Symptoms of fungal, bacterial and viral diseases can be confusing even for trained experts to identify, and may occur in
mixtures, further confounding correct identification. This study could have been stronger if it had been combined with a diagnostic survey to more accurately determine the incidence and severity of Tomato farmers in Thailand used an extremely large quantity of pesticides on average (42.5 kg/ha). The mean and median application rates were 8 times greater than in Vietnam. On average, Thai tomato farmers mixed 3.7 different pesticides in a single spray, which is considerably greater than for the other countries. Such high amounts of pesticide use in tomato production in Thailand have also been reported from other recent surveys