1511. Decades of Herbicide Use Yield "Weeds" that Do Not Respond to Herbicides: The Case of Amaranthus Palmeri

By Michael Wines, The New York Times, August 11, 2014

Glyphosate resistant Palmer Amaranth, photo by FireFlyForest.com

WHEATFIELD, Ind. — The Terminator — that relentless, seemingly indestructible villain of the 1980s action movie — is back. And he is living amid the soybeans at Harper Brothers Farms.

About 100 miles northwest of Indianapolis, amid 8,000 lush acres farmed by Dave Harper, his brother Mike and their sons, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of weeds refuses to die. Three growing seasons after surfacing in a single field, it is a daily presence in a quarter of the Harper spread and has a foothold in a third more. Its oval leaves and spindly seed heads blanket roadsides and jut above orderly soybean rows like skyscrapers poking through cloud banks. It shrugs off extreme drought and heat. At up to six inches in diameter, its stalk is thick enough to damage farm equipment.

“You swear that you killed it,” said Scott Harper, Dave Harper’s son and the farm’s 28-year-old resident weed expert. “And then it gets a little green on it, and it comes right back.”

Botanists call the weed palmer amaranth. But perhaps the most fitting, if less known, name is carelessweed. In barely a decade, it has devastated Southern cotton farms and is poised to wreak havoc in the Midwest — all because farmers got careless.

After Monsanto began selling crops genetically engineered to resist glyphosate in the 1990s, the herbicide’s use soared. Farmers who once juggled an array of herbicides — what killed weeds in a cotton field might kill cornstalks in a cornfield — suddenly had a single herbicide that could be applied to almost all major crops without harming them.

There were even environmental benefits: Farmers relied less on other, more dangerous weed killers. And they abandoned techniques like tilling that discouraged weed growth, but hastened erosion and moisture loss.

But constantly dousing crops in glyphosate exacted a price. Weeds with glyphosate-resisting genetic mutations appeared faster and more often — 16 types of weed so far in the United States. A 2012 survey concluded that glyphosate-resistant weeds had infested enough acreage of American farmland to cover a plot nearly as big as Oregon, and that the total infestation had grown 51 percent in one year. Glyphosate-resistant palmers first surfaced in 2005, in a field in Macon County, Ga. Nine years later, they are in at least 24 states.

“There’s no substantive argument about whether the problem’s gotten far worse in this era of genetically resistant crops,” said Charles Benbrook, a professor and pesticide expert at Washington State University. “The advent of herbicide-tolerant crops made it possible for farmers to load up so much herbicide on one crop that it was inevitable that it would develop resistance.”

Now farmers are going back to older techniques to control weeds, using more varieties of herbicides, resuming tilling — and worse.

Palmer amaranth is the prime example. Consider the cotton fields that blanket many Southern farms: Without glyphosate, almost no herbicides can kill the weed without also damaging cotton plants. Some farmers have mowed their crops to keep palmer seeds from maturing. In 2009, Georgia spent $11 million to send laborers into a million acres of cotton fields to pull palmers out by hand.

For many farmers, including the Harpers, manual labor has become a last resort in the battle against carelessweed.

“I consider myself a Roundup baby, and it was great,” Scott Harper said. “You didn’t have to think about anything. And now we get this weed that flips everything on its head.”

The Harpers’ 2,500-acre soybean crop is an object lesson in palmer’s adaptability and how far farmers must go just to keep it in check.

Palmer amaranths seem as if they were designed by nature to outwit herbicides and farmers. Unlike many weeds, it has male and female versions, increasing genetic diversity — and the chances of a herbicide-resistant mutation — in each new seed. And each plant is astonishingly prolific, producing up to 200,000 seeds in an average field, said Dave Mortensen, a professor of weed and plant ecology at Pennsylvania State University.

“If one out of millions or billions of seeds contains a unique trait that confers resistance to herbicide,” he said, “it doesn’t take long when a plant is that fecund for it to become the dominant gene.”

William G. Johnson, a Purdue University professor of botany and plant pathology, said the weed probably arrived at the Harpers’ farm in typical fashion: in manure, purchased as fertilizer, from cows that ate cottonseed — and, inadvertently, palmer seeds.

The Harpers initially mistook the weed for waterhemp, a close relative. Before they learned otherwise, combines had already harvested fields containing mature palmer seed pods and had spread the seed far and wide.

A glyphosate-resistant palmer is a mighty beast indeed. Its seeds can germinate any time during the growing season, so herbicide sprayed in April is useless against a palmer that appears in July. Once sprouted, palmer amaranth can grow more than two inches a day. Once it exceeds four inches, even herbicides for which it lacks resistance begin to lose their effectiveness.

The Harpers have kept palmers at bay in their 5,500 acres of corn by spraying dicamba, a weed killer that is benign to corn. Soybeans are a different matter.

Last year, the Harpers sprayed palmer-infested fields several times with glyphosate and two other herbicides, pushing herbicide costs to $80 an acre from $15. About eight in 10 palmers died. The rest wilted for a couple of weeks, then resumed growing.

This year, they are trying a different chemical cocktail that raises herbicide costs only to $45 an acre. Their big gun, a herbicide that blocks palmers from synthesizing amino acids, was sprayed on July 3, the first of two applications allowed each summer.

“I came back from the Fourth of July weekend, and they looked dead,” Mr. Harper said. “I said, ‘I think we smoked ’em.’ My dad says, ‘Awesome.’ ” He paused. “Ten days later, there’s green coming all over them again.”

Should the second herbicide application fail, Mr. Harper said, he is unsure what to do next.

More broadly, experts in glyphosate’s travails — farmers, scientists, regulators, the herbicide industry, environmentalists — feel much the same way.

The industry has readied a new barrage of genetically engineered crops that tolerate other weed killers. The Environmental Protection Agency is set to approve plans by Dow AgroSciences to sell soybean seeds that tolerate not only glyphosate, but a much older herbicide, 2,4-D, and a third widely used herbicide, glufosinate. Monsanto hopes to market soybeans and cotton next year that resist dicamba.

Dr. Mortensen and others say the companies are simply repeating the history that made palmers resistant to glyphosate. He says natural solutions, like planting what are known as cover crops that keep light from reaching germinating palmers, may cost more but are also effective.

Mr. Harper said he believes Dr. Mortensen is right. He also said he cannot wait for Monsanto and Dow to begin hawking their new soybeans anyway.

“I’m not stupid. I know you can only ride a pony so far,” he said. “It’ll probably take another 10 years before palmer becomes a real big problem again. But that just brought me 10 years I didn’t have.”

1476. If Tuberculosis Spread...

By Polly J. Price, The New York Times, July 8, 2014

ATLANTA — Drug resistant tuberculosis is on the rise. The World Health Organization reports around 500,000 new drug-resistant cases each year. Fewer than half of patients with extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis will be cured, even with the best medical care. The disease in all its forms is second only to AIDS as an infectious killer worldwide.

The United States has given more than $5 billion to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. But drug-resistant tuberculosis isn’t a problem only in the developing world; we must turn our attention to the fight against it here at home.

Tuberculosis rates have declined in the United States in the last decade. In 2012, there were around 10,000 cases, and of those, only 83 were resistant to all of the most commonly used tuberculosis drugs — 44 fewer than in 2011. So far we have been lucky. The low numbers hide the precarious nature of the nation’s public health defense, and how vulnerable we would be to an epidemic.

The problem is that responsibility for tuberculosis control is divided among 2,684 state, local and tribal health departments. That infrastructure is politically and legally fragmented, underfunded and disproportionately strained in many poor communities.

Patients with infectious tuberculosis, caused by bacteria that usually attack the lungs, need medication regularly administered over many months. Local public health workers provide the medication and observe that it is taken by the patient, requiring as many as five visits each week. If treatment is interrupted, or if the drugs are not working, patients have a much higher chance of developing (and spreading) drug-resistant tuberculosis. At the same time, health workers must track down and test anyone who had come in close contact with patients before the disease was diagnosed, to be certain no one else has been infected.

All this is made much more difficult by the patchwork of jurisdictions and the lack of coordination among health departments, which can easily lose track of patients who travel or relocate to another county or state.

Tuberculosis is also most common in communities with the least stability. Among people born in the United States, the greatest disparity is between blacks and whites; blacks contract it at a rate more than seven times higher than whites, often because of poverty and crowded living conditions. But foreign-born individuals account for two-thirds of new cases. We have no reliable method to identify tuberculosis in migrant populations or foreign visitors. Even if screening at borders were logistically possible, it could take several days to obtain test results. By that time, it would be difficult to locate travelers who were unknowingly carrying the disease. And health departments near the southern border are already overwhelmed, especially by a recent influx of migrant children from Latin America, where tuberculosis is more common.

Perhaps most critical is the high rate of tuberculosis among the two million people incarcerated in America. Prisoners are routinely screened and treated, but that treatment ends when they are released, even if they are not yet cured. Former prisoners are also among the least compliant of all patients, possibly because the strict medication regimen, which requires repeated contact with government health care personnel, feels like an extension of their prison term. There is no legal mechanism to determine which local health department “owns” a tuberculosis patient after he is released from federal or state custody.

These decisions are too important to leave to the vagaries of local politics. In Jackson County, Ohio, voters last year were asked to approve a tax to continue to fund the county’s tuberculosis prevention and treatment program. In an effort to ensure approval, tax commissioners reduced the levy, leaving just enough to keep the program going. Voters still rejected it, 3,363 to 3,195. As a result, the health department had to cut the program’s public health nurse and a clerical assistant.

We need a better system for tuberculosis treatment, funded at the national level. The Division of Tuberculosis Elimination at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention routinely works with local public health departments to monitor tuberculosis outbreaks and to provide expert guidance. But it does not have the funding to help them pay for tuberculosis treatment, even where local resources are clearly inadequate.

That must change. Congress should appropriate additional funds to the C.D.C. to cover costs of tuberculosis treatment that are now borne by local health departments. The C.D.C. should also take on the responsibility of locating and monitoring tuberculosis patients who move from one jurisdiction to another, including newly released prisoners, since many local health departments do not have the ability to do so.

It will be costly: Over the next 10 years, one estimate shows that we will need to spend $1.3 billion on tuberculosis treatment — and that’s if infection rates remain the same. But tuberculosis’s greatest lesson is that the health problems of poor people in poor areas are everyone’s problem. Continuing our present failing system would prove to be far more expensive in the end, because drug-resistant tuberculosis will not obey political or economic boundaries.

Polly J. Price is a law professor at Emory University.