Quote:
Originally Posted by tis
Shore things, he just said there is a way to test to see what is causing the high levels, whether it is mammal, fish,vegetable or fowl. Just wondering if this is true and if the state would test for this? But thanks for your opinion thinking it is a combination.
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I brought your question to the folks the do our water quality sampling and testing. Certain strains of e. coli are better adapted to different hosts and you can differentiate between those strains. This works well testing in a controlled or limited system but not in an open lake environment. The problem is that the test can tell us that some is from goose, some is from humans, and some is from dogs, but it doesn't tell us what percentage of the e. coli found is from each source. The test doesn't have practical value if it doesn't reveal the percentage of contribution. On top of this DNA testing is extremely expensive. So for reasons of cost and reliability DES chooses not to do DNA testing.