Matt D. wrote me recently about the flesh-eating disease he contracted while working on his boat at the north end of Kent Island in September 2020. A cut allowed Vibrio vulnificus bacteria to enter his bloodstream causing an infection that nearly cost him his leg and life.

Matt, a healthy 30-year-old, was placed on antibiotics, and after two trips to the emergency room at UM Shore Medical Pavilion at Queenstown he was released. The infection, however, worsened and he was sent to Shock Trauma in Baltimore in critical condition. Matt was hospitalized for more than a month, had multiple surgeries, and spent another week in the hospital to receive a skin graft.

He now has minimal feelings and limited range of motion in his right leg, suffers constant nerve pain, and has swelling due to losing his leg’s main vein. He is still upset at being discharged from the emergency room twice despite the spreading infection. Matt has asked me “to spread the word to save others.”

Here’s a link to a graphics image of Matt’s leg as necrotizing fasciitis set in.After my first column last September on lurking infectious diseases, a distraught father contacted me about his 15-year old son’s six-month battle, including hospitalization, with a Mycobacterium marinum infection in his finger. This is a much more common bacteria. The man’s son contracted it while handling rockfish on the Chester River. The infection was incorrectly diagnosed at our local hospital and began killing his skin tissue. It was correctly identified at Washington Children’s Hospital and the proper intravenous antibiotics subdued the infection. See Luke Helfenbein tell his story at: www.Lukefhd.com

The Anne Arundel County Health Department website notes that, “The majority of reported Maryland human cases of Mycobacterium marinum occur in Anne Arundel County.” Unfortunately, many cases involve misdiagnoses.

These infections are not rarities. They are underreported and deliberately kept from the public by state and local health departments and other officials to prevent any negative economic effects and political fallout.

I was rather shocked when a leading U.S. toxicologist confirmed this and told me suppression of such infection data collection and information occurred not only in Maryland but throughout the U.S. and globally. This occurs despite medical warnings that proper diagnosis and treatment should be initiated immediately.

While these infectious organisms are naturally present in our waterways, they proliferate in warm summer waters, fueled by greater algal growth from excessive nutrients. When water temperatures exceed 68 degrees, Vibrio vulnificus can be found in all oysters harvested in the Chesapeake Bay and Gulf of Mexico. At 86 degrees, these bacteria increase and become more toxic in the bay’s warm nutrient-enriched soup. Global warming is exacerbating this problem.

Looking into victims’ eyes and hearing of their life-changing afflictions has seared my soul and led to a sense of pessimism about Chesapeake Bay restoration compounded by guilt at failing to do more to restore its water quality. My greatest failure in 16 years in the state legislature was my inability to gain tighter regulation of agricultural pollution, the main source of bay nutrients that cause the proliferation of these diseases.

I did succeed in gaining enactment of the Maryland Agricultural Water Quality Cost-Share Program in 1982. Farmers have received $175 million in grants to cover up to 100% of the cost to install best management practices on their farms to prevent soil erosion and manage nutrients to safeguard water quality. Other state and federal grants to farmers in the bay watershed exceed several billion dollars since 1983.

Yet, with little examination of the effectiveness of best management practices and lax enforcement of existing weak regulations, the heavily subsidized agricultural sector continues to pollute our water with impunity. Manure from the huge poultry industry is a major source of these pollutants fouling our waters. Agriculture is way behind in meeting its Environmental Protection Agency-mandated limits for nitrogen pollution.

Gov. Larry Hogan and his environmental and agricultural agencies do little to rein in these farm pollutants while the legislature turns a blind eye. They are enabled in this obsequiousness toward agriculture by the environmental community, led by the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. Instead of holding agriculture accountable for its pollutants, the foundation decided to go soft and instead seek more funding.

Longtime Patuxent Riverkeeper Fred Tutman wrote in The Capital that, “Tom Pelton, notes in his book ‘Chesapeake in Focus,’ that CBF has gone from ‘Save the Bay’ to ‘Trade the Bay.” He notes that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s spectacular success in fundraising from corporations and wealthy donors: having saved $107 million, with $57 million in stocks and investments, and a $17 million waterfront headquarters.

Pelton points out how employees rarely swim from their beach on the bay because of well-founded fears of high bacteria levels. He goes on to charge that the Chesapeake Bay Foundation refused to publish a report about farm pollution because it did not want to anger the farm lobby or the Koch family, whose Koch Industries is the largest privately owned company in the country and well documented as actively opposing climate change legislation. The Koch family owns large chemical fertilizer plants.”

Pelton worked as a senior write at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation for six years and quit to work for the Environmental Integrity Project. He also found that the foundation has been given $21 million, mostly from the federal Agriculture Department, to dole out to farmers. Without support of the foundation, efforts to adopt tighter regulations and better enforcement of farm pollution go nowhere.

We need to greatly ratchet down the nutrients especially from agriculture and also from existing and new development. The environmental community must change its tactics and stand up to agribusiness and use the courts and legislature to crack down on this major source of bay pollution. We also must significantly reduce global warming emissions that lead to rising water temperatures and increased nutrients, both which fuel the proliferation and deadliness of flesh eating organisms.

I do worry each summer as I watch my grandkids, their many cousins, and even their parents frolicking in the waters of the bay at our community beach or off our pier on Oyster Creek. I join them in handling crabs, fish, oysters and other critters from my oyster cages and crab pots.

I pray they do not become infected with one of these dangerous pathogens. Like Patti Peacock on Harness Creek, who contracted a nasty mycobacterium handling her crab pots last year, I now wear gloves and a long-sleeve shirt while tending my crab pots daily.

Just how many more innocent bay users will be sacrificial lambs on the altar of political expediency?

Gerald Winegrad represented the greater Annapolis area in the General Assembly for 16 years. Contact him at gwwabc@comcast.net.