Irish Central recently published an article about researchers at North Carolina State University led by Professor Jean Ristaino who have have concluded that potato blight was first reported in five different US states in 1843, two years before the beginning of the Great Hunger in Ireland in 1845. Potato blight was first reported in five different US states - New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Connecticut and the study deduced that infected potato tubers
from France, Colombia, or Nova Scotia were the possible sources of this disease in the US. Researchers mapped the spread of potato blight in mid-19th-century North America using historic farm reports, news accounts and agricultural records to document the spread of this pathogen. Meanwhile, researchers analyzed tweets from 2012 to 2022 to learn more about the modern spread of the disease by using common and scientific names for the pathogen.