[All] Manure bigger threat than toxics?

[Susan Koswan]

Hi GRENers,

Hope everyone has found a cool place to hang out in this heat wave. I
thought this article was worth forwarding. Makes me less happy about my
upcoming camping and beach trips to Lake Huron, though.

 

Susan K

 

 

July 8, 2010

 

The Ottawa Citizen

 

Misgivings about manure

 

By Tom Spears,

 

When I started writing stories about Great Lakes ecology in the late 1980s,
an activist said something that sounded profound. Thinking back to the
earlier, algae-choked days on Lake Erie, she said: "Today there's less
sewage, but more poison."

 

By poison, she meant synthetic chemicals with long, unpronounceable names,
known by their initials (DDT, PCBs) or short forms (dioxin).

Some were pesticides, and some were just accidental byproducts of industry,
the stuff people used to dump anywhere without understanding the harm.

 

Today the picture is changing again. Those synthetic chemicals do last a
long time, but we've stopped manufacturing and dumping most of them.

No one makes mirex or PCBs today. Eventually the chemical residues will
break down.

 

What we do produce in enormous quantities is manure. Federal figures show
that Ontario and Quebec together produce manure equivalent to the sewage
from 100 million people. It is sprayed, mixed with water, on fields near the
Great Lakes, especially lakes Huron and Erie, and the smaller St. Clair.

 

I've been uncomfortable with this for some time. Then a few weeks ago, the
environmental commissioner for Ontario came to Ottawa. Gord Miller dropped
in to the Citizen for a chat and mentioned that he had just given a speech
to a conference on fresh water in Bracebridge, the heart of the Muskoka
region.

 

Miller argued in his speech that the biggest threat to Ontario's water isn't
toxic waste. It's manure.

 

Manure is called "nutrients" in official circles, but in reality it's
foul-smelling brown stuff, especially the manure from factory farms that is
kept in huge vats, fermenting a bit, and sprayed on fields in spring and
fall. (And sometimes winter. They shouldn't do this because it runs off
frozen land in spring into lakes and rivers, but people sometimes do it
anyway.)

 

For years we've been told E. coli and other pathogenic material in fresh
water comes from both farm animals and from humans, the implication that
both groups are equally part of the problem. But a recent study of Lake
Huron looked at the DNA of E. coli. It shows that only about one to three
per cent of the lake's E. coli come from humans -- and about 60 per cent
comes from livestock manure. The rest is either unknown or from wildlife.

 

So human sewage isn't the problem. The problem is the spraying of more
animal manure than the land can soak up.

 

If you wonder why we haven't heard more about this, Miller had an answer for
that too.

 

The Great Lakes have wave action that keeps such pollution close to shore,
where people swim.

 

But until very recently, Miller says, surveys of lake water quality were
done by boats that are too big to approach shore. They've been sampling
farther out, in deep water that's cleaner -- and missing the true picture.

 

Luckily the commish is on top of this. He says sampling procedures have
improved. We do hope his next survey of Ontario's environmental health tells
everyone what's been happening.

 

And yet Canadian and U.S. pollution regulations still focus on the enemies
of the 1970s, the remnants of days when the chemical factories dumped waste
material in a shallow hole out back, near the local river or lake. That's
yesterday's problem. It's time to focus on the real, Walkerton-style
pollution. There's less poison today, but more animal sewage.

 

This problem appears to threaten more than our waterways. At Newcastle
University in England, scientists have been measuring how natural bacteria
change over time. In farm soil, they've found something odd:

soil bacteria are showing genetic signs of resistance to a variety of
antibiotics. Professor David Graham, who led the research, said the findings
suggest an emerging threat to public and environmental health.

 

Graham's point is that drug resistance in infectious disease bugs is a known
threat. It most often takes the form of "superbugs" that infect people,
often in hospitals. A common one is MRSA, a staphylococcus bug that resists
the drug methicillin.

 

We know that hot spots of drug-resistance in soil bacteria are often near
hog farms. Pigs get antibiotics in their food regularly, sick or not, and
the drugs are flushed out with the manure. In high volume, this is enough to
change those soil bacteria.

 

But then again, soil bacteria don't affect us directly, right? They help
crops grow, and it doesn't matter, does it, whether they can resist
antibiotics?

 

Turns out these bugs may affect us after all. Back at Newcastle, Graham
points out that harmless soil bacteria could pass on a resistant gene to a
disease-causing pathogen, such as MRSA, with obvious consequences. (Bacteria
are weird; they borrow genes from each other, and from their hosts.)

 

Manure, anyone?

 

Tom Spears is a member of the Citizen's editorial board.

 

E-mail tspears at thecitizen.canwest.com

C Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

 

Read more:
http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/Misgivings+about+manure/3248981/story.ht
ml#ixzz0t56xjeUh

 

 

 Read 2080:The Return of Pareto by Susan Koswan 

Environmentalists, corporate fundamentalists, aliens and dandelions... 

In Kitchener/Waterloo bookstores and libraries or from dandelion at gto.net

 

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