disease pandemic.
Evolutionary arms race
埃克塞特大学的植物病理学家海伦·福恩（Helen Fones）告诉他说：“病原体与宿主之间一直在不断的进化战。”SciDev.Net. “Each continually evolves to overcome the latest strategy that the other has created to infect or resist infection.”
Fones’ latest research, published with colleagues in the journal大自然食品(8 June), points to this ‘evolutionary arms race’ to conclude that no interventions last forever. Fungi, such as wheat stem rust, pose the greatest threat, according to the researchers.
Highly adaptable and able to evolve rapidly, fungi have short generation times and can reach high population sizes in agricultural fields.
“This aspect of their biology makes them hard to predict,” says Fones. As fungal pathogens are introduced through global trade systems, they attack crops that lack immunity.
“In a new location there are new, naïve hosts lacking immunity, a release from competition and other opportunities. For this reason, the transported fungus often thrives,” she says.
加剧这是一种全球食品系统，强调单一养殖实践 - 单一农作物物种的大规模生产 - 如果农作物疾病对防御能力有抵抗力，则会增加对作物疾病的毁灭性影响。
Fragile system
While regional crop diversity has increased over the past 50 years, researchers say large industrial farms in Asia, Europe and South America are allgrowing the same one crop speciesacross thousands of hectares of land.
多伦多大学的生态学家亚当·马丁（Adam Martin）告诉说，“在全球范围内，世界上的农业地区现在开始越来越相似。”SciDev.Net.
As this trend continues, he says, many different parts of the world will be affected by the same pests and disease outbreaks. This will likely lead to “major and surprising disruptions”.
马丁说，全球粮食系统的内置备份可能会缓解作物损失的一些负面影响。尽管一个国家可能会从另一个国家进口疾病的农作物，但它可能会产生营养类似的农作物来取代它。但是这些缓冲区只能掩盖富裕国家。
他说：“当世界对全球粮食或经济体系造成重大冲击或中断时，我们所知道的是，欠发达国家往往首当其冲地受到负面影响。”
寻找world food crisis of 2007-2008，在其中粮食价格飙升，阐明了这些影响：贫困，营养不良以及经济和社会动荡。在危机期间，抗议和暴动爆发48 countries，包括叙利亚，委内瑞拉和14个非洲国家。
Detect and treat
Smart technology, like disease mapping, could play a role in stopping a devastating plant pandemic in its tracks.
Mapping is especially helpful with early detection and treatment targeting, Stephen Parnell, a spatial epidemiologist at the University of Salford, says.
“Identifying plant disease is like a needle in a haystack problem. Maps are like a metal detector to show you where and how to target resources,” he says.
这些地图中的一些通过建模作用，将环境风险因素（例如风和降雨）与其他因素（例如作物传播）以及先前检测到的疾病的接近beplay足球体育的微博性结合起来。其他人则依靠农民和社区成员使用智能手机应用程序来检测和记录疾病标志。
“Plant disease can be very cryptic and look like water stress or nutrient deficiencies. These tools enable someone to diagnose it effectively where it may have been missed before,” Parnell says.
但是，一个挑战是能够及时收集这些数据的能力。他说：“有些植物疾病很快表达，而另一些植物疾病可能会在表现出症状之前感染一年。”
How to treat the disease is another challenge. Fungicides are an effective first-line defence, but only for so long, says Fones.
“Fungi are constantly evolving and that includes evolving resistance to new fungicides,” she says. Worryingly, she says, the same fungicides used on farms are also used in human medicine.
Azoles, for example, are the most widely-used class of plant fungicides, while being among the frontline anti-fungal drugs for humans. Research suggests this dual role is promoting azole-resistance, with one study in the Netherlands showing100 per cent mortalityamong patients suffering related fungal infections.
The conflict between the use of fungicides in agricultural settings and their clinical effectiveness highlights the limitations of anti-fungal interventions, researchers say.
Still, Fones says not using fungicides is not an option. "Without fungicides we might expect to lose 30 to 50 per cent of the wheat harvest in the UK in a bad year. For crops that don't have resistance and rely only on fungicides for protection, it could be 100 per cent,” she says.
“因此，我们确实需要新的，特定于农业的真菌控制方法。”beplay下载官网西西软件
Protecting the plant
Some biochemists argue that the most effective protection against a pandemic is to avoid plants getting sick in the first place.
2Blades Foundation总裁戴安娜·霍瓦斯（Diana Horvath）告诉他说：“现代植物科学生产了更有针对性，有效的作物育种工具，使我们能够改变农作物的基因组。”SciDev.Net.
“现在，我们可以通过使植物能够检测到新的病原体来扩展植物的强烈抗性。”
2Blades is a non-profit supporting genetic solutions for crop disease resistance. Horvath says its scientists can engineer seeds with gene stacks, where multiple resistance genes and modes of action make it much harder for a pathogen to infect the plant.
她说，在生物医学世界中已经看到了这种多种抵抗感染感染的方法。
“With resistance genes, we have shown that we can prevent most of the damage caused by major diseases of major crops, such as wheat stem rust, and protect not only the individual plant, but also its progeny – its seeds and tubers,” Horvath says.因此，全球农业beplay下载官网西西软件最好的武器可能正在加强植物病原体研究。但是霍瓦斯说，植物和农业研究长期资金不足，仅收到了生物医学研究的投资的十分之一。
This may be further affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve seen a lot of global development organisations switch priority to COVID-19. You can see why that’s important, but the plant pandemic scenario hasn’t gone away,” she says.
What a crop disease pandemic will look like, and how the world will fight it, is difficult to predict. But, the University of Toronto’s Martin says, “both science and economics suggest we’re going to find out sooner rather than later.”
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A healthy wheat crop in Uganda, just weeks from harvest, turns into a tangle of black stems and shrivelled grains. As much as 80 per cent of the harvest is lost, a fate that destroys the farmer’s investment in the fields and damages the livelihood of the family.
Soon wheat fields in Kenya, Ethiopia and Egypt experience the same fate. Iran follows, along with India, Pakistan and Lebanon. Then countries in Asia and Europe show signs.
The culprit is wheat stem rust. A plant disease that has been known for decades, a virulent new strain, Ug99, emerged in 1999 to ravage wheat production across the globe — and was spread by the wind.
"Plant disease can be very cryptic and look like water stress or nutrient deficiencies. These tools enable someone to diagnose it effectively where it may have been missed before."
Stephen Parnell, spatial epidemiologist, University of Salford
小麦茎生锈只是植物害虫和疾病的一个例子，全球农民和农业专家正在战斗。它们是对粮食安全的沉默威胁，负责40 per cent of global food crop losses, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization.
While crop pests and diseases can be spread by environmental factors, such as the wind, they also move into new places via global trade, traffic and transport. As the world prepares to feed its expected population of more than nine billion people by 2050, preventing plant disease outbreaks is becoming more urgent.
Indeed, this has been recognised on a global scale with the United Nation’s declaration of 2020 as the International Year of Plant Health. But experts say more research has to be done — and quickly — in order to prevent a global crop disease pandemic.
Evolutionary arms race
埃克塞特大学的植物病理学家海伦·福恩（Helen Fones）告诉他说：“病原体与宿主之间一直在不断的进化战。”SciDev.Net. “Each continually evolves to overcome the latest strategy that the other has created to infect or resist infection.”
Fones’ latest research, published with colleagues in the journal大自然食品(8 June), points to this ‘evolutionary arms race’ to conclude that no interventions last forever. Fungi, such as wheat stem rust, pose the greatest threat, according to the researchers.
Highly adaptable and able to evolve rapidly, fungi have short generation times and can reach high population sizes in agricultural fields.
“This aspect of their biology makes them hard to predict,” says Fones. As fungal pathogens are introduced through global trade systems, they attack crops that lack immunity.
“In a new location there are new, naïve hosts lacking immunity, a release from competition and other opportunities. For this reason, the transported fungus often thrives,” she says.
加剧这是一种全球食品系统，强调单一养殖实践 - 单一农作物物种的大规模生产 - 如果农作物疾病对防御能力有抵抗力，则会增加对作物疾病的毁灭性影响。
Fragile system
While regional crop diversity has increased over the past 50 years, researchers say large industrial farms in Asia, Europe and South America are allgrowing the same one crop speciesacross thousands of hectares of land.
多伦多大学的生态学家亚当·马丁（Adam Martin）告诉说，“在全球范围内，世界上的农业地区现在开始越来越相似。”SciDev.Net.
As this trend continues, he says, many different parts of the world will be affected by the same pests and disease outbreaks. This will likely lead to “major and surprising disruptions”.
马丁说，全球粮食系统的内置备份可能会缓解作物损失的一些负面影响。尽管一个国家可能会从另一个国家进口疾病的农作物，但它可能会产生营养类似的农作物来取代它。但是这些缓冲区只能掩盖富裕国家。
他说：“当世界对全球粮食或经济体系造成重大冲击或中断时，我们所知道的是，欠发达国家往往首当其冲地受到负面影响。”
寻找world food crisis of 2007-2008，在其中粮食价格飙升，阐明了这些影响：贫困，营养不良以及经济和社会动荡。在危机期间，抗议和暴动爆发48 countries，包括叙利亚，委内瑞拉和14个非洲国家。
Detect and treat
Smart technology, like disease mapping, could play a role in stopping a devastating plant pandemic in its tracks.
Mapping is especially helpful with early detection and treatment targeting, Stephen Parnell, a spatial epidemiologist at the University of Salford, says.
“Identifying plant disease is like a needle in a haystack problem. Maps are like a metal detector to show you where and how to target resources,” he says.
这些地图中的一些通过建模作用，将环境风险因素（例如风和降雨）与其他因素（例如作物传播）以及先前检测到的疾病的接近beplay足球体育的微博性结合起来。其他人则依靠农民和社区成员使用智能手机应用程序来检测和记录疾病标志。
“Plant disease can be very cryptic and look like water stress or nutrient deficiencies. These tools enable someone to diagnose it effectively where it may have been missed before,” Parnell says.
但是，一个挑战是能够及时收集这些数据的能力。他说：“有些植物疾病很快表达，而另一些植物疾病可能会在表现出症状之前感染一年。”
How to treat the disease is another challenge. Fungicides are an effective first-line defence, but only for so long, says Fones.
“Fungi are constantly evolving and that includes evolving resistance to new fungicides,” she says. Worryingly, she says, the same fungicides used on farms are also used in human medicine.
Azoles, for example, are the most widely-used class of plant fungicides, while being among the frontline anti-fungal drugs for humans. Research suggests this dual role is promoting azole-resistance, with one study in the Netherlands showing100 per cent mortalityamong patients suffering related fungal infections.
The conflict between the use of fungicides in agricultural settings and their clinical effectiveness highlights the limitations of anti-fungal interventions, researchers say.
Still, Fones says not using fungicides is not an option. "Without fungicides we might expect to lose 30 to 50 per cent of the wheat harvest in the UK in a bad year. For crops that don't have resistance and rely only on fungicides for protection, it could be 100 per cent,” she says.
“因此，我们确实需要新的，特定于农业的真菌控制方法。”beplay下载官网西西软件
Protecting the plant
Some biochemists argue that the most effective protection against a pandemic is to avoid plants getting sick in the first place.
2Blades Foundation总裁戴安娜·霍瓦斯（Diana Horvath）告诉他说：“现代植物科学生产了更有针对性，有效的作物育种工具，使我们能够改变农作物的基因组。”SciDev.Net.
“现在，我们可以通过使植物能够检测到新的病原体来扩展植物的强烈抗性。”
2Blades is a non-profit supporting genetic solutions for crop disease resistance. Horvath says its scientists can engineer seeds with gene stacks, where multiple resistance genes and modes of action make it much harder for a pathogen to infect the plant.
她说，在生物医学世界中已经看到了这种多种抵抗感染感染的方法。
“With resistance genes, we have shown that we can prevent most of the damage caused by major diseases of major crops, such as wheat stem rust, and protect not only the individual plant, but also its progeny – its seeds and tubers,” Horvath says.因此，全球农业beplay下载官网西西软件最好的武器可能正在加强植物病原体研究。但是霍瓦斯说，植物和农业研究长期资金不足，仅收到了生物医学研究的投资的十分之一。
This may be further affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. “We’ve seen a lot of global development organisations switch priority to COVID-19. You can see why that’s important, but the plant pandemic scenario hasn’t gone away,” she says.
What a crop disease pandemic will look like, and how the world will fight it, is difficult to predict. But, the University of Toronto’s Martin says, “both science and economics suggest we’re going to find out sooner rather than later.”
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