Jan
24
Palm Beach County Health Department water survey finds 12% felt sick
Filed Under health, single stories |
Originally published in The Palm Beach Post on Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008.
By KATHLEEN CHAPMAN
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
WEST PALM BEACH - More than one in 10 people who drank city water when it was contaminated with fecal bacteria said they got sick, according to a survey of residents released by the Palm Beach County Health Department on Wednesday.
The more unheated tap water that residents drank in September and October, the more likely they were to say they felt ill, surveyors found.
The health department targeted a random sample of 5,000 households out of 23,763 West Palm Beach residential water customers between Oct. 12 and Nov. 2. Most of the households chosen for the survey didn’t have a home phone number, failed to return messages or didn’t want to participate.
But of the 315 water customers who agreed to the interview, 38 people — or 12 percent — said they had symptoms such as diarrhea, stomach pain and nausea. Of those, six said they sought medical treatment.
The survey asked residents how much unheated tap water they drank in the weeks before and after Sept. 28, when the city discovered the bacteria and issued a boil-water notice affecting 120,000 people.
The contamination was probably caused by problems at the city water treatment plant sometime between Sept. 19 and Sept. 25. City officials discovered the contamination on Sept. 28, when test results came back positive from a sample taken two days before. Another test on Oct. 30 showed fecal coliform and E. coli bacteria in the water coming from the treatment plant.
Surveyors can’t say for sure that the contaminated water caused the illnesses, because they relied on people’s own reports, rather than medical tests. Salmonella, norovirus and a variety of other common germs cause the same symptoms as water-borne bacteria.
But in a normal month, the report said, only about 2 percent of the population has some kind of gastrointestinal problem. Twelve percent of the population reporting stomach sickness in one month is “very high,” health department Director Dr. Jean Malecki said. “That makes this important.”
With tests showing fecal bacteria in the water on Sept. 26 and Oct. 30, the plausibility of a cause-effect relationship is even higher, Malecki said.
In recent months, the city has cleaned its water with chlorine, a more powerful disinfectant, and brought in an independent contractor to make improvements to the water treatment system. The chlorine treatments are scheduled to end Feb. 14, at which point the city should have the best water quality in years, Mayor Lois Frankel said.
Though “we’ll never definitively know” what made people sick, Frankel said, “what is important is that something like this doesn’t ever happen again and that we don’t even have to speculate whether someone got sick or not.”
The sample size of 315 people is a limitation to the study, Malecki said, and it is possible that people with complaints were more likely to call back after receiving a message from the health department.
But a key finding, Malecki said, is a strong link between how much water people drank and whether they reported symptoms.
Those who reported having drinks with unheated tap water before the boil water order were eight times more likely to say they felt sick than those people who drank no tap water, the report said. And people who drank the most water were more likely to report symptoms than people who drank less.
Surveyors found that link to be statistically significant, meaning that there is less than a 5 percent possibility of the difference in reported illness rates being caused by random chance.
The survey asked people how much water they drank between Sept. 1 and the boil-water notice on Sept. 28.
It also asked how much they had to drink from the time of the boil-water notice until the date of the call from surveyors in October or November.
The results show that some of the people who got sick continued to drink unheated water, despite a warning from the city.
Frankel said the survey “confirmed to me the importance of having a good system to get the word out to people and the importance to everyone when they are told to boil water, to do that.”
City leaders have repeatedly stressed that despite the anecdotal survey, there are no confirmed cases of water-borne illnesses.
A total of 128 people called the health department themselves last fall to say they thought the water was making them sick. None of their stool samples tested positive for water-borne bacteria, Malecki said, but bacteria can clear the body quickly and wouldn’t necessarily show up in lab tests days later.
Of the 38 people who reported sickness in the random survey, most said they recovered on their own with five days. But the survey still sends a message about the importance of clean drinking water, Malecki said.
“People expect to have safe, potable water,” she said. “And if it is not, people get angry — not just sick.”
Frankel said city leaders have worked “24 hours a day” to improve the water system.
“We don’t want people to think they got sick from the water or may have gotten sick from the water,” Frankel said. “That just shouldn’t be.”
Copyright 2008 The Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Palm Beach Post (Florida)
January 24, 2008 Thursday
FINAL EDITION
SECTION: LOCAL; Pg. 1B
LENGTH: 838 words