Crying fowl over goose poop

A soccer goalie at Sand Point nibbles an orange slice during halftime while her fingers are caked in muck.

A 10-year-old boy inhales a mouthful of stagnant Juanita Bay water, coughs, climbs onto the dock and feels a green slurry between his toes.

Geese have been here. The evidence abounds. Should the parents of these children worry?

Swimming season at local beaches begins June 18, and concerns about germ-riddled goose poop will have thousands of people tiptoeing warily. If the piles don't spook them, the threat of poop-borne swimmer's itch might.

Several recent studies show that waterfowl excrete giardia, salmonella and E. coli bacteria. The risk of those bacteria spreading to humans is unclear.

While there are lots of cases of bird-borne diseases from food and farms, no proof exists that people have contracted stomach diseases or flu through exposure to bird poop at parks and beaches.

Still, officials believe the potential exposure to infectious waste will increase as resident goose populations grow - from a quarter-million nationwide in 1970 to an estimated 2 million this year.

"The risk appears to be low, but we cannot rule it out," said Mansour Samadpour, a University of Washington microbiologist who tracked down toxic E. coli in the 1996 Odwalla juice outbreak.

And ingredients in goose poop are not just of interest to families at beaches and ball fields. They have political implications.

Next week, a federal judge will decide whether 3,500 of the Puget Sound area's 25,000 Canada geese are to be gassed to death this summer, after only 678 of the federally protected birds were destroyed in the last three years. Public-health issues will be part of the argument between parks managers and animal-rights activists.

Once guests, now pests

In the '70s, geese were such a novelty that discovery of a nest under the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge halted repair work, and parks workers built fences to keep children from pestering geese on a Green Lake island.

The geese arrived in the mid-'60s, when eggs were rescued from rising waters behind the McNary and John Day dams on the Columbia River.

But since the goslings were hatched without parents, they never learned to migrate along their native Pacific Flyway, between Mexico and the Arctic Circle, so they stayed put.

Protein-rich lawns and a lack of predators made Seattle a goose paradise, and it became one of many cities with exploding populations of nonmigratory birds.

During the early '90s, officials tried moving 7,000 birds back to Eastern Washington. Some birds resettled in parks there; others flew back to Seattle, said Roger Woodruff, an assistant manager for the U.S. Agriculture Department's Wildlife Services Division in Olympia.

Now, a 3,500-kill quota would stabilize the population and help the most hard-hit areas, said Woodruff, who supervises local goose control.

Overpopulation of resident Canada geese is such a new phenomenon that until now, scientists had little incentive to investigate the bacteria in goose feces.

So far, E. coli O157:H7, the strain that can produce life-threatening illness in humans, hasn't been detected in goose waste, said Larry Clark, a biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Wildlife Services lab in Fort Collins, Colo.

But a case of bacterial detective work began last September after 32 people, mostly children, were sickened by E. coli at Battle Ground Lake in Clark County in southwest Washington. A health officer speculated that the bacteria came from a child who had defecated.

Samadpour, the UW microbiologist, found the same strain of E. coli in a water sample - the first such bacteria recorded in a swimming lake, he said. His lab found the strain again in a duck, and a state health lab later found a separate but also hazardous strain of E. coli in a second duck.

Research raises questions

Such matches raise the possibility that birds harbor strains of bacteria that are transmissible from fowl to humans. At Battle Ground Lake, though, it was more likely that ducks ingested the bacteria from humans, other animals or water, Samadpour said.

This month a follow-up check of nine Battle Ground ducks showed none of the dangerous E. coli, said Tom Besser, a Washington State University veterinary microbiologist, who tested more than 100 droppings from the ducks.

The clean outcome suggests that the ducks rapidly pooped out the bacteria they ingested from other sources, but they didn't increase the amount of hazardous E. coli in the environment.

Not enough research on geese has been conducted to determine whether their digestive systems can cause human-threatening bacteria to proliferate, Besser said. Even if geese are mere carriers, even slight risks would increase somewhat with the volumes of waste, he said.

Geese in eastern Maryland have been found to carry giardia and cryptosporidium, which cause diarrhea, abdominal cramps and nausea in humans who ingest the bacteria through contaminated food or hands. The birds were seen eating undigested corn from cowpies, the likely origin.

Birds' mobility as "mechanical carriers" makes their waste a potential threat to drinking-water supplies, the Maryland study said.

Government requests for lethal goose control cite the Maryland findings as evidence that geese present a health threat.

But a national Humane Society veterinarian, Patrice Klein, counters that if geese are merely transporters of other species' diseases, they shouldn't be blamed.

Moreover, bacteria levels vary by region.

In London tests, salmonella and other potentially hazardous bacteria appeared in 6 percent to 44 percent of droppings from six parks, and the bacteria survived four weeks in the scat. Tests in Fort Collins, Colo. by the USDA Wildlife Services research lab found salmonella in only one of 400 fecal samples there.

Hikers, kids at risk

Over the next year, Clark's lab in Colorado will collect fecal samples from eight states, including Washington, and a Johns Hopkins University researcher said he plans a similar project.

Clark said that although the risk of goose-borne illness is relatively low, hikers routinely catch giardia by drinking creek water near wildlife droppings, so common sense suggests that goose piles should be avoided.

Children who play with balls on waterfronts have higher odds of becoming infected through hand-to-mouth contact than adults, and people with immune deficiencies, including AIDS, are also at elevated risk, the London scientists warn.

Geese also play a role in "swimmers' itch" by carrying schistosomes, worm-like parasites that burrow into human skin.

Goose-waste runoff is one of several pollutants in Green Lake that have caused toxic blooms of cyanobacteria, which can cause nausea, shock, itching and, in high doses, liver damage.

In court next week, Wildlife Services will likely argue that defending against outbreaks of potentially dangerous bacteria is one justification for lethal measures, especially in places where harassment and egg addling hasn't worked.

Animal-rights advocates will reply that taking the birds' lives would be illegal and immoral without conclusive proof they have caused epidemics.

Wayne Johnson of the Northwest Animal Rights Network argues that skin irritation doesn't justify killing geese, and criticizes local governments for using geese as a scapegoat when sewage still overflows into Seattle-area waters.

Instead of destroying geese, said the Humane Society's Klein, perhaps it's better to take precautions, such as hand-washing, and realize we don't inhabit a sterile world.

Samadpour said geese present less risk to urban health than cats, dogs, vermin or sewage overflows. In fact, he said, he wouldn't swim in a lake near young children, because it's a safe assumption one of them is contaminating the water.

Mike Lindblom's phone message number is 206-515-5631. His e-mail address is mlindblom@seattletimes.com

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King County's Lakes Monitoring Program Web site contains articles about water contamination and lists bacteria counts at swimming beaches, http://splash.metrokc.gov/wlr/waterres/lakes