BY ROBERT J. SMITH

Posted on Saturday, March 8, 2008

URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/219012/

TULSA — Salmonella and campylobacter bacteria levels in the Illinois River are not high enough to cause intestinal diseases in humans, a Texas doctor testified Friday.

Dr. Herbert DuPont’s declaration came as eight poultry companies try to convince a federal judge in Tulsa not to ban the spreading of poultry litter on farm fields in the river’s watershed. A hearing began Feb. 19 on a ban requested in November by Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson.

DuPont and other poultry company witnesses spent much of their time Friday rebutting what they called invalid research, misguided calculations and flawed analyses of state witnesses who testified during the first five days of the hearing.

DuPont, the director of the Center for Infectious Diseases at the University of Texas School of Public Health in Houston, told U. S. District Judge Gregory Frizzell that salmonella and campylobacter are “moderate dose pathogens,” meaning people don’t catch them with a small amount of exposure.

“You need more of them to get it,” DuPont testified. “You don’t see those kinds of counts in the Illinois River.”

DuPont said 19. 5 million annual cases of diarrheal diseases stem from water, and most cases are related to swimming pools, wading pools and drinking water. Few cases are related to rivers and lakes, he said.

Within a “reasonable medical certainty,” he said that he’s confident “chickens ain’t the source” of human illnesses in the watershed.

Oklahoma contends people are at risk in the watershed, which includes portions of eastern Oklahoma and Northwest Arkansas, because they spend time in the river and drink from wells. Sections of the 99-milelong river in Oklahoma are popular for swimming, canoeing and fishing.

Oklahoma blames the poultry companies for bacteria found in water, soil and litter samples, saying the litter threatens human health because it leaches from fields where it’s spread.

No one could swallow enough river water to become sick from fecal bacteria, DuPont said.

Bacteria from poultry and most other species need hours or days to multiply to be in a sufficient quantity to cause salmonella, he said. It’s not possible for a person to touch a turkey, for instance, and immediately put his hand in his mouth and catch salmonella.

“I can lick the turkey, and I’m all right ?” asked Louis Bullock, a private attorney hired by Oklahoma.

“No problem,” DuPont said.

DuPont’s comments contradicted Monday’s testimony of Dr. Robert Lawrence, the founder and director of the Center for a Livable Future at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Lawrence blamed poultry litter, a combination of bird manure and rice hulls, sawdust or wood chips, for gastrointestinal diseases that cause nausea, diarrhea and other symptoms.

Many gastrointestinal diseases go unreported because they don’t occur until days after a person was in the Illinois River, and the sick person is more likely to connect the symptoms with something he ate, he said.

“I would hope people would be informed of the considerable risk they are taking,” Lawrence said. “I’d be highly motivated as a public health person to reduce the risk.”

Another defense witness — geochemist Rene Jean-Claude Hennet — attacked the research and analysis of Roger Olsen, a state expert who said he’s found a chemical signature in poultry litter and tracked it from poultry houses into streams.

Most of the 25 components found by Olsen in poultry litter, including copper, calcium and aluminum, are common in such things as cow and swine manure and sewer sludge, Hennet said.

“He should have tested his hypothesis against the reality of the watershed,” said Hennet, who works for the consulting firm Papadopulos & Associates in Bethesda, Md. “He didn’t do that.”

Hennet accused Olsen of “manipulating his data” to make the results identical to his hypothesis about the cause of bacteria in the watershed.

“If you put garbage in, you get garbage out,” Hennet said.

A third defense witness, Dr. Billy Clay, evaluated the amounts of manure in the watershed, and determined that beef cattle produce more manure than 140 million chickens and turkeys raised by the companies on an annual basis.

Poultry represents 260, 250 tons, or about 9 percent, of the animal manure in the watershed, said Clay, a veterinarian and adjunct professor at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater.

The 103, 737 beef cows in the watershed account for 1. 18 million tons a year, Clay said. He also calculated the manure that comes from pigs, deer, sheep, horses and other animals in the area.

The hearing, one aspect of a federal lawsuit filed in 2005, continues at 9 a. m. Monday. The companies sued by Edmondson are Tyson Foods of Springdale; Simmons Foods of Siloam Springs; Cargill of Minneapolis; Cobb-Vantress of Siloam Springs; George’s of Springdale; Peterson Farms of Decatur; Willow Brook Foods of Springfield, Mo.; and Cal-Maine Foods of Jackson, Miss.