Here’s What Ocean Germs Cost You
Beachgoers who get sick after swimming off two popular Orange County beach areas rack up about $3 million annually in health-related expenses, according to a study announced Monday.
The report, by UC Irvine researchers, is believed to be the first to put a dollar figure on the cost of medical care and lost wages to people who become sick after swimming in ocean waters when bacterial levels are within state health standards.
Although the study looked at the stretch of shoreline along south Huntington Beach and north Newport Beach, its authors said the economic toll would be similar at beaches nationwide. The dollar amount would vary by the number of people using the beach.
“There’s no reason to think that Orange County people get sick more than Los Angeles people,” said Ryan Dwight, lead author of the report, which was part of his doctorate in environmental health. “People are people. Say you have a standard dose of an organism and you give it to someone from the East Coast or West Coast. They would both contract the same illness.”
The report, which has been published online and will appear in the Journal of Environmental Management, combined published data from two earlier studies.
The authors hope it will give policymakers a way to compare the cost of cleaning up coastal waters with the personal cost to beachgoers.
The researchers noted that most people who swim at the beach do not get sick. Though it’s a small percentage -- about 0.8% -- at beaches like Huntington State Beach, a small percentage getting sick can produce a large total, Dwight said.
What makes surfers, swimmers and divers sick are pathogens from urban runoff, mostly human and animal waste.
Researchers said that among the more than 5 million people who swam in the waters surveyed, from 1998 to 2000, an estimated 36,000 cases of gastrointestinal illnesses were contracted, along with about 38,000 other ailments, including respiratory, eye and ear infections. Stomach ailments cost each infected person an estimated $36.58, and acute respiratory disease cost $76.76. Eye infections cost $27.31, and ear ailments cost $37.86.
The study did not include the price of self-treatment, such as buying over-the-counter medicine. Losses to the local tourism industry were not considered. Dwight said the group’s findings should be considered conservative because it could not be known what was spent on self-treatment.
Data was not used from days when the beaches were closed for poor water quality.
“This study’s critical because it provides long-overdue information on what the costs are of swimming in poor water quality,” said Mark Gold, executive director of Santa Monica-based Heal the Bay, a nonprofit group that publishes beach report cards on water quality.
The coastal water quality debate is often one-sided, he said, with regulators and polluters focusing on the costs of cleaning urban runoff. “This helps tremendously to balance the ledger in the economics of clean water,” Gold said.
To calculate the expense of treating sick beachgoers, researchers first looked at data from a 1996 British epidemiology study -- used by the World Health Organization to set its water quality standards -- tracking how many days people were sick and took off work, and how many needed to see a doctor.
Meshing that information with a 2003 study of Newport Beach and Huntington Beach showing beach attendance and water quality records kept by the Orange County Health Care Agency, academics could calculate how many people were likely to develop infections. Adjusting for the average wage in Orange County and using a third study to determine the average cost of a visit to a doctor to be about $102, the group could estimate how much ocean-borne ailments cost beachgoers. (Some who get sick don’t go to the doctor, or don’t even miss work.)
Reusing data from previously published reports is common among university academics. The report assumes that beachgoers in Britain and Southern California are in the same general health and that they act similarly when they get sick -- for example, missing the same number of days of work to recover.
“It’s sound science, but it’s not the best science,” said Linwood Pendleton, an associate professor at UCLA specializing in the economics of coastal issues at the School of Public Health. “The best science would be doing an original study ... but it’s very expensive to do that. The important part of this paper is that it does a good job of figuring out what it might cost a person who gets sick from swimming.”
Pendleton noted that the total health expense figures in the new study are not far from the costs of cleaning up coastal waters. Newport Beach spends $5.5 million a year trying to reduce runoff and sewage spills that cause beach closures.
But although Newport Beach officials agreed that improving water quality was important, they were wary of the new report.
“The message they’re reinforcing is a good message, but I’m still skeptical of the science that went into this,” said Dave Kiff, assistant city manager of Newport Beach. He said, for example, that the link between ocean-borne bacteria and illness wasn’t so simple, and noted that the study relied on studies of other environments.
“To me, the way we convince the public to spend more money on water quality is through very good science, and I don’t know this is good science.”
