Mayor questioning month-long delay with water tests

Atikokan residents may have been drinking water with disease-causing bacteria for more than a month due to delays in getting test results. And Mayor Dennis Brown said he wants to know why.
“I certainly, as the mayor, am concerned that it did take so long,” he noted yesterday.
While the water sample with Cryptosporidium in it was drawn Sept. 9, the Ontario Clean Water Agency said it didn’t get those results back from the Ministry of Health lab in Toronto until Oct. 12–with the Northwestern Health Unit issuing its “boil water” advisory two days after that.
Michael Brodsky, environmental micro-biologist with the Toronto lab, said results from such a test are returned in a week under normal circumstances.
In this case, though, preliminary tests were conducted at the ministry’s Thunder Bay Regional Lab, one of two in the province that is starting to develop expertise on testing for Cryptosporidium.
The problem is Thunder Bay just started doing the testing this year. So once it found the positive reading, samples still had to be forwarded to the Toronto lab for confirmation.
“And that really was the delay,“ Brodsky said yesterday, noting with this being a new initiative, they wanted to be extra-cautious. Testing requires expertise because many things will mimic Cryptosporidium, he added.
He also said the turnaround for test results depends on the sense of urgency, staffing, and expertise available in the situation.
To prevent any delay this time around, the Thunder Bay lab will phone results from last Friday’s sample test once it’s completed, which is expected to be done by this Friday.
“They will be allowed to issue a preliminary report, pending confirmation,” Brodsky noted.
While there were no reported cases of people getting ill from drinking the contaminated water, Mayor Brown, who sits as Atikokan’s rep on the Northwestern Health Unit board, said he plans to bring the issue up at its next regular meeting.
Bill Limerick, the health unit’s team leader for environmental health, said Dr. Fred Ball, who heads up the ministry’s Thunder Bay lab, was in Fort Frances yesterday, adding they “talked at great lengths” about the delay and concerns about it.
Meanwhile, with Emo also having problems with low water levels, Limerick said they likely will conduct tests for Cryptosporidium there.
“We’ll be monitoring it,“ he noted.