Heat pretreatment, isolation, meristem culture and plantlet recovery of infected banana plants allows the recovery of healthy plantlets for micropropagation. The technology includes the use of in vitro propagated banana plantlets, a heat chamber to pretreat plantlets at elevated temperatures for 16 hours a day for 4 to 8 weeks, the isolation of the meristem from pretreated shoots and the indexing of recovered plants to identify which plantlets are virus-free.