01/15/2015

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Government-sanctioned tests of equipment designed to cleanse ship ballast water of invasive species are seriously flawed because they don't determine whether the systems will remove microbes that cause gastrointestinal illnesses, scientists said Wednesday.

 

The Environmental Protection Agency and the Coast Guard have set limits on the number of live organisms ballast water can contain, based on standards proposed by an international agency in 2004. To comply, ship companies must install technology that kills enough creatures to meet the limits.

 

Laboratory testing of treatment systems has been conducted for 10 years. But a newly published paper in the Marine Pollution Bulletin contends the evaluations have a crucial defect: They don't adequately measure the systems' effectiveness against three disease-carrying microbes that the regulations target. One of them, E. coli, can indicate the presence of fecal sewage.

 

"This is a real problem," said Andrew Cohen of the Center for Research on Aquatic Bioinvasions in Richmond, California, who wrote the paper with Fred Dobbs of Old Dominion University in Virginia. "We know there are serious pathogens in ballast water. There's good evidence that ballast water has moved them around the world and into U.S. waters."

 

The Coast Guard declined to comment and EPA had no immediate reaction to the report.