SUNDAY REPORT : New Tests Show Human Viruses in Beach Waters : Southern California’s costly program to sample beaches is failing to detect microbes most likely to sicken people. A solution to the problem remains elusive.

Scientists wielding sophisticated new genetic tests have discovered that Southern California beach waters are incubators for human viruses with the potential to make swimmers sick with ailments from diarrhea to hepatitis to the common cold.

Because enteric viruses--which cause diseases of the intestinal or respiratory tract--are spread only by people, finding them in the water proves that human sewage is still routinely flowing into the ocean despite the billions of dollars the region has invested in massive treatment plants.

Viruses are being carried to the beaches by urban runoff, the voluminous waste that spills into gutters from streets, yards and parking lots and flows straight to the ocean via storm channels. Unregulated and unmonitored, the viruses are showing up at many beaches year-round, even in waters that meet state and federal health standards.

The discovery shows that Southern California’s costly program to sample beaches, often on a daily basis, is failing to detect the microbes most likely to sicken people. Beach-sampling programs test only for bacteria--an unreliable way to look for human waste--because public health agencies have not yet found cheap and reliable ways of finding viruses in seawater.

For several years, officials have been giving Southern Californians advice about avoiding urban runoff and staying healthy in the water: Don’t swim near storm drains, they say, even in dry weather. After rains, avoid all ocean waters for several days.

The detection of human viruses at beaches does not change that advice--for now. But the risk of contracting an infectious disease is almost certain to increase as Southern California’s population grows unless steps are taken to reduce the waste that flows into storm drains from streets and yards.

For part of this summer, officials closed nearly all Huntington Beach waters in Orange County after finding mysteriously high bacteria counts that may be due to runoff.

Urban runoff--one of the few U.S. environmental problems still getting worse--is the nation’s No. 1 source of pollution fouling waterways. And experts believe that the Los Angeles region has the most severe problem in the nation, with residues of city life routinely spreading out to sea.

The volume of contaminated runoff reaching Southern California’s coast, from Ventura to the Mexican border, has swelled roughly twelvefold since 1972, according to the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, a scientific institute funded by the federal government and county sanitation agencies.

Back then, about 65 billion gallons of runoff poured yearly into the region’s 13 largest creeks and rivers that flow into the ocean. Now, with so much land paved and with 5 million more people, the volume has surged in some years to nearly a trillion gallons--enough to fill two swimming pools for every man, woman and child in the region.

Evidence is now emerging that, as vast and invincible as the ocean seems, it doesn’t simply swallow up the contaminated water. When people use the ocean as their trash dump, the ocean strikes back.

Urban runoff has long been associated with plastic bags, soda cans and motor oil fouling local beaches. But now that tests show it routinely carries disease-spreading microbes too, runoff is considered a more severe threat that commands attention.

Water-quality experts had for years assumed that high levels of fecal bacteria at some beaches came from animals or natural sources that pose little, if any, risk to people. They did not believe the fecal waste in runoff was human in origin because they couldn’t fathom how sewage could routinely wind up in the streets of Southern California.

Now the virus discovery “opens our eyes to a different dynamic in the ocean,” said Anthony Michaels, director of the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies, where genetic tests for detecting viruses in seawater have been developed.

With bacteria, “you don’t know what mammal it comes from. But these viruses, you know it comes from human beings, and you know it’s a health risk,” he said.

Some viruses are so hardy they can remain likely to cause infection for weeks in cool ocean waters, even longer in the bottom sediment. Although bacteria die off quickly, many types of viruses survive--and runoff doesn’t mix quickly into the ocean. It lingers on top near shore, right where swimmers are most likely to ingest it.

“We don’t want to shock people, and we don’t want to draw conclusions too soon before we have the whole picture,” says Sunny Jiang, a UC Irvine biologist who specializes in marine viruses. “But people need to know there are a lot of potential risks.”

Experts are uncertain what the discovery of seawater viruses means about the safety of ocean waters, especially for children, who have more vulnerable immune systems than adults and are often attracted to the calm, shallow waters near polluted drains.

A gallon of sewage flowing onto a beach contains roughly a thousand particles of viruses carrying as many as 125 different human diseases. But scientists are unable to pinpoint exactly how much danger swimmers face. A lone virus particle could infect an unlucky child wading into the water in Santa Monica, a kayaker rowing out to sea in Newport Beach or a surfer riding a wave in Malibu. On the other hand, to sicken a large percentage of swimmers may take a high concentration of viruses.

No one knows how many people may be contracting diseases from swimming at Southland beaches. But a 1995 study by USC of 14,000 beachgoers in Santa Monica and Malibu showed that one of every 25 people who swam within 400 yards of storm drains came down with gastrointestinal viruses or infections.

Nationwide, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that up to 900,000 cases of illness occur yearly in the U.S. from pathogens in drinking and recreational waters.

Microbiologists are trying to invent cheap and reliable ways to tell which waters threaten us with disease. Tests can now identify the DNA of viruses, but researchers are at least a decade away from replacing the primitive and inaccurate tools health officials use today when they decide when and where to close beaches.

In Southern California--where the beach is both an icon and a commodity--the stakes are high. Some 60 million people a year visit the 50 miles of shoreline of Santa Monica Bay alone, according to studies based on lifeguard counts.

Officials feel it is critical to track down credible information about precisely where viruses are lurking.

Yet the answers are elusive. Human sewage and viruses are coming from too many places along streets and gutters to trace easily.

Where in City Do the Viruses Come From?

Like detectives on the trail of a fugitive, sewage sleuths work to hunt down the source of contamination at popular beaches.

For John Dorsey, assistant storm-water manager of the city of Los Angeles, there are few clues.

It’s slow, painstaking work to trail viruses in a place as big as Los Angeles. For example, roughly 100 tributaries or drains enter Ballona Creek, which collects runoff from nearly 2 million people in the central and western portions of the city and dumps it at the beach along Santa Monica Bay.

Dorsey knows that sources of sewage are as diverse as the city itself. There are leaks in sewer lines, faulty septic tanks, improper sewer connections, homeless people defecating in the streets, toilet waste dumped from recreational vehicles.

For several weeks, Dorsey dispatched city inspectors to sample runoff at a few dozen spots in Ballona Creek to look for hot spots that could narrow his search. But the results showed only what Dorsey calls “warm” spots.

Leads developed, then vanished. Germs are like ghosts: here one minute, gone the next.

Because virus tests remain too difficult and expensive to use routinely, Dorsey and his colleagues test for bacteria, even while realizing that the tests are imperfect. For two weeks in a row, they noticed a high count in the creek near Fairfax Avenue. But by the third week, it had vanished. Perhaps it was a sewer blockage that was fixed or a mass of fertilizer that was washed away.

The lack of a pattern worries Dorsey, an avid surfer with a doctorate in marine biology who idealistically hopes to keep beaches virus-free.

“We have absolutely no idea where the pathogens are coming from,” Dorsey said. “Until you get the hard scientific data, all we can do is speculate.”

If a hot spot does emerge, sanitation crews can open manholes and insert closed-circuit television cameras to look for sewer lines illegally dumping into storm drains. In December, for example, city crews tracing mysterious odors found a mini-mall that had accidentally switched sewer and street-runoff lines when it was rebuilt after the 1992 riots.

“By mistake or whatever, there are many ways for sewage to get in the storm drains,” said Xavier Swamikannu, who heads storm-water programs at the state’s Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board.

Sewage also is likely to be leaking from old clay sewer lines that meander throughout the region. The situation worsens during storms, when storm water seeps through leaks into the sewer lines and floods the system, popping out manholes. Sewage mixed with storm runoff then flows into curbside drains and into the ocean.

Dorsey and his colleagues know that the culprits may be hiding many miles inland. Southern California’s runoff rushes down concrete channels, so germs can flow long distances to the coast.

In March 1998, bacteria levels suddenly shot up at beaches at the northern border of Newport Beach. Orange County officials were baffled until they found the source far upstream--a massive sewage spill 11 days earlier in San Bernardino County, more than 50 miles away.

One major pollution outbreak remained a mystery for months. Bacteria contamination this summer closed much of the shoreline of Huntington Beach--one of Southern California’s most popular swimming and surfing spots. Sanitation officials tried everything imaginable to find the source--radar, dyes, TV cameras. Finally, last week, they homed in on urban runoff flowing into a coastal marsh and a construction site and reopened most of the beach. Businesses and city leaders say the loss of beachgoers and tourists devastated the area’s economy for much of their prime season.

In Los Angeles, Dorsey already has discovered that raw sewage from downtown Los Angeles’ skid row was flowing into the ocean 25 miles away in Long Beach.

He observed that every morning city crews washed down the alleys where homeless people congregate. Tests found that a mere quarter cup of the alley runoff contained 1 billion coliform bacteria, a level higher than any he had ever seen.

This was essentially undiluted excrement going straight into the Los Angeles River and down to the ocean.

Dorsey and city sanitation teams moved quickly to fashion a plan to keep the runoff from flowing down street drains. Sandbags now block the drains and trucks pump the waste water from the streets into the sewers--an effort that takes a caravan of workers three hours each morning.

Dorsey and other experts are convinced that runoff, not sewage treatment plants, is the origin of the waste showing up on the beaches.

The reason: Bacterial and viral counts are high near storm drains, not in the waters around the outfall pipes that discharge treated sewage. Waste from the plants does contain viruses, but it is discharged several miles out at sea, unlike runoff, which flows straight into the surf.

Said Charles McGee, a virologist who supervises the lab at the Orange County Sanitation Districts: “We’ve incriminated every storm drain we’ve looked at as containing human viruses.”

Around the world, from Sydney to Hong Kong, researchers have detected a similar pattern of infections among swimmers, lifeguards, canoeists, windsurfers and others playing in marine waters. Stomach and respiratory diseases and eye and ear infections are the most common symptoms.

Vance Clark, 38, of Venice is a surfer who suspects that he was a victim of an ocean-borne virus.

A year and a half ago, Clark suffered severe sinus infections and headaches after surfing near the mouth of Ballona Creek one rainy day. A doctor ordered routine blood tests, which showed that his liver was functioning abnormally. His doctor said it wasn’t hepatitis, but some unknown virus. His sinuses and liver have apparently recovered, but Clark, who has surfed in Santa Monica Bay for 25 years, vows never again to paddle after rainstorms.

“Something attacked my liver,” he said, “and my doctor thought it probably was in the water. Most of my friends are complaining about getting sick after surfing.”

Viruses Can Survive Months in Seawater

Still, without knowing exactly what was in a mouthful of water, it’s impossible to prove that any individual has been infected while swimming.

For decades, the common wisdom was that because salt water protected people, swimming off the coast posed a minimal danger. That has now been proved wrong.

One recent study, for example, found that it takes nearly three months for 99% of respiratory viruses to die in 59-degree seawater. Noninfective polio virus survived 18 days. Hepatitis is one of the hardiest, able to remain infective in water for several months. The tiny microbes have an amazing ability to spread past obstacles, traveling vast distances at a rapid pace.

In the Florida Keys, for example, tracer viruses dropped into septic tanks of homes in Key Largo took only 11 hours to show up in nearby canals and 23 hours to reach marine waters. In areas with a high density of septic tanks, 90% of canals tested positive for viruses.

“They moved clear across a whole grove of mangroves,” said Joan Rose of the University of South Florida, the lead investigator. “They moved very, very rapidly.”

Southern California has been almost fanatical about testing the quality of its ocean waters. “Beach runners” sample the water 90,000 times every year, at more than 500 spots in five counties, at an annual cost of $3 million. When bacteria counts are high, a beach is closed and posted with warnings.

But are health officials sampling for the right thing and closing beaches at the proper times?

The answer, experts concede, is a resounding “No.”

“It’s crummy,” added Dorsey about the beach-closing system, “yet it’s the best we have.”

Studies have shown that the bacteria tests--for fecal coliform and enterococcus--have little value for finding viruses, which are likely to be the worst pathogens. Beaches that pass the bacterial standards and remain open for swimming often contain virus-tainted human waste that somehow escapes detection.

While a coliform culture test (for bacteria often found in the colon) costs $20, with results back in 24 hours, a virus test runs $700 a sample, takes six weeks and requires a special sterile room. No health agency can afford that expense--or, more important, can afford to wait that long to decide whether to close a beach.

Worldwide, only 11 laboratories are capable of tracking viruses in ocean water.

Environmental experts have known for 20 years--since viruses were detected at Texas beaches--that the government’s bacteria standards and tests fail to protect the public from viruses.

But new genetic technology developed by USC virologist Jed Fuhrman and Rachel Noble, a USC molecular biologist who works for the Southern California Coastal Water Research Project, holds out the promise of locating viruses within a day or two. The new tests, though, cost about $1,000 per round, and only a few molecular biologists are trained to perform them.

Noble is among the few people who know how to find a virus in seawater.

On a recent day, she headed to the beach to collect water from the surf, filling a 20-liter jug that she spent up to 20 hours concentrating down to a fraction of a milliliter--which barely filled the bottom of a test tube.

She boiled it, releasing the genetic material, which she then copied, allowing her to look for pieces that matched the size of human polio viruses. The polio she found was noninfectious, the genes carried by vaccinated schoolchildren in their feces.

So far, the genetic tests have been used only in Southern California--mostly in Santa Monica Bay. Noble has conducted about 80 tests over five years at 20 beaches.

Roughly half the beaches have tested positive for viruses, and she found that many of them were not identified as problems using the government’s bacteria standards. Waters at the mouth of Malibu Creek and Ballona Creek have among the worst viral concentrations, Noble said.

Although the DNA test can detect the presence of viruses, it cannot tell whether they are alive and infectious, nor can it identify all the specific diseases lurking in the water.

Other new tests focus on bacteria but look for DNA “fingerprints” that can distinguish human waste from animal.

Still, none of the techniques for detecting sewage is easy or cheap enough yet to work for routine beach testing performed by county agencies.

Some companies are working on genetic probes that are as simple and quick as slipping litmus paper in the water to test for viruses.

Unlike today’s coliform tests, a new test should detect substances found purely in human waste, said J. Charles Fox, an assistant administrator at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

One possibility, Fox says, would be to test for caffeine: If it is in beach waters, it probably got there through human waste.

In the meantime, to ensure that the public is protected, scientists Fuhrman and Noble say the costly genetic tests should be conducted at beaches that attract large crowds and that repeatedly test high for bacteria.

But even if health departments could afford such tests, what would they do with the information?

If a single human virus is found, is a beach dangerous? How many viruses should be deemed acceptable in 100 gallons of ocean water? The answers are elusive.

Visits to L.A. County Beaches Drop by Half

At the environmental group Heal the Bay, Mark Gold, who conducted some of the earliest research on beach monitoring, is a fierce crusader for beach protection; but he is also a cautious scientist who knows key questions remain unanswered. He fears that if people know viruses are lurking out there, they will stop using the beaches.

Already, visits to Los Angeles County beaches have dropped by half since 1983, according to the Santa Monica Bay Restoration Project, and some authorities blame fears over water quality. More than 40% of 500 people surveyed in L.A. County in 1992 avoided Santa Monica Bay, with most of them calling the water too dirty.

Most epidemiologists say it would be arbitrary today, given the newness of the science, to set a numerical virus limit for deciding when to close a beach. Years, maybe decades, of complex and costly assessments would be needed to get a credible estimate of the risk of disease, they say.

In the meantime, some say that warning people away from a beach on the basis of a single virus test is going too far.

“There would be a lot more postings, and it would desensitize the public,” said Dorsey, the storm-water manager. “People already ignore the warnings now.”

Others argue that even one virus is dangerous enough to warrant cautionary action to protect the public.

“If you find human infective viruses, you should close the beach,” McGee said. “People should not be there.”

Viruses at the Beach

Genetic tests by USC microbiologist Rachel Noble have detected human viruses, a telltale sign of sewage, at about half of 20 beaches and storm-water outlets sampled between Santa Barbara and the U.S-Mexico border. These are the spots that have tested positive so far.

Malibu Creek

Ballona Creek

Santa Monica Pier

Playa del Rey

Tijuana River

Los Penosquitos Lagoon

Aliso Creek

San Luis Rey River

Los Angeles River

Source: University of Southern California

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Urban Runoff in Ballona Creek Watershed

Ballona Creek flows to the ocean at Marina del Rey, collecting urban runoff from much of Los Angeles as well as Beverly Hills and Culver City. Virtually anything deposited on a street within this 127-square-mile watershed winds up in the ocean via the concrete creek. Even on a dry summer day, millions of gallons of runoff, containing virus-tainted sewage, metals, oil and other contaminants, flow into the sea. On stormy days, the plume can spread many miles out, almost reaching Santa Catalina Island.

Sources: City and County of Los Angeles Dept. of Public Works, UCLA Dept. of Environmental Engineering