The county’s public health department is stepping up its public reporting of gastrointestinal illnesses in the South Bay amid growing public calls for a greater focus on sewage-related suffering linked to the Tijuana River.
Announced Wednesday afternoon, the launch came just hours before the start of a special workshop on river pollution featuring updates from five key organizations, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the International Commission on Boundaries and Water.
A new “surveillance bulletin” will be published weekly on a special “GI Concerns” website every Thursday, showing the prevalence of gastrointestinal symptoms seen among recent emergency department patients as well as the number of new cases of illnesses reported caused by six different infections. agents commonly associated with wastewater exposure, including: campylobacter, giardia, hepatitis A, salmonella, shiga toxin-producing e.coli, and shigella.
The inaugural report shows exactly what local public health officials have repeatedly said in recent months. South Bay has not and is not seeing an increase in the type of symptoms or reported infections that one would expect from exposure to polluted water.
“For reportable diseases, we are not seeing an increase,” said Dr. Seema Shah, medical director of the county’s Epidemiology and Immunization Services Branch.
This is likely an unsatisfactory result for those who have recently reported headaches, diarrhea and a host of other symptoms that seem to worsen when wet weather causes the river to swell, spilling more water spent in the river bed and, shortly after, in the Pacific. Ocean.
Why start reporting this information regularly if it doesn’t show an increase? Shah said the regular weekly updates aim to better answer the public’s questions about illnesses in the South Bay that could be linked to the river.
“Like many South Bay residents, we are very concerned about what is happening and we wanted to make sure we take these reports very seriously,” Shah said. “Transparency is important, so sharing data, we felt, was very important. »
An area medical provider, South Bay Urgent Care, recently reported an increase in gastrointestinal symptoms such as diarrhea this winter with the arrival of heavy rains. In early February, the county sent investigators to the clinic to try to understand why that location seemed to be reporting an increase in these cases when other providers in the area were not.
So far, the Health Ministry has not shared the results of its investigation with the public, although a report is expected within the next 30 days.
Doctors Kimberly and Matt Dickson, who run South Bay Urgent Care, noted that the public health system doesn’t cover everything. Not all infections need to be reported to public health agencies, and some people with gastrointestinal symptoms may not go to emergency departments, meaning their illnesses will not show up in reports that do not. follow only infections that end up in hospital.
“There is an uptick in illnesses, but not all are reportable,” Kimberly Dickson said in an email after reading the county’s announcement and inaugural report on South Bay gastrointestinal illnesses.
She said the rains caused an uptick in diarrhea among South Bay urgent care patients who live near the Tijuana River Valley.
“The majority of patients did not have a ‘notifiable’ illness, but they still had symptomatic diarrhea,” Dickson said. “There is a trend that when we see an increase in rain events, the flow of the Tijuana River increases and the amounts of diarrhea increase in our clinic. »
The county’s solution, as expressed in Wednesday’s announcement, is to avoid direct contact with water contaminated by sewage.
“South County residents deserve access to clean beaches and waterways,” said Dr. Ankita Kadakia, deputy county public health officer. “As we continue to closely monitor reports of illness and await action to reduce and clean sewage flows, it remains very important that people avoid going into contaminated water.”
But after reading that statement, Dickson backed away.
“The patients we see were not surfers or ocean swimmers,” she said. “These are community members who live and work locally; sewage doesn’t just cause illness to swimmers in the ocean, we see it in the community at large.
Water is far from the only current concern for South Bay residents. Residents have reported experiencing symptoms such as nausea after being regularly exposed to strong odors emanating from the river, leading local air quality authorities to increase monitoring of chemicals such as sulfur dioxide and hydrogen sulfide.
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