"Henderson, Mark" wrote:
> I work with the Washington State Dept. of Ecology and sit on a couple of
> > citizens groups regarding the closure of commercial shellfish beds. Our
> > goal is to have these beds re-opened. One of the closed shellfish areas
> is
> > an embayment with a seafood processor contributing their effluent to the
> > harbor. The seafood processor processes bottom fish, dungeness crab (in
> > season), and wild salmon (in season) a few days a week and contributes low
> > volumes of effluent. They monitor their effluent by taking grab samples
> and
> > testing for fecal coliform bacteria among other things. Results show high
> > levels (in the 10,000's) of fecal coliform bacteria monthly....
Hi Mark,
I have neglected to read my email regularly, and I just
stumbled on your note. Have you gotten good feedback?
I would be very interested to know how many of those "fecal
coliforms" were actually E.coli, the presumptive indicator of fecal
contamination. If, as I suspect, most of the "fecal coliforms" in
the seafood processing effluent are NOT E.coli, then it would be
simple to distinguish effluent from other contamination. Simply test
for E.coli. There are many excellent E.coli tests based either on
MUG or the indole reaction.
Best regards,
George Chang, UC Berkeley
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Apr 09 2001 - 12:07:11 PDT