at the doorstep were found to be a source of infection for people. The birds followed the milk delivery truck and then poked through the tops of the bottles for a fresh drink. Although Campylobacter grows best in birds, it has been isolated from river and sea water, mud, sewage, and sludge.
This disease appears to be most serious in Western peoples living under conditions of good hygiene. In many developing countries, it seems to be found almost as often in healthy people as in sick people. Clinically normal animals in all countries can carry the organism. In people in developing countries, and in farm animals in North America, the organism can be found with just about equal frequency in healthy and diarrheic individuals.
Although infection is common, disease, in adults at least, does not appear to be as common as would be expected, suggesting that immunity might be developed by continuous exposure. One study has shown that college students who visited a friend’s home farm got sick from drinking the milk, while the farm family remained cheerfully healthy. One of the costs, then, of protecting children from disease is that, as adults, they are more vulnerable. The alternative, however—to expose kids while young and let the strongest survive—is hardly tenable morally.
Overall, the presence of V TEC in cows and Campylobacter in a variety of animals didn’t explain the Walkerton outbreak. I visited the farm from which, allegedly, the offending organisms entered the city’s water system. It was run by a veterinarian just outside the town limits. It was no factory farm. Like the farm in the center of the 1986 tragedy, it was an idyllic place, with some corn and a few cows, the kind of place held up as a perfect example of all those who want a return to the simple life of small family farms. The farmer had in place a good Environmental Farm Plan, a program devised by Ontario farmers to assess how well they are managing the landscapes of which they are stewards.
There are a lot of bad things a person could say about feedlots and factory farms, and I would be one of the first to voice them, but the Walkerton outbreak cannot be laid at that door. The outbreak represented a failure to think systemically; it was a triumph of boundaries, blinders, governmental departmental silos, and small-mindedness. The farm was just outside city limits, so the ecologically important boundaries did not match the political decision-making boundaries. The contaminated well was located on low ground, apparently in a place that engineers had advised against but that made short-term economic sense. The provincial government was ideologically driven and reckless, typical of both communist and free enterprise governments the world over. It cut back on environmental programs, privatized laboratory testing, and downloaded responsibilities without paying attention to whether local officials were up to those responsibilities. The guy who was supposed to monitor water quality didn’t know anything about water quality, drank on the job, and fabricated data. Nobody seemed to be quite sure who was supposed to report to whom or who was ultimately responsible. Because of all the government cutbacks, no one was watching. The government seemed more concerned about building highways, encouraging the trucking industry, and dismissing the values of higher education than they were about public health.
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