The second case of ToBRFV has been identified in the US. “We’ve had two incidents of it in California,” says Bob Gilbertson, who specializes in plant virology and seed pathology at University of California, Davis. “It was identified in a Santa Barbara County production greenhouse in September last year, confirmed by Kai-Shu Ling of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and by our plant pathologists. In that instance, all ToBRFV-infested and symptomatic plant material was voluntarily destroyed.
“Then, sometime in early August, we received suspect fruits from a market in Sacramento that had obtained them from Baja, Mexico,” he said. According to a report by Gilbertson and Zach Bagley of the California Tomato Research Institute, “They didn’t have necrotic lesions on the fruit — there were white blotches — but when we tested them, ToBRFV showed up.”