Word: funguses
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...diseases that can afflict the coffee tree, the most devastating is caused by a yellow-orange fungus called Hemileia vastatrix. In the late 19th century, when it ravaged the coffee plantations of Ceylon and India, the fungus helped change Britain into a nation of tea drinkers. Now it has invaded the New World, spreading rapidly through a Texas-sized area of southeastern Brazil and threatening 2 billion plants that yield a third of the world's coffee...
...vastatrix's deadly advance has given growers throughout Latin America a bad case of coffee nerves. Once the microscopic spores of the fungus settle on a susceptible plant, they send thin, tubular filaments into the leaf. These cause structural damage and also release a toxin that disrupts the life-giving process of photosynthesis. As the sickly patches spread, other leaves catch the infection, and within a year or two the entire plant dies...
...disease is almost impossible to contain. The minute spores are tough, long-lived and prolific: each tiny fungus spot on the leaf may produce 50,000 new spores. They can hitchhike easily by almost any conveyance: insects, birds, even raindrops. U.S. Plant Pathologist Frederick Wellman suspects that the spores may be carried all the way across the Atlantic by storms that form off Africa, where the rust has been a problem for many years. Airborne spores have been found 2,000 feet above infected plants. Man himself is probably a carrier. A heavy outbreak in the Brazilian state of Bahia...
Scientists seeking ways to fight the disease are now experimenting with fungicides derived from petroleum. Other fungicides, containing copper-sulfate solution, have already been used successfully in Africa, but they are usually too costly for the small grower. There is an added expense: because the fungus clings to the undersides of the leaves, safe from aerial attacks, the spraying must be done by hand...
Corn in the three states, which produce more than half of the nation's supply, is being attacked by a virulent fungus disease. It eats through the tender leaves of young plants, causes weakened stalks to collapse and, at worst, turns ears of corn into blackened rot. Called Southern-corn leaf blight, the fungus has long been confined to the South because its wind-borne spores do not survive the dryness of northern summers. Last year a new and more deadly mutant strain of the leaf blight appeared, and this year it spread north from Florida and Georgia. Farmers...