Kansas officials say there’s a chance that geranium plants shipped to more than 20 greenhouses statewide harbor a plant-killing bacterium listed by the U.S. government as an “agricultural bioterrorism” threat.

The bacterium, Ralstonia solanacearum, causes Southern bacterial wilt, which can devastate crops like potatoes and tomatoes.

But it’s not yet clear whether the public is witnessing a true agricultural hazard, an overreaction or a case of the government doing exactly what it should to contain unwanted pathogens.

The state is asking affected greenhouses to isolate the plants as it waits for direction from the federal government. A state official said there’s virtually no chance any Kansas gardeners have taken the flowers home because they’re still growing indoors as cuttings, or stems.

“It’s not as if there’s an outbreak of the disease,” said Lisa Taylor, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Department of Agriculture. “It’s that we received some plants that may harbor the pathogen, and they also may not.”

Taylor said the department contacted 25 greenhouses since it learned of the problem late last week. She wouldn’t identify the greenhouses or say whether any were in Douglas County.

She said some of them hadn’t yet received the geraniums but appeared on a list from the federal government because they’d ordered the plants.

California-based Goldsmith Plants Inc. grew the geraniums last year at a greenhouse in Lake Naivasha, Kenya, said Don Snow, the company’s production director. It sent them to the United States sometime late last year as rootless stems.

A company in Michigan planted them in tiny patches of soil, then shipped them to greenhouses in at least 20 states.

The company found the bacterium after a complaint from a greenhouse in Indiana, Snow said. He estimated 100 contaminated stems made it into the United States, and he said he didn’t know how the contamination happened.

Ralstonia solanacearum is one of nine biological agents listed in the U.S. Agricultural Bioterrorism Protection Act of 2002 as “potentially posing a severe threat to plant health or plant products.”

A University of Florida professor who has studied bacterial wilt, Tom Kucharek, said some stubborn strains of the bacterium already existed in the United States. The imported strain could be damaging if spread because plants here haven’t adapted to it.

“If it’s an exotic pathogen of any kind, we don’t want it,” he said.

Donna Gardner, manager and grower at Sunrise Garden Center, 15th and New York streets, unboxes geraniums just received from Costa Rica. Geraniums that harbor a plant-killing bacterium listed by the U.S. government as an agricultural bioterrorism threat have been shipped to more than 20 greenhouses statewide.

Snow agreed the geranium cuttings needed to be isolated. But he said a similar occurrence happened in 1999 and 2001– before the anti-terrorism law — and the distributor was able to contain it then.

He said some states, but not Kansas, were overreacting to the recent event by closing greenhouses. And he questioned whether this pathogen should be on the anti-terrorism list.

“We’re shipping our product to an enclosed environment, and the chances of it escaping out of a greenhouse are very, very slim,” he said.

Still, Ken Davidson, co-owner of Sand Creek Nursery in Ottawa, said he was concerned by the agriculture department’s warning even though he had not ordered any of the contaminated geraniums.

“If we happen to get one of those, it would just be devastating,” he said.