Farmers Review Africa Sept/Oct 2018 FRA - September - October 2018 digital 5 | Page 49

Internal symptoms revealed by doing
a cross-section of an infected stem
are yellow-orange streaking and the
presence of a yellow bacterial ooze.
This can also be seen from any other
infected plant part.
Prevention measures
Removal of the male bud after the
last hand has set will prevent insect
transmission of the bacteria. Keeping
cutting tools clean will also help
prevent the transmission through
contaminated tools.
However, should the disease show
up, removing the diseased stem has
been proved to reduce the incidence of
new infections to negligible levels. That
is, when used in combination with the
practices that prevent transmission of
the bacteria. Alternatively, the growing
of cultivars with persistent bracts has
also been proposed to protect the male
bud from insect-transmitted infections. the plant if the said plant is only in the
first stages of flower infection.
Control practices
Removing infected plants
From the early days of the epidemics,
farmers were advised to uproot
diseased mats, and to dispose of the
plant debris, before replanting using
clean planting material. However, long-term studies have
since proved this wrong, since the
bacteria do not go on to systematically
colonize all the suckers attached to the
rhizome. Moreover, the development
of the disease is not given once a
particular plant is infected.
The practice, however, proved to be
a demanding task especially for small
holder farmers. Mats can also be
destroyed by injecting an herbicide into
the mother plant. Single diseased stem
removal This, then makes the single diseased
stem removal (SDSR) technique an
effective alternative to uprooting the
entire mat.
An alternative to uprooting the entire
mat is cutting off the infected plant
at soil level. In the early days of the
epidemic, research suggested the
possibility of preventing the infection of
Beyond what individual farmers can do
on their plots, a number of measures,
such as intensive surveillance and
reporting of new outbreaks and
strict control of the movement of
plant material from infected areas to
unaffected ones, have been proposed.
Photo Courtesy of www.frontiersin.org
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