Henry- these posts make me so angry. What a "Frankenstein's Monster" this has turned into. I appreciate all your updates though and did write to my congressman urging him to vote to fund research after reading your post on the despicable legislation being proposed by that a** from AZ.

Hopefully someone will come up with a treatment, or better yet, a cure for this dreaded disease. I check my roses frequently and panic every time I see red growth!! I haven't seen any RRD in my area so far so I'm hoping that we're isolated enough from exposure.

Thanks for the latest info and keeping our forum so informed on the latest progress. I really appreciate it.

Sharon

"led to complete eradication of rose rosette in Florida,"

Nope. It lead to the eradication of Rose Rosette in the area they worked on. The authors did NOT examine every rose in Florida, so making that complete statement is careless on their part.

Reducing the severity of the symptoms....so we can keep sick plants around waiting for additional vectors to find them and spread it? Balderdash.

Likely these roses were infected during a "canning" operation in Texas or some other southern area where the disease is active. Or I guess some roses are still grown in Texas. Florida probably doesn't have enough wild roses to serve as a bridge for RRD, but the disease could take hold in any city in the country if nurseries carry infected stock.

I would like to know where the infected roses came from.

The following was stated:

" Reducing the severity of the symptoms....so we can keep sick plants around waiting for additional vectors to find them and spread it? Balderdash"

H.Kuska comment: It is my understanding that there are roses that are resistant to natural in field infection. What does this mean? Some observations may be due to the mites not recognizing the leaf surface as belonging to a rose. We do not have to worry about these spreading the infection as they were never bitten. However, what about the others that were bitten but were able to control the infection naturally? Are they going to be "Typhoid Marys" of the rose world? This appears to be a concern of the above quote.

My first thought is that the "surviving rose" may have a virus concentration below the amount necessary to overcome most clean roses' natural defense system.

The virus plant world is not black and white. There are plants that do not get infected by a particular virus (complete resistance). There are plants that exhibit partial resistance, and there are plants that exhibit so little resistance that the virus kills it.

If we add an external chemical that boosts the immune system of a plant so that the plant does not die from the infection, are we providing the plant the opportunity to "fine tune" its immune system naturally so that it will be able to fight the virus in the future without addition application of the external chemical? The literature supports this possibility. This is called systemic acquired resistance against plant viruses.

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&authuser=0&gws_rd=ssl#q=systemic+acquired+resistance+against+plant+viruses&newwindow=1&hl=en&authuser=0&start=90

Can this plant that has acquired SAR pass it on to the next generation? Evidence is now being accumulated that supports the possibility of "next-generation systemic acquired resistance".

http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/158/2/835.short

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=%22next-generation+systemic+acquired+resistance%22+against+plant+virus&btnG=&as_sdt=1%2C36&as_sdtp=

https://www.google.com/webhp?hl=en&authuser=0&gws_rd=ssl#newwindow=1&hl=en&authuser=0&q=%22next-generation+systemic+acquired+resistance%22+against+plant+virus