Sacramento Bee: Livestock waste found to foul Sierra waters

[marmar]

Livestock waste found to foul Sierra waters

By Tom Knudson
[e-mail]

Published: Sunday, Apr. 25, 2010 - 12:00 am | Page 1A


As director of the emergency room at the UC Davis Medical Center, Robert Derlet always wondered what made people sick.

Each summer, on hiking trips into the high Sierra, he brought that curiosity along, asking himself: Where do you get infections in the wilderness? The most obvious possibility, he believed, was the water.

Now, after 10 years of fieldwork and 4,500 miles of backpacking, Derlet knows for sure. What he has learned – after analyzing hundreds of samples dipped from backcountry lakes and streams – is that parts of the high Sierra are not nearly as pristine as they look.


Nowhere is the water dirtier, he discovered, than on U.S. Forest Service land, including wilderness areas, where beef cattle and commercial pack stock – horses and mules – graze during the summer months. There, bacterial contamination was easily high enough to sicken hikers with Giardia, E. coli and other diseases. In places, slimy, pea-green algae also blossomed in the bacteria-laden water. ..........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.sacbee.com/2010/04/25/2703875/bee-exclusive-livestock-waste.html