Panama Disease facts

While investigating facts about Panama Disease Of Banana and Panama Disease Resistant Banana, I found out little known, but curios details like:

Banana candy doesn't taste like banana because the flavoring was invented while an old species of banana was popular, the Gros Michel, which tastes different to the currently popular banana, the Cavendish. Panama disease wiped out the Gros Michel but the artificial flavour never changed.

how is panama disease treated?

The French originally tried building the Panama Canal but gave up in 1889 after reportedly spending US$287,000,000 and losing an estimated 22,000 lives to disease and accidents

What is panama disease in bananas?

In my opinion, it is useful to put together a list of the most interesting details from trusted sources that I've come across answering what does panama disease do to bananas. Here are 13 of the best facts about Panama Disease Symptoms and Panama Disease Tropical Race 4 I managed to collect.

what is panama disease?

1. The diseases the workers had to fight odd included malaria and yellow fever. They also had to cut through jungles, swamps, and all the creatures found within, including rats that carries the bubonic plague. Approximately 5,600 people died during the U.S. construction.

2. Gros Michel bananas were common in grocery stores until the 1950's when Panama disease wiped out much of the crops. They were replaced by the modern banana of the Cavendish variety.

3. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States issued a travel advisory in 2016 for pregnant women to consider postponing travel to countries affected by the Zika virus. The countries included many in Latin America and the Caribbean such as Barbados, Bolivia, Columbia, Venezuela, Suriname, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Guyana, Ecuador, and many others.

4. In the 1900's, 'Gros Michel' bananas were the most common banana type in Europe / North America. However, the 'Panama Disease' killed vast amounts of the crop, and their popularity was replaced in 1965 by the 'Cavendish'. Modern Cavendish bananas may face the same fate due to the TR4 Virus.

5. Every banana consumed in the western world is directly descended from a plant grown in a Derbyshire estate's hothouse 180 years ago. This is the Cavendish Banana which replaced the Gros Michel - the most-exported banana that was wiped out by the fungus known as Panama disease in the 1950s.

6. Until the 1960s, we ate different bananas than we do today. We ate Gros Michel bananas until they were essentially wiped out in the Western hemisphere by Panama disease. Since then, we've ate the blander, easily bruisable but Panama disease-resistant Cavendish banana.

7. Scientists believe the common Cavendish Banana (the type most shops sell) will be extinct in 30 years, because of a disease affecting the crop called 'Panama Disease'.

8. In the 1950s, Cavendish banana was developed to replace the Gros Michel banana most common before the 50s) after crops of the latter were devastated by Panama disease.

9. The bananas we eat today (Cavendish) are not the same type of banana that were sold pre-1960. Gros Michel bananas, which were considerably sweeter and creamier, were almost entirely wiped out (in the Western hemisphere) by Panama disease in the 1940s/50s.

What is true about panama disease?

You can easily fact check it by examining the linked well-known sources.

Bananas in Europe and America are considered worse now than they were pre 1950s. This is because the variety of banana back then was the Gros Michel variety, what banana flavourings are still based on. When these were almost wiped out by Panama disease, we switched to Cavendish bananas.