Something's Attacking These Carolina Fishermen | Diagnosis Unknown 12 | Real Responders

Mysterious organism pulls wires North Carolina victims find their skin burning, then begin to fear they're losing their minds Even scientists studying the organism succumb Health officials rush to close rivers and beaches Must track source mysterious of this dangerous disease before it is too late, the Carolina coast, a watery desert teeming with life,

fishermen

Seth Willis and David Jones had worked in North Carolina news on the Pamlico rivers all their lives, but they did not A long time ago they began to notice

something

strange: the days were better at certain times of the year. When they were in the water, David Jones felt nausea and dizziness, they always passed and they mostly didn't worry about it one day in 1995, although it didn't happen, in fact, it got worse when the men turned to go home.

They ran into a problem, none of them could remember which wave it was at home. It was a clear day and they knew the Neuse River like the back of their hands, but that day nothing seemed familiar to them. They were disoriented and confused if I drove in circles for hours trying to fix on a spot. familiar landmark, as David Jones remembers, out of nowhere, you don't recognize the landmark, you don't recognize where you are, it's a strange feeling, I was lost in myself, after hours of wandering aimlessly, they finally arrived. on the ramp of his boat, but his thoughts and actions became increasingly confused.

We were trying to put the boat on the trailer. Very, very simple operation, like putting on your pants when you get up. The only problem is that you can't concentrate to achieve it. In the trailer for almost three and a half hours when he arrived home, David Jones described the incident to his wife. We got lost. Margaret Jones had been seeing many changes in her husband. I got

real

ly scared and worried and asked him not to do it. Do you think you need to see a doctor? I'm not going to see a doctor. He is wasting my money.

The longer he stayed in the water, the worse he got. David and his partner Seth Willis compared the symptoms and discovered that they had both begun to feel. develop lesions sores on his arms that did not heal properly the lesion began to appear on the top of the glove where it touched the skin this seven months finally healed the lesions began to not heal but appear more

something

is happening but you can't quite identify it, The men noticed that the lesions appeared every time they worked in the water, not only that the fish they handled also had lesions.

Finally, David's symptoms got so bad that he decided to go to the doctor. Tell me what happened precisely when he couldn't even express what his thoughts were. I don't know if he was having a nervous breakdown. I just didn't know because he just wasn't acting irrationally and he kept saying, you know, I feel like it. My skin crawls, he said, I feel like something is crawling on my skin and I never want to say, I couldn't understand that well maybe you know you have an allergy or it's itchy or something, you know because sometimes you feel like it's itchy. the skin said no, I feel like something is on my skin crawling around the doctor couldn't find any medical explanation for David's symptoms David suggested I contact a scientist in Raleigh who was doing a study on

fishermen

with mental problems and the like. physical problems her name was Joanne Burkholder as director of the Center for Applied Aquatic Ecology at North Carolina State University Joanne Burkholder is a marine ecologist who had heard about a mysterious illness that afflicted fishermen like David Jones.

I was in the Navy in North Carolina. Fisheries Commission, so I interacted with a lot of fishermen in our state, especially the coastal people, and I started quietly asking them: have you ever had any problems? Have you ever been in the water? Have you ever been sick? Has anything funny ever happened? The doctor traveled to New Bern and met with David and Margaret Jones. In fact, when I met David Jones, his eyes were burning, his skin was burned, he couldn't breathe, he didn't speak very well, he had serious bouts of memory problems, she knew it. Jones needed help.

Burkholder suggested that she see a doctor at Duke University Medical Center's neurological disorders clinic, Dr. Donald Schmeckel specializes in difficult to treat neurological cases, his presenting symptoms basically make you think about the nervous system, he had difficulty reading, he had some difficulties with emotions and I thought he also had some indication of generalized changes in body type , whatever features they skipped But I had a skin rash, so the sky is the limit. Do you have a systemic medical illness that indirectly affects the nervous system or is the nervous system the problem? When he has a skin rash, he has to argue that, but not only the nervous system but the rest of his body was also being affected by the exposures.

The first step was for David Jones to have a cat scan. The results were not good. Scans showed David had suffered serious neurological damage. He had a deep injury to his left temporal lobe. of his brain the area linked to memory and language, but the doctor had no idea what was causing it, he told me that my body was degenerating daily and that there was nothing they could do to stop it. Whatever was

attacking

David Jones' body wasn't just affecting. Fisherman Joanne Burkholder had become ill while she was working with fish from these North Carolina rivers.

She had had similar symptoms to Jones. There were problems that affected us, but I ruled them out. The sore throat must simply be a virus or the headaches must be stress, difficulty breathing, the asthma-like symptoms must be allergies and it wasn't the first time, a couple of years earlier, Burkholder had been studying water samples similar with sick fish when he had a strange reaction that I had been getting my hands on. aquariums to get the water currents and put them in different containers for this experiment and I was holding the glass close to my face she started to feel fed and disoriented I needed to get out of the lab I doubled over I had bad stomach cramps and I

real

ized I wasn't breathing very well, had an asthma attack outdoors, the fresh air seemed to relieve the symptoms, but Burkholder was not going to return to the laboratory, instead he went home and I do not remember much else for about eight days, except that he had periods when he could realize that something was really wrong.

It was really a very scary experience. She called in sick with the flu, but her symptoms suggested something quite different. For a week her memory seemed to fade and become unfocused. I realized. I couldn't hold a conversation so here I stayed in my apartment for about eight days and when I started to get out of there I tested myself by watching a news broadcast and then seeing if I could write a simple sentence that someone Accepted after more than a week At home, Burkholder felt well enough to return to work in the laboratory. She was now determined to try to find out what made her so sick that she had been studying a class of single-celled organisms called dinoflagellates or dinosaurs.

They are so called primitive, that is, they have been on Earth for a long time. They are considered among the oldest types of organisms with nuclei in their cells, so they have probably literally been around for 500 to 800 million years, no matter what they look like. They are not really very primitive in some ways, they have had a lot of time to develop complex chemical interactions with other animals the day she improved so much that she had just started working with a specific organism, a small predator known as a fusteria, like this single-celled killer . It transforms through up to 24 life stages, becoming increasingly more deadly, in fact it had recently been linked to huge fish gills along the Carolina canals, no one knew exactly why, but the fusteria seemed to thrive where rivers meet the sea in coastal estuaries were salty. and freshwater mix the signs of its presence in the tidal basins of the Neuse and Pamlico rivers were alarming hysteria it is a generalist it eats almost everything and anything it eats dead material living material but its favorite food source is fish like a Jekyll Microscopic and Hyde most of the time, kissteria was a small, benign organism that lay dormant in the silt at the bottom of estuaries, but in the presence of fish, something caused it to grow many times its size, sprout tentacles, and potentially release a poisonous toxin that paralyzes its prey.

The first most horrifying toxin was so powerful that it could literally peel flesh from fish bodies in a short visit. The area was transformed into the perfect killing machine. Scientists feared that this newly discovered organism could also be

attacking

humans they had to discover and soon in coastal waters. of North Carolina, a foreign organism was possibly attacking the fish, killing them and devouring their flesh within minutes. Humans working in waterways were also developing large skin lesions. Loss of motor skills and memory problems. It was a disease that affected many fishermen like David Jones I. I am sick, I don't feel well and I can't answer the most important question.

What's going on? No one can answer this question at the North Carolina Center for Applied Aquatic Ecology. Joanne Burkholder's research team searched for answers. It seemed to her that the visiting area might be more dangerous than anyone knew. It could be directed at humans. Waterman were the most common victims, but Burkholder's staff were also suffering. Howard Glasgow is a marine ecologist who had worked closely with Joann. Burkholder in fusteria for years also experienced some strange symptoms while she researched the organism. Just, you know, she had this really euphoric feeling and she stood up and it was like my mind was running a thousand miles an hour but my body was moving like I was walking on the moon.

I'm really slow and it's kind of an out-of-body experience, so to speak, I'm heading home. At the time I lived about half an hour away. It took me about three hours to get home, evidently I was wandering aimlessly. Hello everyone. with a dozen lab workers sick, the university had no choice, they closed the lab until it was safe, stopping all work with their fists for over a year, all of our cultures were destroyed because they simply couldn't survive a year and middle of inactive state, so we couldn't get back to work, we basically had to start in June 1995.

A biohazard level 3 laboratory was opened, it was divided into two sides, a ventilated side containing the so-called hot side for work with toxic agents and a separate side. cold side for everyday offices once Burkholder was satisfied that the design of the new facility would greatly minimize the risks of exposure to lethal organisms research resumed in the first area fusteria samples would be grown in the air it was never known to affect humans, and Burkholder set out to answer two key questions: exactly how it affected humans and what could be done to stop it. She asked for help from the National Ocean Service in Charleston, South Carolina.

John Ramsdale and Peter Moeller are two of the world's leading experts in marine toxicology. Burkholder sent the lab to take a sample of hysteria and the men set to work trying to isolate what made it so dangerous. Peter Moeller knew that what he was being asked to do was almost impossible. It's like looking for a needle in a haystack, but we don't know which needle it is. It seems like we have to start dividing this haystack by throwing out all the things we recognize as hay and testing everything else and then we have to slowly build up what we determine is the active component that we don't know what it looks like, scientists first.

The challenge was trying to identify and isolate the toxin from the fist area. Toxin samples were dissolved in a solvent and then isolated using a controlled evaporation process. Once they isolated it, they then sought to learn how it worked in the lab. They studied how specialized cells reacted. to the presence of the toxin, John, what I found. I did a big scam if I charge and I just received where is the activity, its friction six seven, we investigated that inside the cells to look at some kind of biochemical mechanisms that are occurring and it is from this. information that doctors can better understand how this toxin causes adverse effects, for example, on memory processing, for example, on the formation of skin lesions, what they found was a dangerous substance that acted in a terrifying way.

Ramsdale and Molar used their research to better understand the possibility of the area's first toxin negatively affecting the immune system and brain functions now that they were beginning to understand what fusteria toxin did,These researchers wanted to see how aggressive it was, what different types of cells it would attack when investigating fish deaths, they tested how it responded to different types of blood. It didn't seem interested in frozen chicken blood, but when they gave it human blood what they found was surprising, He is incredibly aggressive and loves to attack and in fact after providing him with human blood we saw him eating aggressively. human blood as aggressively as it did fish blood the fist area moved from cell to cell like vampires breaking down and devouring blood cells they were hungry and their favorite food seemed to come from humans scientists were in a race to find something to stop them In 1995, researchers in North Carolina were working to find the source of a mysterious illness.

They had been examining an aggressive microorganism and a potentially dangerous toxin that was linked to the killing of fish populations. Now they feared that this organism would also be attacking humans in the future. North Carolina Aquatic Laboratory A new facility had just been built to safely contain dangerous organisms. Iria's first toxin was confined in a biohazard level three containment area. Marine ecologist Howard Glass goes. The work area was in the safe zone, but it was still showing mysterious symptoms. I was. having conversations with people and leaving the room and coming back in and not even remembering having a conversation or being there and arguing with them for not being there and telling them they were crazy when it was actually me who had the problem, the technicians The lab's staff feared that somehow the toxin might have become airborne and was leaking out of the containment area into the offices.

If that was the case, they needed to find the source of the problem quickly. They feared something might be wrong with the system. ventilation and performed a smoke test. Smoke was introduced into the ventilation system to see how the air in the work area was processed throughout the process. The smoke should have been vented outside, but when they went to check Glasgow's office, their worst fears were confirmed: an improperly installed ventilation system was sending air from the hot, toxic room directly to the vent above Glasgow's desk, so which, naturally, suffered much exposure and thought that it had been working in perfectly fed conditions.

Howard's case led to theories from researchers that fusteria not only passed through water, but that the toxin from it could cause illness even in the air, which was something that fisherman David Jones already knew that he no longer worked in Water. He is still dealing with the mysterious symptoms of it. I can be less than eight hundred yards from the water and sometimes my skin itches, my eyes start to water, I get a headache, you know something is present because it is affecting your senses. Burkholder's team turned their attention to the Neuse River, where David Jones and other fishermen were getting sick, now thinking that if the fist area was concentrated in the water, it could easily blow away and endanger people across the state by As the wind rises it can cause water molecules to leak. in the air and water molecules would have attached to them potentially Pfiesteria toxin in the laboratory water samples were prepared for examination, the water was in fact full of fists if the subsequent toxin was airborne the researchers feared it could infecting thousands of people living working and playing along North Carolina's waterways, the implications were chilling and that was just the beginning, in fact, researchers thought they were facing a much bigger problem as the Wisteria was not confined just to North Carolina, 200 miles north in the Chesapeake Bay, the Waterman of Maryland.

We were witnessing something terrible: the water was covered in fish, thousands of dead fish with ugly sores and lesions and tails that had been eaten away, and the Maryland boatmen were getting sick too. Dave, morally, had been fishing in the Chesapeake region for years over the last year. He had begun to develop chronic memory lapses along with oozing red sores on his arms. His strange symptoms sent him to his family doctor's office. Hello, good afternoon, dr. Richie Shoemaker of Pocomoke Maryland noticed that many Watermans came to his office with injuries covering their arms and legs. He has been sick because they also complained that they were losing their minds.

Memory loss. These diseases do not follow the pattern of anything that As we have seen before, it was clear from the beginning that, as a family doctor, I had no experience in any of the many different sciences that were emerging and did not know what was going on, so my Unable to help, Schumaker became very concerned and began doing his own research and discovered that North Carolina was experiencing the same fish problems and Waterman was linked to an organism called fusteria. One name kept coming up. Joanne Burkholder. My name is Ritchie Maker on a butt. The Pocomoke Maryland doctor contacted Burkholder and found striking similarities between her patients and the fisherman she had documented.

They don't look like anything she's ever seen before. A water sample from Maryland was sent to the North Carolina aquatic laboratory. The technicians identified fusteria. microbes present in Chesapeake Bay water, results confirm dr. Cobblers' worst fears: The dangerous toxin was also infesting Maryland waters in 1995. A newly discovered microbe had appeared along the North Carolina coast. It had been linked to the killing of millions of fish and was now thought to prey on men working in the waters. In Maryland, hundreds of miles away, the same organism had been detected, but the discovery had not yet been made public.

No one knew that an influential fisherman on a weekend excursion would reveal the story wide open. Thanks everyone, you caught anything today. Maryland Governor Parris Glendening was While fishing with her son, they caught a rockfish just north of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, but her excitement soon turned to horror when they discovered it was covered of injuries. Hey, I have to tell you, they were disgusting, I mean, it was almost like either acid or a worm or something on board, in some cases, throughout the fish, the health of the fish was not good at all and it was clear that we had problems serious and the problem continued to grow weeks later, 10,000 fish were found floating dead. in the mouth of the gorilla Pokémon dr.

Cobbler Richie's small practice was becoming overwhelmed with patience, everyone had eerily similar complaints, skin lesions, confusion, memory loss, headaches, fatigue, burning eyes and throat, the story was the first disease that we find to be acquired by environmental exposure to a compound produced biologically by a living creature. produced neurotoxin, these diseases do not follow the pattern of anything we have seen before in Maryland, as North Carolina fishermen were not the only ones affected if Vaughn Lawson was a researcher documenting fish deaths, we will do a visual contrast test later After working with the fish for several months she began to suffer memory loss, respiratory problems, she did not have any type of concentration, she could not read well and maintain a conversation well, if I don't write it down, it can't be done, that's why I write notes and why I live with notes. full of pockets take another look at a shoemaker's small office.

He identified 60 patients with what he believed was severe exposure at first. Area officials now knew they were dealing with a full-blown epidemic and eager to document the effects of the hysteria. They decided to take the case to the state level, a panel of doctors headed by Dr. Glenn Morris of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins traveled to Pocomoke to examine firsthand a group of patients identified by the public health department, including patients of Dr. A shoemaker piled into a Health Department that hit the Health Department's ban on going down to the Pocomoke River and on the way I gave a short lecture on hysterical reactions and talked about the fact that our goal was to try to provide reassurance from a From From a public health standpoint, nothing was happening, but it turned out it didn't work out exactly that way.

What the doctor saw surprised them. These patients could not be classified as having hysterical reactions. In fact, all thirteen patients they examined had skin lesions. Some memory losses and learning difficulties associated with exposure to Erie's fist-infested water come this way, Mr. More in exam room 3 this afternoon, okay, ready, dr. Lim Gratton, a neuropsychologist at the University of Maryland, was asked to measure the patients' cognitive functions, and Mr. Morley with us today, the Waterman that we had the opportunity to meet with was scared, he was anxious, he was worried about how this was going to affect their ability to work for a living, whether or not it was reversible, whether or not they would get better, He initially thought the assessments would take about 15 minutes per patient.

He didn't expect to find significant or dramatic health problems when we went out there. It just seemed incomprehensible to me that there could be a toxin suddenly appearing in the estuary channels. That this could suddenly start making people sick, in the end the deficiencies they showed were so profound that he spent almost two hours with each patient. I was in a state of considerable disbelief to have something so clear, surprising and consistent across an entire group of people. It was quite remarkable that people who had been exposed to the waterways to a significant degree, suffered significant problems in new learning and memory, after ten days of testing, the panel met to discuss their initial findings, there were 13 people and almost every. has some kind of interested problem and his stories were quite surprising, confusion and memory problems.

I'm very curious to know how the panel compared the Pocomoke cases to a sample of average sailors. Grant, who documented the waterman's symptoms, his research showed that people exposed to affected waters had a range of cognitive difficulties. Harriman was in this memory compartment, the element of memory that is involved in new learning. They were able to learn material at a much slower pace. that age and education compared to normals, they are not exposed people, the deficit was quite significant and this probably explains why they complain of confusion, this was not a hysterical reaction, this was something very real and there was something very real and very strange. what was happening in the brains of these individuals these are the PET scans the medical team prepared their report for the Maryland State Department of Health they didn't beat around the bush as you can see here some hypermetabolic activity in the bright yellow In this group , compared to the control room, now finally had strong indicators that exposure to the river caused learning and memory problems.

What they didn't know was how they could combat it. What we have here remains a mystery. We do not know. I know what's going on with these people, but the data we've said says something real is happening. One of the things I'm not comfortable with is that not all they knew was that the problems originated in the waterways like us. We're going to have people in that river and are we comfortable with people having continued exposure to the river based on what we're saying with these findings? We need to get the State Department of Health involved in this and pretend we're going with the governor, you know.

The governor is ready to close the river if you give him the red line, tell him that is one of those circumstances from a public health standpoint. We have to close the river. The governor had only one option and he acted quickly for the first time in Maryland history. ordered the Pocomoke River to be closed, no one knew exactly when it would reopen or if they would ever be able to help people who were getting sick after a deadly germ invaded Maryland's waterways and people started getting sick in 1997, the The governor acted quickly to close the Pocomoke River, not risking it going from a local fish kill problem to any potentially life-threatening problem.

Human health at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences in North Carolina. Leading scientists also gathered to compare research on the Many Maryland state officials gathered there along with fishermen and some local doctors and certain scientists who were invited to try to shed light on the issue and we all came together and presented dataor ideas and discussed what We thought might be happening that was causing the fish disease, the key question for scientists: what had happened to trigger the diseases. Normally, fusteria occurs naturally in waterways and is not a problem, but something had allowed the microbes to grow rapidly and out of control.

Scientists said the summit theorized that the subsequent rise in levels was a direct result of increased nutrients in the water, much of it potentially caused by animal waste products entering rivers and upsetting the natural balance. The waste runoff into North Carolina rivers was so extreme that it could be seen from space that the amount of manure produced by pigs in North Carolina is the estimated equivalent of all the sewage of the people of California. and New York and North Carolina officials decided to close the infected Neuse River as the Maryland State Legislature took the strongest action of any state by passing the Clean Water Act of 1998 in direct response to the infestation of waterways.

Chesapeake in the area visited, the miners used to take the canaries to the mine and if there was bad gas there, the canary would die and the miners would give it to them. time to escape from that mine before the gas killed everyone I think the first area is like the Canary Islands of the years passing is a clear sign that we have exceeded pollution levels beyond reason beyond what nature can be tolerated in our waters and it is an implication for us that we have to do something about it. While lawmakers were struggling to find the best way to handle the situation, doctors like Richie Shoemaker were still dealing with dozens of patients suffering from what you mean to say.

As he began to see more and more patients, Dr. The shoemaker had a hunch and decided to try cholestyramine, a powerful anti-cholesterol drug that works by binding to harmful cholesterol and removing it from the patient's system. Co-star Amin has been used for many toxicological purposes in the past. It's one of the few things that binds to dioxins, binds to chlorothalonil, binds to DDT, for God's sake, PCB, binds to toxins, how long has this been going on dr. The shoemaker's assumption was correct. The drug was so successful that the first three fusteria patients who received it were symptom-free within three days.

The shoemaker discovered that the medicine had to be administered soon after the first lurid exposure began to be effective. It worked best for limited exposures over three days. Months after he first saw his original 13 patients, neuropsychologist Dr. Lin Gratton performed a follow-up examination to check her cognitive function. Can you tell me as many words as you can about that outing? Yes, 11 had recovered to near normal levels and those who possibly had the greatest degree of exposure to Pfiesteria are still severely affected today. The first outbreak in the area has become a public health problem as this vicious microbe intensifies its attack on the National Ocean Services Laboratory in Charleston, South Carolina, Dr.

John Ramsdale continues his work to find a way to control the fist area. His team is trying to create a marker so health officials can identify fusteria toxin in water in the laboratory. The mysterious green glow of a fusteria sample means success Dr. Ramsdale and Dr. . Mohler has combined a gene from a firefly and a human to create a marker gene that glows green in the presence of hysteria toxin. When these cells respond to the toxin, they activate the firefly's luciferase gene, producing all the enzyme that gives them the ability. to produce light, therefore these cells become almost like little flashlights in response to the toxin, instead of going through a biochemical change, at least until cellular toxicity, they go through a biochemical change that generates light, but for the researcher Howard Glasgow of the North Carolina Aquatic Laboratory, all of the research may be too late his condition continues to deteriorate he has developed tremors numbness in his arms and legs and progressive degeneration of his spinal cord if not corrected and we cannot control this, eventually It will get to the point where I will be completely paralyzed due to the area where my demyelinating problem or nerve degeneration occurs in my spinal cord.

I certainly have a personal investment associated with understanding the motor action of Pfiesteria toxin. We need to know more about how it affects the brain and how it can be helpful in understanding Alzheimer's, as the symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases like multiple sclerosis, which you know, in combination with each other, have occurred in my situation and in others who have been exposed. to Pfiesteria. It is an Alexandrian toxin. I'm signing up to thank dr. Joanne Burkholder herself has also suffered significant exposure to fusteria. She still fights chronic bronchitis, but she continues her work with the toxin. The only reason I continued working at Pfiesteria was because of Howard's health.

The only reason I stayed after the 1997 outbreaks in the state of Maryland. and North Carolina had to go all the way to characterize this toxin to see if there was anything that could be done to help our scientists, they have yet to develop a test to detect fusteria toxin in human blood, for now medical scientists are calling for health. estuary associated syndrome effect to open my mouth a little so good the tests continue while there is still debate about whether fusteria is really the cause of these symptoms the signs and symptoms are so nonspecific that they can be imitated by other very common diseases we will not know the answer until effective tests are developed for conversations and I think the prudent thing to do in the meantime is not to need fish with injuries and not to be near the gills of the fish for doctors like Richie Shoemaker, the obvious symptoms cannot be ignored taking anyone's word as affirmation has to be firm other people need to see it and skepticism is correct, but skepticism of obvious anomalies is inappropriate look at their condition the coloration they are supposed to be white and clean and they are brown and full of toxins .

Those suffering symptoms of possible Styrian exposure, like fishermen Seth Willis and David Jones, don't need experts to tell them that the effects of hysteria are as real as David Jones's health. he is degenerated he can no longer work in water the toxin has taken the only life he has ever known I have spent my entire life building a business and it was taken away from me you feel like you are a burden on someone else and it is not a very pleasant feeling while Scientists struggle to understand this mysterious organism. David Jones only longs for the day when he has a clear mind and clear water to fish in.