Copyright 1998 Stuart News Company
The Stuart News/Port St. Lucie News (Stuart,FL)
April 5, 1998, Sunday
SECTION: A Section; Pg. A1
LENGTH: 1457 words
HEADLINE: MARYLANDERS HOPING FISH KILLS WON'T RECUR
BYLINE: Jennifer Maddox Washington correspondent
BODY:
Troubled Waters
MARYLAND'S EASTERN SHORE
The tourists haven't yet arrived at this watery playground.
The roadside produce stands are still boarded up. The streets
are almost empty in Crisfield, the "soft shell crab capital"
of Maryland.
Bait shops aren't open yet, and the party boats, as local residents
call them, haven't started their cruises to Tangier and Smith
islands in the Chesapeake Bay.
In Shelltown, the public boat ramp was deserted and Fred Maddox's
commercial fishing business was just as quiet on a recent rainy,
windy day.
Things haven't always been this quiet.
Maddox and his family summoned the national press last summer
when thousands of fish floated belly up near his perch at the
mouth of the Pocomoke River, a blackwater tributary of the Chesapeake.
Fish kills have been a normal cyclical event reported since
pioneers settled the area. But last summer was different. It looked
like a scene from a horror movie.
All told, 50,000 to 60,000 fish in the Pocomoke and two other waterways feeding the Chesapeake turned up dead, their bodies scarred with gaping lesions, their flesh eaten to the bone.
In his 60 years of fishing, Maddox, 72, never had seen such
a thing.
"That's what alarmed me, and (state environment and health
officials) didn't take no for an answer when they told us it was
very common," he said.
That's also what alarmed Wade and Betty Aycock of Sewall's
Point last month when they noticed hundreds of mullet floating
near their dock, their bodies similarly riddled with ugly lesions.
In Maryland, officials soon admitted this was nothing common.
At different times in August and September, the fish kills led
Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening to close two sections of the Pocomoke,
a creek off the nearby Manokin River, and a section of the Chicamacomico
River the next county over.
The cause behind the kills was identified as a one-celled organism,
Pfiesteria piscicida (pronounced fistEEria piskisEEda). Neither
plant nor animal, the microscopic cell is also behind what has
become an annual rite of death in North Carolina's Neuse and New
rivers. Scientists place the total of dead, lesioned fish found
since 1991 at 1 billion.
The Pfiesteria cell is nothing new. What's new is something
that alters its biology and turns it into a killer.
The normally harmless cell has 24 forms of life, and only
two or three of them are toxic states in which they eat and kill
fish. Scientists from Maryland to Florida are arguing about what
causes the "cell from hell" to reach that toxic state.
Florida parallels
Pfiesteria is not the attacker that has killed fish in Florida's
St. Lucie and Indian rivers, but it is in the same family of microorganisms
called dinoflagellates. The Florida fish killer undergoes similar
altered states in its life stages. Another member of its family,
which is well known in Florida, is the toxic algae that brings
on the phenomenon known as red tide.
Public officials caution people not to draw too many parallels
between the events in Maryland and Florida. But the parallels
are hard to ignore when thousands of fish are surfacing in both
places with chunks of flesh missing from their bodies.
What's scarier is how the Pfiesteria cases reported in Maryland,
Virginia and North Carolina infected humans, too.
Tommy East, who works for Fred Maddox, got a lesion on his
arm last summer after pulling up hundreds of fish with the same
sores. East described it as an itchy, open sore that didn't heal
for weeks. Besides that, he suffered nausea, severe cramping "that
would double you over," and he lost 40 pounds. He also lost
his short-term memory.
"I've never been sick like that before in my life,"
he said, wincing at the memory. "I know one thing: I don't
want to go through it no more."
East is one of more than 50 patients who have described similar
symptoms after being in waters where the Pfiesteria toxin has
been confirmed. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
last month awarded $ 3.2 million in grants to six states to study
the effects of Pfiesteria on people.
Florida is one of those states, but the grant would not apply
to any cases reported from the Treasure Coast because the cause
of the fish kill there is not Pfiesteria, officials say.
A Jensen Beach man reported getting an open sore on his mouth
similar to those on the pile of diseased mullet he caught in the
Indian River last month. Doctors don't know what caused it, and
the common form of herpes that causes cold sores has been ruled
out by blood tests.
Pfiesteria politics
So far, only one doctor has found a successful treatment for symptoms of Pfiesteria-induced illness. Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker is a family physician in Pocomoke City, Md., a few miles north of Shelltown.
Shoemaker was drawn into the "Pfiesteria hysteria"
when some of his patients who work and play on the water got the
symptoms. In his quest to find a treatment, Shoemaker has placed
himself at the center of the debate over what makes the Pfiesteria
cell toxic. He disagrees with other scientists and public
officials who say the cause is nutrient run-off - animal waste
and pesticides - from area farms. He thinks the cause is heavy
metals such as copper, which is found in anti-fungal agents used
on leafy vegetable crops and in chicken and hog feed.
But as research continues, politicians are using the nutrient theory to push new regulations on the way farms can store and use animal waste.
Maryland has introduced a plan "based on our knowledge
that excessive nutrients are harmful to the (Chesapeake) Bay and
its tributaries," Glendening testified Thursday before the
Senate Agriculture Committee. The Maryland plan imposes mandatory
nutrient management levels that limit runoff from farms, and Glendening
wants Congress to adopt similar federal regulations.
Shoemaker said the politicians are missing the point, especially
since the nutrient theory has not been proved as the cause of
what makes Pfiesteria toxic.
"I think the science has been politicized," Shoemaker
said. "I feel strongly that we are much more likely to have
sick people if we don't have open-minded, scientific thinking."
Meanwhile, longtime chicken farmers such as Eleanor and James
Eberhart feel unfairly targeted.
"The sad thing is, they don't know what's causing it,
but they've got to blame somebody," Eleanor Eberhart said.
The Eberharts, who bought their farm near Shelltown in 1966,
plan to market more than 90,000 chickens this year.
They think the recent Pfiesteria-induced fish kills are part
of nature's cycles. As former residents of a town along North
Carolina's Neuse River, they remember talking about fish being
found with lesions as far back as the 1950s, though Pfiesteria
was not identified until 1991.
The Eberharts don't mind seeing their tax dollars spent on
Pfiesteria research, but they resent new rules and regulations
in the absence of scientific conclusions.
"Just get the facts straight," James Eberhart said.
"Everybody makes us out to be a bunch of bad guys."
'Everything's perfect'
On the brink of a new tourist season, local residents don't
want to talk about their new notoriety. One Crisfield boat mechanic
who was sickened from handling diseased fish last summer says
he has gotten threatening calls telling him he "better shut
up" about his problems.
The man didn't want to give his name because of all the "flak"
he's gotten. He still is receiving treatment and will undergo
another MRI to search for possible causes of his memory loss.
"I just want to hold tight right now, because I think it's going to come back," he said, lowering his voice so his co-workers wouldn't hear.
"Everything's perfect," his manager interrupted.
"We've been catching beautiful fish. Beautiful."
State officials agree with the mechanic that the Pfiesteria
problems might not be over.
"If we look at North Carolina's experience, that says
it's likely that it will come back again this year," said
John Surrick, spokesman for the Maryland Department of Natural
Resources.
Those who rely on the water for their livelihoods are not deterred
by concerns of another outbreak.
Fred Maddox has coped with a lifetime of uncertainty that defines
his business. Pfiesteria is just another event, he said with a
shrug.
"It didn't bother us," he said.
The diseased fish didn't account for "all that much"
of his catch last year, he said.
Tommy East grimaces at the thought of how sick he got last
summer, but he said he never considered leaving the water because
of it.
"I've been doing this for 18 years. It'll take a lot more
than that to get me to stop," he said.
Story Filed By The Stuart News,Stuart,Florida
GRAPHIC: (color) photo by Jeff Keeton: Commercial fisherman Tommy
East became sick last summer during an outbreak of Pfiesteria
piscicida in the Pocomoke River in Maryland. He lost 40 pounds,
suffered severe cramping and experienced short-term memory loss.
(B/W) photo by Jeff Keeton: Dr. Ritchie Shoemaker explains
how he thinks Pfiesteria affects the fish in the Pocomoke River
and the humans who come into contact with them. His theories are
at odds with Maryland officials' as to cause of the outbreak.
LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1998