Scientist Learns Toxic Algae Health Threat Firsthand : Research: He suffers serious mental impairment while studying organism. Health returns after ending exposure.
Howard Glasgow’s mental collapse began one night last December when he nudged his wife awake and flew into a rage about how she had left the vacuum cleaner cord draped loosely over the handle. “Why didn’t you coil it?” he screamed. When he awoke the next morning, Glasgow refused to believe his outburst had happened.
A few days later, Glasgow got lost for two hours on his way home from work--even though he has lived in the same house for seven years. When he tried to call his wife for help, he couldn’t remember his phone number.
At work, the 37-year-old scientist started missing appointments and then insisted he never made them. He had long conversations with co-workers he instantly forgot. In time, he couldn’t complete a short sentence without losing his train of thought and, although he had never suffered a speech impediment before, started to stutter so severely that he quit talking.
Perhaps most painful of all, Glasgow--who has college degrees in biology and chemistry and is a whiz at complex math formulas--saw his reading comprehension plummet to match his 6-year-old daughter’s.
“I would start reading something and I couldn’t retain it. Absolutely none of it,” said Glasgow, a research associate at North Carolina State University’s aquatic ecology laboratory in Raleigh. “It was like I was looking at Chinese writing and couldn’t make any sense of it. And this was pretty simple stuff.”
After a barrage of medical tests in December and January, Glasgow learned his body was under siege. His heartbeat and blood pressure were wildly erratic, his liver enzymes had shot up, he was prone to infections and his kidneys were excreting unusual amounts of phosphate.
Physicians and marine scientists who studied Glasgow’s case now suspect toxic marine algae, known for killing millions of fish off the Atlantic Coast, had slowly poisoned Glasgow while he worked in the laboratory.
Invisible to the naked eye, the dinoflagellate--a phantom-like half-plant, half-animal microorganism--thrives in shallow bay waters along the East Coast that are polluted with phosphates, a widely dispersed nutrient in sewage and farm runoff.
For two years, Glasgow studied the one-celled creature, mostly working alone in the lab next to rows of 2 1/2-gallon fish tanks containing water from North Carolina’s Pamlico Estuary, a coastal bay inhabited by the organism.
The creatures apparently excreted a powerful toxin into the aquarium water--and eventually the laboratory air--that jumbled Glasgow’s brain simply by sharing the same room with him, scientists and physicians believe.
Glasgow, who took two months off to recover, now seems nearly normal and has returned to work. Apparently, the damage to his brain was gradually reversed once he distanced himself from the organism.
North Carolina State aquatic botanist JoAnn Burkholder, who directs the laboratory, called her research associate’s ordeal an amazing story about “an organism that seems to have dropped out of some Stephen King movie.”
Although some marine algae, including red tides, are known to be toxic to fish and contaminate shellfish, this is the first known instance of a human poisoned directly by them.
Glasgow’s ordeal is especially alarming because the dinoflagellate has been found in large concentrations from Delaware to Florida in bay waters that are popular with millions of swimmers, fishermen and boaters. No one knows yet if the organism inhabits estuaries along the Pacific coast.
Burkholder and other scientists and neurologists caution that research into Glasgow’s syndrome is in the fledgling stages and that they cannot prove the organism was to blame until the damaging toxin is isolated. Even so, they call the medical evidence overwhelming, and Burkholder says she is “personally dead certain.”
Two other researchers who worked with the organism reported similar but less severe symptoms, including Burkholder, who said she suffered an eight-day bout of disorientation and short-term memory loss last year. Others reported vague problems such as nausea, eye irritation and breathing difficulties that may be related.
“I can’t say for sure there are chronic, insidious effects on human health, but I think there are,” said Burkholder, who discovered the dinoflagellate in 1988 after striped bass died in a colleague’s aquarium. “I think it’s real, considering everything that’s happened to people who work with it. We have a lot of strange, anecdotal information. Everyone who works with this organism seems to have problems.”
Dr. Donald Schmechel, a neurologist who heads Duke University Medical Center’s Memory Disorders Clinic, declined to talk about Glasgow’s case because of patient confidentiality. But in March 31 medical records, Schmechel said Glasgow seems to have suffered a “toxic encephalopathy,” or brain disorder, apparently caused by “exposures in the workplace due to biological toxin.”
The part of his brain deep within the left temporal lobe was damaged, wiping out his memory, especially his verbal memory--which means he could not recall what he said or what was said to him--and triggering “episodic rage as well as depression,” according to the medical records. The toxin also may have suppressed his immune system.
“This was not a functional or psychiatric disorder but was clearly organic, and apparently a mostly reversible injury presumably secondary to marine biological toxin based on your exposure and symptoms,” Schmechel reported.
Glasgow’s syndrome adds a bizarre twist to a new phenomenon of poisonous algae blooms that have been found in increasing numbers around the world.
Before the mid-1980s, only a handful of poisonous algae species were known to kill fish. But since then marine researchers have discovered 10 species around the world, including one in 1987 that killed sea birds in California’s Monterey Bay and sickened people who ate shellfish in Oregon and Washington.
Burkholder has found the dinoflagellate that apparently poisoned Glasgow in every state she has looked--North Carolina, Delaware, Alabama, Virginia, South Carolina, Maryland and Florida. In 1991, it was linked to a massive fish kill in North Carolina’s Pamlico Estuary.
Worried about public health, North Carolina environmental officials last month began exploring whether shrimpers and other fishermen who frequent Pamlico Estuary are suffering unusual neurological symptoms and other ailments.
Some fishermen have told researchers about periodic memory lapses and sores that don’t heal.
“I don’t think people need to be scared, but they need to be made aware that there is a potential for human health problems as far as the estuary goes,” Glasgow said. “Along the Atlantic seaboard, at this point, everywhere we’ve had fish kills, we’ve had these organisms present.”
The health worries are a legitimate concern, said Don Anderson, a senior scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who specializes in toxic algae.
“When you’ve got so many big fish kills caused by this organism, it is very possible there is a danger to a fisherman or a passerby or scientist sampling the water,” Anderson said. “If the winds blow over the dead fish and there are all these (toxic) cells there, you could imagine (someone being harmed).”
Daniel Baden, a marine toxicologist at the University of Miami who is trying to isolate and identify the poisonous substance in the dinoflagellate, agrees.
“If you have acute problems in the laboratory, you probably have chronic effects in the environment where people are exposed naturally,” Baden said.
The biggest mystery is how the creature poisons humans and fish.
Baden is trying to isolate the toxin by extracting bits of matter from the organism and testing each one for toxicity to fish. Then researchers can explore how the culprit interacts with fish and humans. Does it attack through the respiratory system or the skin? Does it target certain nerves?
Until recently, little has been known about how toxic forms of algae function.
“There is a consensus that this whole problem of red tides and what we are now calling harmful algae is worse all over the U.S.,” Anderson said. “Where the line is starting to split, though, is whether this is a reflection of some fundamental coastal change such as pollution, or whether it is many different things.”
Researchers suspect that the surge in toxic algae is related to nitrogen and phosphorus, nutrients in sewage and farm runoff that feed algae blooms and deplete oxygen in a process called eutrophication. Many marine experts believe the nutrients are causing a slow environmental shift in coastal waters to make them more hospitable to toxic organisms.
Others, however, say some of the new toxic species may be turning up because of more sophisticated research techniques.
“It is an open question of how many of the blooms are new and how many just hadn’t been discovered before. It makes good sense that nutrients have something to do with it, but that is hard to prove,” said David Garrison, a National Science Foundation oceanographer who studied toxic blooms in Monterey Bay and the Pacific Northwest and found no link to nutrients.
The creatures in Glasgow’s case act like phantoms in the sea, hiding in sediments and waiting for fish or shellfish--any species or size--before they attack. They excrete a toxin that attacks the fish’s nervous system, devour the fish, then quickly mutate into 15 other stages and retreat to the sediments to await their next prey. They often wait for years.
“It is the worst-behaved dinoflagellate we have seen,” Burkholder said. “It absolutely zeros in on fish. We shove a piece of fish tissue toward it and it starts to go crazy. It is more sneaky, more insidious and we don’t really know how much damage it is causing yet.”
Burkholder said the organism is probably expanding in scope because nutrient contamination that feeds algae blooms is worsening due to population growth along the shoreline. The highest algae concentrations are found near sewage outfalls, and laboratory tests show the algae grow rapidly in waters containing phosphates but not other pollutants.
Marine experts suspect the organism inhabits coastal estuaries worldwide, particularly shallow, turbid bays with warm water that are prone to algae buildup.
“You probably have fish kills all over the place because of this organism,” said Karen Steidinger, a senior research scientist at Florida Marine Research Institute. “My gut feeling is these things are fairly common in back bay shallow areas which tend to be high in nutrients.”
The creature’s habit of altering its appearance and lying in wait for prey is so unusual that few marine researchers believed it existed until Burkholder filmed it and Steidinger, a nationally known algae expert, confirmed her discovery.
“It was such a ‘Star Wars,’ alien scenario,” said Raymond Alden, director of a marine research laboratory at Old Dominion University in Virginia.
Glasgow’s first hint of something wrong dates back to 1991, just a few months after he began working with cultures of the organism. He was reaching toward a tall shelf to gather materials when he realized his mind was racing but his hand was moving in slow motion. He went outside for fresh air and the feeling quickly passed.
For months, bouts of dizziness, moodiness and forgetfulness occurred off and on, even after his research was switched twice to different sites. The signs were so subtle that his wife and friends wrote it off to the vagaries of a scientist under stress.
Then, the Monday after last Thanksgiving, Glasgow accidentally dropped some cultures on his arm, producing a huge, festering sore that quickly became infected. His wife Aileen, watched her good-natured and intelligent husband of 20 years fall apart before her eyes within two weeks.
“Howard got worse and worse,” Aileen Glasgow said. “There were times where he would virtually give up speaking at all. He would get one word out, and then stutter, then forget what he was saying. Bless his heart. He was very frustrated, because he realized something was happening.”
At first, she feared her husband was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or a brain tumor. But Duke University neurologists quickly linked his symptoms to exposure to some type of biological toxin.
“We were really concerned because he was forgetting literally everything that was said to him. He would go absolutely berserk about trivial things,” Aileen Glasgow said.
Glasgow, who took off work from mid-December until late March, now seems nearly normal mentally and physically, although no one knows whether he will suffer further problems such as liver damage.
“He has cleared up so remarkably, but they don’t think he will ever have his memory back,” Aileen Glasgow said. “The memories during that period simply didn’t imprint on his brain, just like you took a photograph that didn’t turn out.”
Although he has returned to his research lab, Glasgow will never again be able to work directly with the organism because doctors fear his exposure has left him ultra-sensitive to its toxin. Worst of all, he says, is the knowledge that the organism is still out in the environment.
“I try to concentrate on the science and what we can do about it from an environmental standpoint,” Howard Glasgow said. “If something can be learned from my exposure, all the better.”
