DATE: Sunday, September 28, 1997            TAG: 9709270004

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J5   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS

DATELINE: RICHMOND                          LENGTH:   86 lines

PFIESTERIA MEDICAL REPORTS MAKE HEALTH THREAT REAL

I figured Maryland was overreacting.

After all, it's the state that was willing to throw millions at Art Modell in hopes of luring his Cleveland Browns to Baltimore.

It's the home of former Gov. William Donald Schaefer, who used to send hate mail to ordinary citizens when they dared to speak ill of His Lordship's ways.

Another former Maryland governor went to prison. And don't even get me started on Spiro Agnew.

So when a panel of Virginia health officials called a press conference to announce that, not to worry, fish with lesions have been turning up in state waters for years, I felt reassured.

There might be an outbreak of pfiesteria-hysteria north of the border, where the microorganism was causing rivers to be closed faster than a snapping turtle swallows gnats. But Virginia was going to assess those pesky little intruders in its usual calm and systematic way.

That's what I thought before I read Ritchie C. Shoemaker's account in The Washington Post of what it's been like to practice family medicine in Pocomoke City, Md., for the past year. Which is to say, before Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening began to look more like a hero than a kook.

Let us pause briefly for clarification. I am not yet ready to endorse the position of Dr. JoAnn Burkholder, a North Carolina scientist who last week urged that Virginia rivers where pfiesteria is found be closed as well.

But I am joining Mayor Charles Tull of the Eastern Shore community of Saxis in wondering why it took Virginia so long to get animated about its concern. ``If you were a cattle farmer and cattle were dying on either side of your fence, you'd say, `Whoa, what's going on here?''' Tull told Virginian-Pilot reporter Scott Harper.

In the decade since Burkholder discovered the one-celled pfiesteria microbe, which turns toxic under certain conditions, it has been implicated in the deaths of a billion or more fish in North Carolina.

Most recently, it has emerged as the suspected culprit in a major fish kill in the Maryland portion of the Pocomoke River. And it has been blamed for illnesses affecting about 28 Maryland residents who were in contact with those and other waters.

Yet just a few weeks back, Del. Tayloe Murphy, D-Warsaw, who is perhaps the Assembly's leading expert on the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries, was complaining that Virginia was still sending water samples to North Carolina for pfiesteria analysis. Results took weeks.

Not until 10 days ago did Virginia Gov. George F. Allen announce an $800,000 research initiative, including money for the purchase of a new scanning electron microscope that will allow Virginia to analyze its own waters.

For me, any doubt that such investigation should be a Red-Alert priority for officials from Allen on down was erased by reading Shoemaker's first-person account. It begins:

``On Wednesday, July 30, I got a call. . . . `I think I've got the pfiesteria thing,' the man on the phone told me. I asked him to come in right away.''

The patient had spent an hour water skiing on the Pocomoke River the previous Sunday. Before the day was out, ``his head hurt; he couldn't remember simple things; he had trouble walking and talking. When he woke the next morning, he had a crop of some 30 flat, red sores over his body. They looked just like the distinctive rash described by physicians in North Carolina. . .

About an hour later, Shoemaker was visited by a bartender complaining of ``funny zits'' on his face. He'd spent about 15 minutes swimming in the Pocomoke on the same Sunday. The next day a woman who'd been watching the water skier showed up with similar complaints.

The medical findings were dismaying, but the resistance Shoemaker encountered when he tried to alert public officials to his findings was just as bad.

It is the same inertia and hesitation that Tayloe Murphy describes when he complains of foot-dragging by Virginia environmental officials in working to reduce nutrient levels in the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.

Burkholder and others believe that elevated levels, caused in part by agricultural runoff, may be a primary culprit in the growth of pfiesteria.

In 1987 Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania signed a pact calling for a 40 percent reduction in nutrient levels in the water by 2000. A plan for meeting that timetable has not even been established for the Rappahannock, York and James rivers, Murphy noted.

Virginia has yet to encounter red sores and funny zits. And time is running out on Allen's environmentally embattled four years.

But his successor should attack this issue as aggressively as Glendening, if not by closing rivers, then by an equally dramatic assault on reducing the nutrient levels that may feed pfiesteria. MEMO: Ms. Edds is an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

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