"Worst potato blight since Ireland's:" is it really just tabloid-style hype?

It read like a scare story in some supermarket tabloid: the worst outbreak of a killer fungus since the great Irish potato famine of 1845. Only it appeared in The New York Times, which became alarmed when the fungus reached potato farms in upstate New York.

Although the blight is real, the scare is overblown, according to Grant Jones, spokesman for Ore-Ida Foods, Boise, ID, one of the largest potato products processors in the United States. Despite a damp season that encourages fungal growth, fungicides are keeping the blight under control, he told Quick Frozen Foods International.

It's the same in Europe, according to QFFI's sources there. A combination of fungicides and more resistant strains of potato has kept the blight in check. Not that there isn't some concern: as Jones pointed out at press time, crops in Idaho, Oregon and Washington were just starting to put on tuber weight, and only after that would any serious effects become apparent.

Although it took the Times until this summer to notice the blight, it wasn't exactly news. A mutant form of Pkytophthora infestans, the fungus that destroyed the Irish potato crop and caused a million deaths by starvation, had already spread from Mexico as far as China and India by the end of 1993, according to a report Nov. 20, 1993 in The Economist.

The Economist was also way ahead of the Times in reporting what had scientists most worried about the mutant fungus: it has been spreading through the sexual reproduction of two strains known as A-1 and A-2. Most fungi reproduce asexually, but sexual reproduction allows greater genetic variation - producing strains that spread faster, survive in harsher environments, and are more resistant to chemicals.

The sex angle had already been reported in the June 1993 issue of BioScience. But the potato industry wasn't exactly sleeping, in fact, efforts were already under way at Purdue University to develop a potato resistant to the blight by activating the gene for the fungus-fighting protein osmotin. That was reported last October in Discover.

The Times didn't seem to be aware of the development, although it did mention import of three unlicensed European fungicides under a special one-year permit. Several potato growers have been wiped out in Maine, where the blight cost farmers $25 million last year, according to the Times, suggesting that New York farmers might also be decimated.

It was the spread of the fungus into upstate New York, however, that first drew the newspaper's attention, although the organism had entered the US in the late 1980's and soon spread up the East Coast from Florida to Maine. Unmentioned in the Times was the fact that an outbreak last year in Wisconsin was stopped by timely application of fungicides.