USDA to Conduct Survey on Oak Disease

WASHINGTON - The Agriculture Department will spend $15.5 million on trying to halt the spread of sudden oak death, a blight that kills oak trees and sickens some ornamental plants including rhododendrons and camellias.

The department will spend $6.9 million on surveying the nation's plant nurseries. "We want to know what the distribution of the disease is in the United States," said Larry Hawkins, a spokesman for the western region of USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Inspectors with APHIS and state plant health agencies will visit a representative sample of nurseries and collect leaves for laboratory testing, Hawkins said.

The disease is a threat to the nursery industry, by blemishing the plants it infects and killing some young plants, Hawkins said. Sudden oak death also poses a risk to forests; the fungus-like pathogen has killed thousands of trees in California and Oregon.

The remaining $8.6 million of the USDA allocation will fund quarantine and identification programs in California. In April, the federal government barred California nurseries from shipping 59 plant species out of state until they can be declared free of the disease.

State and USDA officials will continue to survey California nurseries and will revisit sites that show infection to ensure they are disease-free before they can ship plants out of state again, Hawkins said.

Sudden oak death has been found in 14 states, 13 of which are known to have received plants from a single nursery in California, Hawkins said. At least 10 states have restricted the sale of host plants, and Florida has banned the import and sale of all nursery plants from California.