Posted by
Rich on Wednesday, February 06, 2008 7:07:41 AM
I can't believe this. In today's Sarasota Herald-Tribune editorial, "
Bacteria at the beach"
we have another major health crisis that, "Governments whose economies
depend on tourism and beaches should focus on keeping coastal waters
clean and healthy."
Last week the Herald-Tribune wanted us to
worry about more global warming caused hurricanes, yesterday is was
pesticides in our produce and juices, and today it is bacteria on our
beaches. I for one am going to lock myself in my house and become a
hermit living on bread and water.
It seems the Herald-Tribune is
again using the fear card - having earlier used the race and gender
cards in their political editorials as we reported
here. How many more cards do they have in their deck?
What is interesting about the
study
that they refer to done by University of Florida doctoral student Tonya
Bonilla is that she states, "Our objective was to understand whether
beach sand could pose a health risk to beach goers...What we found was
that there was no increased health risk due to exposure to sand on the
upper beach,”... “However, the longer the period of time people spent
in the water and in the wet sand, the higher the probability that they
would experience some gastrointestinal illness."
Tonya goes on
to explain, "While fecal indicator levels in the near-shore waters of
South Florida’s recreational beaches are routinely monitored, sand
samples from the surf zone — the wet sand — and the upper beach are
not." Solution found, right? Not quite.
Now where does this fecal coliform come from? According to Tonya "seagull droppings".
The
Herald-Tribune editorial board takes Tonya's study then projects beach
contamination from SE Florida to our area, and then blames multiple
sources including agricultural, lawn, sidewalk and street run off from
animal waste for fecal contamination of our beaches, all without proof.
The
editorial board also makes light of the fact that the study was based
on surveys given to beach goers, who volunteered to take them home and
after four days returned them. This resulted in a "suggestion of an
association between fecal indicator levels in sand and illness rates
among humans". Note the word "suggestion".
Correlation does not mean causation.
We
do not know if the source of survey reported illnesses were in fact
caused by pathogen exposure from playing in the wet sand or water. How
is a volunteer beach goer able to determine the cause of their illness
without a medical examination? Their illness could have been caused by
a bad hot dog for all we know.
So what is the final conclusion
of Tonya's study? “At this point, we don’t know whether the increased
health risk is due to pathogen exposure,” Bonilla said. “To really
understand this, a more comprehensive and targeted epidemiological
approach is needed.”
Bottom line we need to do more studies of beach sand.
Got
that? We need to spend more of our hard earned tax dollars to find out
that seagulls poop on the dry sand, the wet sand and in the water and
we can possibly get sick from that. What a racket.
My suggestion
to the Herald-Tribune is we kill all dogs, cats, cattle, goats, sheep,
all wild critters like the Florida panther and bald eagle, and of
course get rid of those pesky seagulls. That will solve at least some
maybe even most of the fecal problem on our beaches.
I wonder what PETA and the Sierra Club would say about that. What do you think?