Can These Tree 'Shots' Save Urban Park Trees from Deadly Beetles and Disease?
San Gabriel Valley Tribune (November 29, 2016)

Don Grosman hooks tiny needles into the bark of a 50-foot-tall sycamore tree, injecting the tree with a medicinal cocktail to ward off Fusarium Dieback, a plague killing urban street and park trees.

“We equate it to giving someone a shot for the prevention of a disease,” said Grosman, technology advancement manager and entomologist with Arborjet, Inc., a Massachusetts company that patented the combination of pesticide and fungicide that’s directly shot into a tree’s vascular system like a shot is injected into a person’s bloodstream to prevent measles or the flu.

Grosman returned Tuesday to the Pomona Fairplex grounds to complete a three-year trial started in January 2014 in cooperation with researchers at UC Riverside. So far, results are promising, he said:

Ninety percent of trees that received an injection of a combination of two chemicals, Propizol (propiconazole), a systemic fungicide; and TREE-age (emamectin benzoate), a general use pesticide; showed no signs of the disease, he said.

Similar results occurred in Pasadena Glen, a leafy neighborhood north of Kinneloa Mesa that asked Arborjet for help with about 100 private sycamore trees in October 2013. After three years, the neighborhood lost one of 20 treated trees, yet 40 percent of the untreated trees set up as a control died from the disease, Grosman said.