How this headline may connect to industries in Alabama. Technical scores are below — click any ? for what a metric means.
A deadly bacteria is creeping up the Atlantic Coast.How worried should you be?A deadly bacteria is creeping up the Atlantic Coast.How worried should you be?A deadly bacteria is creeping up the Atlantic Coast.How worried should you be?Bailey Magers and Sunil Kumar cut strange figures on Pensacola Beach.Bags of disinfectant solution surrounded them on the white sand; their gloved hands juggled test tubes while layers of rubber and plastic shielded their skin from the elements.As the two organized their seawater samples on the popular Florida shoreline last August, an older woman wearing a swimsuit walked over to ask what they were doing."We're just actively monitoring water quality," they told her, but she pressed on."Are you looking for that flesh-eating bacteria?" "We're looking into it," they replied, hoping not to frighten her.The woman turned back toward the ocean, her curiosity satisfied.As she walked away, Kumar noticed that she had scrapes and bruises on her body.A few minutes later, he watched her step into the waves.He shook off a chill and returned to the task at hand.Magers and Kumar study a bacteria called Vibrio, part of a lineage of ancient marine species that likely emerged sometime around the Paleozoic Era, Grist reports.Enormous, shallow seas flooded the massive, interconnected supercontinents that constituted the Earth's landmass at the time, and complex marine ecosystems developed that thrived in these temperate, freshly-formed bodies of water.Researchers think there are more than 70 Vibrio species in the environment today, hundreds of millions of years later.The organisms float in warm, brackish water, attaching themselves to plankton and algae and accumulating in prolific water-filtering species like clams and oysters.A small number of Vibrio species can sicken and even kill.In worst-case scenarios, a person who has been exposed to the most dangerous of them — by swimming in brackish water with an open wound or ingesting a piece of raw shellfish that is contaminated with the tasteless and odorless toxin — may find themselves with only hours before the flesh on one or more extremities starts to bruise, swell, and decay.Without the quick aid of powerful antibiotics, septic shock can set in and lead to death.Anyone can get infected, though it is much more likely in people who have liver disease or are immunocompromised, elderly, or diabetic.Climate change is making the world's oceans, which have absorbed more than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions, more hospitable to Vibrio.Research shows that temperature and salinity are the largest predictors of how widespread Vibrio bacteria are.As water temperatures rise, so does the concentration of Vibrio in seawater — boosting the risk of infection for beachgoers and shellfish consumers.The bacteria start getting active in water temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit and multiply rapidly as coastal waters warm throughout the summer.In recent years, scientists have documented Vibrio expanding into places that were once too cold to support the bacteria, pushing as far north along the U.S.East Coast as Maine and appearing with more prevalence in temperate seas around the world.Vibriosis infections in general are the leading cause of shellfish-related illness in the U.S.They have increased "more than any other illness caused by a pathogen in the U.S.food supply" since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or CDC, started keeping tabs on such illnesses in 1996, according to a 2019 analysis by the International Association for Food Protection.The report attributed the precipitous rise to a "perfect storm" of factors that include climate change, food handling practices, expanding globalization, a patchwork of regulatory oversight, and improved diagnosis.On their conspicuous expeditions to Pensacola and other Sunshine State beaches, Magers and Kumar are trying to understand where, and when, harmful Vibrio species are present across the state.The research they're doing is part of an ongoing effort by a laboratory at the University of Florida to create a Vibrio early warning system for the eastern United States — a program that can alert public health departments to high Vibrio concentrations in any given area a month in advance.How many limbs would be saved, Magers wonders, if doctors and nurses could be warned ahead of time that their emergency rooms would soon see an uptick in these chronically underdiagnosed infections?The work serves more than one purpose: As Vibrio bacteria spread north into cooler waters, they serve as a first warning signal of changing marine conditions — giving researchers a heads-up that the familiar composition of marine species in their local waters may be starting to shift.In Europe's Baltic Sea, for example, a spike in Vibrio infections in July 2014 closely mirrored a heatwave that rapidly warmed the shallow sea.The incident showed researchers that Vibrio spikes herald unusually warm marine conditions — and they have since been utilized as barometers for ocean heatwaves and sea-surface warming patterns, not just food safety."We see Vibrio as the indicator for climate change," said Kyle Brumfield, a microbiologist at the University of Maryland who has been studying the bacteria for a decade."We can use the presence of Vibrio and Vibrio cases as a proxy for water health in general." The CDC estimates that about 80,000 cases of vibriosis occur in the U.S.every year, resulting in about 100 deaths.Of those 80,000 cases, most are caused by a Vibrio called parahaemolyticus, which most commonly results in gastroenteritis, or food poisoning.The vast majority of the deaths, however, are caused by a type of Vibrio called vulnificus — the Latin word for "wound-making." Vulnificus is so potent it can squeeze through a pinhole-sized cut in the skin and lead to death in just 24 hours.In the last five years, the CDC registered 429 such vulnificus cases, plus 136 foodborne cases.But even though foodborne cases are less numerous, the patients who contract vulnificus by eating contaminated shellfish are more likely to die than those infected via open wounds.Thirteen percent of those nonfoodborne cases died, compared to 32% of people who got the infection from eating seafood.Most cases occur in the Gulf and Atlantic coastal regions.As far as infectious diseases go, vulnificus is exceedingly rare: The CDC reports between 150 and 200 cases a year.The sexually-transmitted disease chlamydia, by comparison, one of the most common bacterial infections in the U.S., infects northward of 1.5 million Americans annually.But vulnificus' astonishing speed and high fatality rate — 15-50%, depending on the health of the person exposed and the route of infection — makes it a unique public health threat, particularly as climate change grows its pathways of exposure.Vulnificus is not the kind of pathogen you'd want behaving erratically, but that's exactly what it's been doing since the late 2010s.Across the Eastern Seaboard, local and federal health officials have been reporting "unusual increases" in vulnificus prevalence — jagged spikes in infections that appear to correspond to extreme weather events like hurricanes and marine heatwaves.In 2022 and 2024, years when the brackish water that Vibrio bacteria thrive in was pushed inland by major hurricanes, Florida's public health department reported 17 and 19 deaths, respectively, linked to vulnificus exposure via open wounds.North Carolina, New York, and Connecticut also saw small clusters of infections during a record-breaking heatwave in the summer of 2023."As coastal water temperatures increase," the CDC warned in its investigation of those outbreaks, "V.vulnificus infections are expected to become more common." A 2023 study that analyzed a 30-year database of confirmed vulnificus infections from outdoor recreation along the U.S.Gulf and Atlantic coasts found the northern boundary of infections has moved north by a rate of 30 miles per year