Phiestria: The Unseen Killer :: essays research papers

Phiesteria: The Unseen Killer An incredibly scary new type of algae is on the loose on the eastern seaboard of the United States and worst of all not many people know about it. Phiesteria piscicida- Latin for â€Å"fish killer† has been living in the mud of rivers for millions of years, but until recently something has jolted its metabolism into overdrive and has caused it to become a fearsome predator. This newly discovered type of dinoflagellate or marine protozoa, which generally has two flagella and cellulose covering, has been living off simple nutrients in the river waters of primarily North Carolina, until now that is. Near the Neuse River in NC, there is a slaughterhouse for pigs and chickens; all of the waste from the pigs is stored in massive lagoons where it is later sprayed onto crops as fertilizer. Unfortunately, a lot of this raw sewage ends up in streams that flow into the Neuse, which in turn enters the Pamlico Sound, a 2,000-mile long estuary in NC. This ultimately brings an immense amount of nutrients to the water thus causing the Phiesteria to shape-shift and enter a state of lethal attack on everything from fish to human. The Center for Disease Control has yet to do anything about this at all, which may be the scariest fact so far. I learned about this ecological disaster while reading my newest edition (October 2001) of Maxim. As I was flipping through my new magazine I saw a horrifying picture of a fish; it looked as though something took a bite out of its neck. Interested, I continued to read, â€Å"The Coming Plague† by Jeff Wise. Basically, Maxim exposes the entire path of this deadly modern-day epidemic starting in 1987, when a veterinary graduate student at North Carolina State University, named Stephen Smith, originally found Phiesteria. Further into the article it tells about Phiesteria moving north into parts of Maryland and even going south as far as 1,000-miles to the coast of Florida and how not enough action is being done to stop this deadly organism. The entire article is broken down into segmented stories of individual peoples fight with Phiesteria. I felt this article gave a great amount of information and helped to explain all of Phiesteria’s facts. One of the most amazing things I learned while reading this article is that the organism can infect humans even if they don’t come in direct contact with them, in fact, all we have to do is breath the air that is within a close proximity to where the organism is living.