Questions We're Often Asked: Dutch Elm Disease

It is considerably unfair that this devastating disease is so named. First officially identified in France in 1918, soon after that in Holland, Belgium and Germany, it had reached England by 1927. But it was Dutch botanists who discovered the cause: a pathogenic fungus, Ceratocystis ulmi, spread by two beetles, Scolytus multistriatus and S. scolytus. It emigrated from Europe to the United States in 1930 through a shipment of logs unloaded in New York and destined for Ohio. By the 1940s it was infecting Ulmus americana from Quebec to Kentucky; a decade later it was identified as far west as Kansas. The battle lines are now drawn in Saskatchewan cities where detection and immediate removal of infected specimens is currently holding it at bay.