• Dangerous Pathogen Found in Arizona Town's Water
  
• Two Plague Patients in New York Hospital
  
• Asbestos Shuts Down Interior Headquarters
  
• Global Warming Affects Coastal Marine Species
  
• Environmental Expert Raymond Dasmann Dies
  
• Harassment of Fisheries Observer Nets Fine
  
• Zero Energy Home Being Built In Tucson
  
• Tidewater Goby to Stay on Endangered List
  

Dangerous Pathogen Found in Arizona Town's Water

Households served by water from the Rose Valley Water Company may be in danger from an organism called Naegleria fowleri, an amoeba blamed for the deaths of two five year old boys in Peoria in October. The company serves about 2,500 households in Peoria and several areas in west Phoenix.

Although Rose Valley Water has been chlorinating its system since October 18, the company has been shut down by the Maricopa County Environmental Services Department until its reservoirs can be tested and declared safe. Affected residents are now being served by the city of Peoria's water system.

Health officials have recommended that area residents refrain from using Rose Valley Water for drinking, cooking or bathing. Residents have been told to avoid using or immersing in any standing water like pools, hot tubs or jacuzzis, and to boil water or use bottled water when cooking or drinking.

Suspect water can be used to flush toilets, do laundry or dishes, the Health Department said, but as a precaution, pets should not drink the water.

Tests by Rose Valley Water showed the presence of Naegleria fowleri, which can cause an infection known as amoebic meningoencephalitis. But because these tests were carried out using methods still under research and not licensed for use in the United States, health officials from the Maricopa Country Health Department are retesting the water system to verify results in collaboration with the Arizona Department of Health Services and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The incubation period or time between infection and symptoms for amoebic meningoencephalitis caused by Naegleria fowleri is seven to 10 days. The symptoms include headache, nausea and vomiting, stiff neck, confusion, lack of attention to people and surroundings, loss of balance and bodily control, seizures and hallucinations.

There are no tests to identify the disease before symptoms develop. People who experience these symptoms are advised to contact their doctors or health care providers or the nearest emergency room.

To avoid the infection, residents have been told not to swim or jump into warm, stagnant, fresh water, such as ponds or warm water discharge pools, or unchlorinated swimming pools. People with swimming pools, are advised to super chlorinate the pool, and to keep people out of the pool until the water company or Environmental Services Department have announced that it is safe to use swimming and bathing facilities.

Two Plague Patients in New York Hospital

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has diagnosed bubonic plague in the 53 year old male. His 47 year old wife has symptoms consistent with bubonic plague and laboratory test results are pending.

"Taking all of the necessary precautions, the patients were immediately placed in isolation, and the hospital immediately notified the New York City Department of Health," stated the Beth Israel Medical Center where the couple is being treated.

Health officials said they believe the couple contracted the disease near their home in Santa Fe County, New Mexico, an area known to harbor plague carrying rodents and fleas. A woodrat that was found in the patients' back yard this past July tested positive for plague, as did fleas taken from the woodrat.

This couple traveled to New York City on November 1, and both developed a flu like illness on November 3. As their symptoms continued to worsen, the couple was admitted to a hospital on November 5 with fevers and swollen, tender lymph nodes.

A blood culture on the male patient tested positive for Yersinia pestis, commonly known as bubonic plague. Further tests will be performed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Both patients are being treated with antibiotics, but the 53 year old male, who is also diabetic, is in critical condition with a secondary infection and multi-system failure.

Although the exact source of exposure for these patients is not yet known, most human plague cases are due to bites from plague infected fleas around the home. The usual incubation period for plague is between two to seven days, so the timing of these patients' illnesses are consistent with exposure to the disease in New Mexico.

The New Mexico Department of Health and the CDC are conducting an environmental investigation in the area around these patients' home to assess potential sources of exposure.

The plague is a disease primarily affecting rodents, and transmission between rodents is via infected fleas. In the United States, bubonic plague is transmitted to humans through the bites of infected fleas.

While bubonic plague is not transmitted person to person, pneumonic plague, or lung infection with the plague organism, can be contracted by inhaling plague bacteria during contact with infected animals, including rodents, wildlife and pets, or human patients with pneumonic plague.

Bubonic plague symptoms in humans include fever; painful swollen lymph nodes in the groin, armpit or neck areas; chills; and headache, vomiting and diarrhea. With prompt diagnosis and appropriate antibiotic treatment and supportive care, mostpatients with bubonic plague survive.

Human plague has been reported most often from the four western states of Arizona, California, Colorado and New Mexico. Wild rodents, particularly ground squirrels and prairie dogs, are the natural reservoir for the plague bacterium.

Since January 1980, there have been 272 cases of plague reported in the United States; the overwhelming majority of cases were bubonic plague. Of these, 143, or 53 percent, were acquired in New Mexico. Plague is not endemic in the eastern United States, and there has not been a case of plague in New York City in at least 100 years.

For more information about plague, visit: http://www.bt.cdc.gov/agent/plague/index.asp

Asbestos Shuts Down Interior Headquarters

After employees were sent home from the main Interior Department Building on Friday, experts conducted the most comprehensive air sampling ever done in the history of the building. Tests in most of the building showed either no asbestos fibers, or fiber levels that are within the safety standards set by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and General Services Administration: no more than 0.01 fibers per cubic centimeter.

However, while most of the building reopened Monday, the basement area where the cafeteria is located closed until further notice. Extensive cleaning in the cafeteria was begun during the weekend.

A team of 21 asbestos workers certified by the EPA is using high efficiency particulate air (HEPA) vacuums to clean all floors, including carpeting, and wall surfaces. This vacuuming collects 99.97 percent of all particulates, dust and fibers.

All surfaces will also be wet cleaned, the Interior Department said. Similar work is being done in the Office Eagle Store located adjacent to the cafeteria dining area.

The cafeteria and Office Eagle Store will remain closed while health and safety officials continue their evaluation to determine other measures that may be needed.

Long term exposure to asbestos can lead to a lung disease called asbestosis, or to certain cancers. Short term or one time exposure is believed to carry little risk.

Interior Department officials said the asbestos was released during renovations of a mechanical areas in the basement, which includes removal of old asbestos insulation. Air monitoring tests are conducted routinely during all asbestos abatement activity, and test results received Thursday by the building manager indicated a higher level of asbestos in the mechanical area.

This mechanical area houses ventilation systems that serve the cafeteria and some first and second floor offices adjacent to 18th Street. The ventilation systems in the mechanical area, the cafeteria, and these offices were turned off, and further testing was ordered for these areas.

Those test results were received early Friday morning, showing elevated levels of asbestos in two samples: one in the mechanical room and one in the cafeteria. One of the offices served by the ventilation system housed in the mechanical area was also tested, and the result of that test did not indicate elevated asbestos levels.

An additional six samples taken from the mechanical room showed asbestos levels beneath federal safety thresholds.

Interior officials, in consultation with the General Services Administration and the Commissioner for Public Building Services, decided to close the entire Main Interior Building until further testing throughout the building could be completed over the weekend.

Global Warming Affects Coastal Marine Species

A second study by researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, also suggests that global warming affects different coastal species in different ways.

"The spread of exotic species and climate change are serious threats to the environment, yet little research has addressed the interaction of these two factors," said assistant professor John Stachowicz. "Our findings suggest that global warming may help invasive species establish in new territory, accelerating the homogenization of the world's ecosystems."

Since 1991, Stachowicz and colleagues have monitored the offspring of sea squirts, or ascidians, on the Connecticut coast. Comparing this 12 year record with corresponding surface water temperatures, the authors found that:

• After warmer winters, introduced species arrived earlier and in greater numbers than natives.
• After the warmest winter studied, introduced species outnumbered natives two to one.
• After the coldest winter studied, native species were five times as abundant as introduced species.

Stachowicz's study, "Linking climate change and biological invasions: Ocean warming facilitates non-indigenous species invasions," will be published online this week by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS) at: http://www.pnas.org/papbyrecent.shtml

A second study published last week in the journal "Science" indicates that global warming may change marine ecosystems at certain northern shoreline sites within the next three to five years. This is partly due to the timing of the tides, the researchers said.

"Because they are assumed to live very close to their thermal tolerance limits, organisms inhabiting the rocky intertidal zone have emerged in recent years as potential harbingers of the effects of climate change on species distribution," explain the authors, three of whom are from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Coauthor Carol Blanchette, a researcher with the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, Santa Barbara, said that neither air nor water temperatures alone are good proxies for body temperatures in intertidal organisms. Multiple climatic factors drive body temperature and the pattern of exposure to these conditions is influenced by shifts in the tidal cycle with latitude.

The researchers put temperature recorders, modified to match the temperatures of living mussels, in mussel beds at eight sites spanning 14 degrees of latitude ranging from northern Washington to Point Conception, California and measured temperatures over the course of a year.

They found that Lompoc Landing, California, one of the more southern sites, was very similar in temperature to Tatoosh Island, Washington - the northernmost site where instruments were deployed. In several cases the animals in southern sites are submerged in the afternoon.

"As a result, even if terrestrial climatic conditions become progressively hotter as one moves south along the West Coast, as they likely do, animals at southern sites may be afforded considerable protection by being submerged during the hottest parts of the day," explain the authors.

The article states that "an examination of tidal height predicts that maximum exposure at many northern Washington sites will occur in 2003. Indeed, large mussel mortality events occurred in the summer of 2002 in both Washington and Oregon. These results suggest that, all other factors being equal, the relative level of thermal stress observed between these sites will vary markedly over time."

Environmental Expert Raymond Dasmann Dies

Dasmann, a professor emeritus of ecology at the University of California at Santa Cruz, had been in ill health for several years.

He was the author of more than a dozen books, including "The Destruction of California," "Environmental Conservation," "Wildlife Biology," and "California's Changing Environment." He began working as a conservation biologist in the 1950s when the field was just emerging, identifying the threats of population growth, pollution, habitat loss, and species eradication that would become the focus of international conservation efforts.

Dasmann made an impassioned plea for sustainability on a planet with limited resources. In addition to his academic career, he did pioneering work in the 1960s with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), where he helped launch the Man and the Biosphere program.

For most of the 1970s, Dasmann worked in Switzerland as a senior ecologist for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature.

Dasmann's efforts earned him many major international awards, including the top conservation medals of the World Wildlife Society and the Smithsonian Institution. The Order of the Golden Ark, which recognizes the world's most distinguished conservationists, was awarded to Dasmann by the Dutch government in 1978.

Born in San Francisco, Dasmann was fascinated by wildlife from an early age. His college education in biology was interrupted by World War II; he served in New Guinea and Australia, where he met his wife of 45 years, Elizabeth Sheldon, who died in 1996.

After receiving his bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees in zoology from UC Berkeley, Dasmann embarked on a career in teaching, research and public service in 1954. He was a professor of wildlife management at Humboldt State University for eight years before joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 1977. He retired from UCSC in 1989.

A gifted writer, Dasmann was at home in the field, the classroom, and the policy arena. He translated his passion for nature into a vision of planet preservation years before the public began to grapple with concepts like conservation and overpopulation.

Dasmann's research took him to Africa, Sri Lanka, the Caribbean and California. He was an early advocate of conservation policies that respect indigenous peoples, and his calls for minimizing human impacts on the land helped lay the groundwork for the field of environmental ethics.

Dasmann fought for the title of his influential text, "Environmental Conservation," at a time when the phrase was unknown, and his pioneering work on game ranching in Africa fostered the field of ecodevelopment and helped make ecotourism a household word.

Earlier this year, Dasmann published his memoir, "Called by the Wild: The Autobiography of a Conservationist."

Dasmann's most recent efforts focused on creation of the Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve (GGBR), one of 300 international sites designated by the United Nations for protection and access. The GGBR consists of more than two million acres that extend from the Bodega Marine Laboratory north of San Francisco to Jasper Ridge near Stanford University and 30 miles offshore to the edge of the Continental Shelf.

The reserve is managed by nine separate entities, each of which helps protect the wide variety of native species and natural habitats that characterize the coastal region of central California while offering recreational and educational opportunities for many millions of visitors.

Contributions in Dasmann's memory may be sent to the attention of Lia Hull at the Golden Gate Biosphere Reserve Association, Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5020.

Harassment of Fisheries Observer Nets Fine

NOAA's Office of General Counsel in Juneau has penalized Saltwater, Inc. of Anchorage, Alaska a total of $22,000 for failure to report harassment of a fisheries observer within 24 hours of becoming aware of the problem, and for a separate observer performance problem.

In April 2000, NMFS Office for Law Enforcement, Anchorage Division, received a report that a NMFS observer was being harassed at Peter Pan Seafoods' processing plant in King Cove, Alaska. Saltwater failed to report that harassment within 24 hours of becoming aware of it.

A second violation occurred when Saltwater failed to report an observer experiencing problems with her vision within 24 hours of discovering the problem. The case was referred to the NOAA Office of General Counsel for prosecution.

"The regulations are designed to ensure that NOAA Fisheries is aware when observers are experiencing any type of harassment or other problems that could undermine their ability to collect fisheries data deemed essential to managing the fishery," said NMFS special agent Mark Kirkland. "Protecting observers is one of the highest enforcement priorities for the Alaska Enforcement Division."

Observers are people who work onboard fishing vessels to keep track of fish catch and bycatch in the federal fishing industry. NMFS certified groundfish observers help provide real time data to the agency for use in effective conservation and management of Alaska's federal fishery resources.

NOAA and Saltwater Inc. entered into a settlement agreement to resolve the company's violations of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Saltwater accepted a penalty of $12,000, with an additional $10,000 suspended and discharged at the end of two years providing Saltwater does not commit further violations of the same regulation.

Saltwater cooperated in the investigation and expressed a strong interest in ensuring that Saltwater's employees comply with National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) reporting requirements. NOAA intends to broker a meeting with observer providers to develop guidance for complying with observer contractor regulations.

Zero Energy Home Being Built In Tucson

The zero energy home is being built in a Tucson area subdivision that is expected to cut back its utility bills by more than 50 percent. Local builder John Wesley Miller plans to open the Tucson area construction site of his zero energy home to members of the building industry, the media and the general public.

The National Association of Home Builders Research Center will be conducting an evaluation of the performance of the home.

The zero energy home is part of a national initiative funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) through its National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. The primary goal of the initiative is to introduce the zero energy home concept into the mainstream home building industry.

The Tucson home is part of The John Wesley Miller Companies' Armory Park del Sol community, in which the homes use an average of less than a dollar a day for heating and cooling through a partnership with Tucson Electric Power and Global Solar Energy.

"This is the future for the American home," said David Garman, DOE assistant secretary for energy efficiency and renewable energy. "Solar energy technologies are affordable and practical today. Combined with off the shelf energy efficiency products and proven construction techniques, solar energy can make houses zero net users of electricity, while staying competitively priced."

A zero energy home combines energy efficient construction and appliances with commercially available, renewable energy systems. With its reduced energy needs and solar energy systems, a zero energy home can return as much energy as it takes from the utility grid on an annual basis.

The Armory Park del Sol zero energy home makes extensive use of active and passive solar systems. Tucson Electric Power will run the home's meter backward and credit homeowners when they put power back into the grid.

The Armory Park del Sol subdivision is one of four zero energy home projects comprising a national initiative administered by DOE through its National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Researchers at NREL are working with four home building teams to introduce the zero energy home concept into the single family, new home construction industry.

For more information on zero energy homes, visit: http://www.eren.doe.gov/solarbuildings/zero_energy_blds.html

Tidewater Goby to Stay on Endangered List

As a result, the northern populations and all other populations of the goby throughout its range will remain listed as an endangered species.

After receiving comments from the public, tidewater goby experts, and peer reviewers opposing the delisting, the USFWS concluded that the commenters' arguments "are compelling and that is prudent to withdraw the proposed delisting," said Diane Noda, field supervisor for the Ventura Fish and Wildlife Office.

The tidewater goby is a two inch long, greyish brown fish that lives in coastal saltwater lagoons and sometimes in fresh water along the California coast from Del Norte to northern San Diego counties. It has lost a major portion of its habitat during the past 150 years to coastal development activities.

The tidewater goby was listed as an endangered species in 1994 at the end of an extended drought cycle. In June 1999, the USFWS proposed that the species be delisted because there were more populations in the northern portion of the range than at that time the species was listed; the threats to those populations were not as severe as once believed; and the agency believed the tidewater goby had a greater ability to recolonize areas than was known when the species was listed.

However, comments received by the USFWS, including those by goby experts and peer reviewers, raised legitimate questions about the reasons for delisting.

The USFWS will now begin to develop a recovery plan for the goby that will guide conservation activities for the species and recommend specific criteria for considering the future delisting of the tidewater goby. Recovery plans are blueprints for actions by federal and state agencies and private organizations to conserve species.

The USFWS is also withdrawing its proposal to retain the southern California population of the tidewater goby as a distinct endangered population, which accompanied the original proposal. The withdrawal now makes a southern distinct population segment unnecessary.

A copy of the withdrawal is available at the Federal Register's web site at: http://www.access.gpo.gov/su_docs/aces/aces140.html