Quote:
Originally Posted by shore things
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.
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Thank you so much for that reply. It's too bad because it would certainly be nice to know to try to eliminate the cause.