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worth repeating |
Erin Lipp, of the environmental health sciences department, delivered a lecture on “The Age of Effluents: Ecosystem Impacts in the Florida Keys” for the Institute of Ecology on April 2. Some excerpts: “It is significant, I think, that we are finding these human viruses in the ground-water of these stations that are really far offshore. We believe this is a potential source of these viruses, in wastewater. . . . So what we can conclude is that human sewage—feces—can be found offshore. These are good tools for assessing sewage impact, making a very nice sewage marker, not looking in the water column but looking at the [coral] mucus itself, where they seem to be protected from elements that otherwise might inactivate them. “Source is still an issue, of course. . . . It is always a possibility that there are human feces getting offshore from boats. Of course, one of the questions is, the viruses that we’re looking at—the enteroviruses and the adenoviruses—you’re probably sick if you’re excreting them, so I don’t know how many people are coming up with diarrhea when they’re sitting on their boats offshore. “But clearly the highest volume of waste-water is coming from the high population centers on shore. The impacts for human health we know on shore, if we’re looking at risk assessment, if we understand what this means for human health in these environments. “The other thing that we’re investigating is the importance of using these markers as context for the fact that there is the human sewage impact in these offshore waters.” |
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| —Beth Roberts |
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