At beaches in many counties in northern Michigan, alerts about unsafe E. coli levels in lake water are often issued the day after water is tested, making them less useful to swimmers concerned about the current water quality.
The Health Department of Northwest Michigan is pivoting to a new type of test which will allow results to come back significantly faster. It’s responsible for testing 50 inland and Great Lakes beaches in Antrim, Charlevoix, Emmet and Otsego counties.
Instead of the previous 18 hours, the turnaround time at some beaches in its jurisdiction would now be under six hours.
Dan Thorell, health officer for the department, says his hope is that “in the afternoon, by four o’clock, we’d be able to report out results” for the beaches tested that morning.
The testing will be done using qPCR, a method that looks at the actual DNA of bacteria, instead of the old tests that relied on letting bacteria incubate and grow in the lab under specific conditions.
The Health Department of Northwest Michigan is piloting the qPCR program, alongside the traditional type of testing, at eight beaches. Thorell said the rapid testing methods will also be used to resample contaminated beaches, in hopes of lifting advisories sooner.
As part of the pilot program, the department will also be trying out ‘source tracking,’ an extra level of testing that can determine whether E. coli present in the water originated from cows or humans, and help officials cut the problem off at its source.
Thorell explained, “It gives you those clues to start looking farther upstream to see what is actually going on… If it was a cow marker, is there a farm nearby?”
Thorell said waterfowl are a large source of contamination, but he believes “looking for geese using source tracking is not reliable at this point.”
His department was able to expand and speed up their testing program because of grants administered by Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, that are specifically meant to help local agencies with rapid testing and source tracking.
Thorell said the team is still working to get the qPCR system up and running in the coming weeks, and they expect to iron out the process and have same-day reporting launched soon.
As usual, the advisories only go out if there are problems, and rapid response tests that come back clean won’t be reported same-day.