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This year, for the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency is allowing citrus growers to spray their trees with large quantities of two antibiotics to combat citrus greening, a bacterial infection that is devastating Florida’s citrus crops, as Nature has reported. Because the antibiotics are also used to treat human bacterial infections, public health advocates worry that their use on crops could promote the development of antibiotic-resistant human pathogens. In a new wrinkle, a study reports that one of the drugs, oxytetracycline, doesn’t protect trees against citrus greening.
The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Florida and published August 1 in the journal Phytopathology, finds that orange trees infected with the citrus-greening bacteria and sprayed with oxytetracycline at doses recommended by the manufacturer for six months did not fare any better against the disease than infected trees sprayed with water, The New York Times ...
