It’s been 15 years since 400,000 people in Milwaukee got sick and more than 100 died because of contaminated drinking water. The episode remains the largest outbreak of waterborne disease in U.S. history. To this day, no one knows where the offending parasite, cryptosporidium, originated. But Milwaukee has been told that its experience has made drinking water safer nationwide. WUWM’s Erin Toner reports.
Dr. Ian Gilson has been treating AIDS patients in Milwaukee for nearly 25 years. He says in all that time, nothing’s been as bad as 1993, when cryptosporidium entered the city’s drinking water and made people sick.
“We began to get reports of some of our patients having diarrhea that didn’t stop and we had patients with weird stuff like an ulcer that was not related to acid, severe gall bladder disease without stones. Ultimately by the time it was called a waterborne epidemic we knew we had a big problem on our hands,” Gilson says.
Most healthy people who drank the water had several horrible days of vomiting and diarrhea. But people with weak immune systems, like those with HIV and AIDS, couldn’t fight the parasite.
“I distinctly remember several patients saying if you can’t get me over this let’s just be done with this. One guy who was suffering terribly we couldn’t seem to get him enough morphine. And I ordered what I thought was a fatal dose of morphine because I thought that was the only thing that was going to help him. And it actually relieved his pain,” Gilson says.
One-hundred-and-three people with HIV and AIDS eventually died because of the contamination.
And before the city identified the problem and residents began boiling their tap water to kill the contaminant, hundreds of thousands became ill.
“The cause is not known and may never be known. There does not seem to be any obvious explanation.”
Carrie Lewis is superintendent of Milwaukee Water Works. The utility draws in water from Lake Michigan and then treats it before sending it to customers. A prevailing theory on what happened 15 years ago is that sewage overflows contaminated the lake water. But Lewis doesn’t buy it. She says if human sewage was the source, people would have had to have been infected with the parasite beforehand to excrete it, and there’s no evidence of that. There’s also speculation that cow manure from upstate washed into the rivers that empty into the lake.
“We have tested the watershed for 15 years looking for cryptosporidium and we hardly ever find it in the rivers. So it does not seem that the environment was a huge reservoir of it, so honestly, no clue,” Lewis says.
Lewis says what’s important is that the city changed the way it monitors and treats drinking water.
“We used to get two samples a day that a person would go to a tap somewhere, fill it up, bring it back to the lab and analyze it and we thought we were testing the water quality well. Today we have hundreds of instruments testing the water every single second for all sorts of different parameters, so the 15 years that’s gone by it’s a lifetime," Lewis says.
Fifteen years ago, the city’s water intake pipe in Lake Michigan was about a mile off shore. After the outbreak, Milwaukee spent $90 million dollars extending the line. The utility also replaced filters at its treatment plants and added ozone to the water to kill cryptosporidium. And the rest of the country has taken similar measures.
Michael Beach is associate director for healthy water at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He says as a result of the new techniques, Americans should have confidence when they turn on their tap.
“What we’ve seen is that these large municipal surface water, kind of getting the water from the lake and so on, those types of outbreaks have virtually disappeared from the tracking system,” Beach says.
While there are claims that municipal drinking water in this country is now the safest in the world, Tom Curtis, of the American Water Works Association, cautions that no system is 100 percent foolproof.
“There is always the possibility for a chain of events to occur that would allow an outbreak. But I would say that possibility is extremely small and vastly smaller than it was before the outbreak in’93,” Curtis says.
Curtis says one legacy of Milwaukee’s outbreak is that water utilities are no longer just managing a system of pipes and water mains – they’re in the business of protecting public health.
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