It’s high time for Ireland to finally clean up its act

With E.coli posing a threat on our beaches and in our water supply, we must take action, writes Tony Lowes

BEACHES closed in Cork and Clare! Boil notices for water supplies in many counties. And all because of something called ‘E.coli’. What is it? Where is it? How does it pose a threat to health? And why are we hearing more and more about it?

Over a hundred million years ago the bacteria Escherichia and Salmonella diverged. Escherichia belongs in a group of bacteria generally known as “coliforms”.

The name did not arise until 1895, when Theodor Escherich, a German paediatrician, found it in the lower intestine of warm-blooded organisms. That’s you and me and most of the animals we share Ireland with.

Most E.coli strains are harmless: some can even produce vitamins. But some can cause serious poisoning in humans, especially children under five.

And this isn’t just vomiting and diarrhoea. The ‘Vero/shiga toxin-producing Escherichia coli (VTEC/STEC)’ that is being recorded here can cause gastroenteritis, urinary tract infections, and neonatal meningitis. In rarer cases, virulent strains are also responsible for hemolytic-uremic syndrome and peritonitis, — both requiring emergency treatment — as well as mastitis in cattle and septicaemia in human — along with pneumonia in both.

The bacteria are water borne — they can infect people swimming in water or drinking water. They can contaminate food products, leading to product recalls.

In 2011, an outbreak in 12 countries was first erroneously credited to Spanish organic growers but later found to have originated in Egyptian fenugreek.

Where’s it coming from? Fecal-oral transmission. From the intestines of humans and animals through the contamination of water.

A reported 46% of the licensed Waste Water Treatment Plants are not meeting the legal standards while 57 waste water works are causing pollution in rivers or bathing waters, according to the last EPA Report. And that’s not to speak of the many smaller plants that only require ‘certificates’.

Towns have outgrown even newer treatments plants, with upgrades themselves often inadequate by the time they were built. Other quite large towns — like Youghal or Castletownbere — have no real treatment at all. All along the coast, raw sewage is discharging into the bays and coves, from village and town outfalls to remote septic tanks.

Then there is spreading slurry — the excreta of cattle collected when animals are housed. While in theory sprayed on fields to be absorbed by growing crops, slurry spreading this year had to go on when the ground was saturated with heavy rains almost daily, running off into ditches and streams and so into lakes and rivers.

The proposed expansion in herd numbers under ‘Food Harvest 2020’ will only make this worse.

According to a report issued last year by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, in 2010 Ireland had a rate for E.coli 25% higher than the next country and seven times the EU average.

And, furthermore, according to the HSE, the Irish infection rate increased a further 200% in the first six months of 2012.

WHAT can be done? The rule prohibiting slurry spreading 48 hours before heavy rain or on saturated ground must be followed. Farmers must come together to treat slurry in digesters to produce energy while killing the bacteria, as 4,000 farmers in Germany do.

Because of a bias in the renewable energy grant structure towards wind power in Ireland, only nine applications were received in the last two years for such grants, and only two are still even being considered.

Most important, the stimulus package for the construction industry should be retargeted at waste water treatment plants, water treatment plants, and our antique leaky water pipes, some more than 100 years old, that allow contamination into our drinking water.

Shovel-ready projects like these would clean up our act and provide jobs where they are needed — in the towns and villages of Ireland.

Otherwise, it’s only going to get worse.

* Tony Lowes is a director of Friends of the Irish Environment

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