Fancy heading down to the beach to swim among a host of pathogens that have come from human faeces? If not, then steer clear of public beaches in the US, because no one knows for sure what levels of pathogens exist in the nation’s bathing waters. “Current testing practices are seriously flawed,” warns public health expert Thaddeus Graczyk at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
Graczyk and colleagues sampled water from Maryland’s beaches on Wednesdays and Sundays for 11 consecutive weeks during the summer of 2006. They tested for Cryptosporidium parvum and Giardia lamblia, protozoans in human faeces that…
