"The kind of work we’re doing is not because it would be interesting to do. It has to be done now because a few years from now, it’s too late.” José Cordero of the University of Georgia in Athens
Hurricane Maria devastated the American territory of Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017. Now, 2 months later, not a whole lot has changed for the millions of American's who have not been able to leave the island for better conditions on the mainland.
Power outages are a fact of life on the island to this day. The lack of power for health facilities is not much better than most homes, stores and ATM’s on the devastated island. Hospitals still rely on diesel generators which can only run for a certain amount of time before they need to be replaced. Drinking water, even for those few who can access it from the tap, is highly suspect in regards to safety and cleanliness.
The scientific journal Nature reports on how scientists are dealing with the same infrastructure issues as everyone else on the island, and it is impacting their ability to provide accurate and scientific evidence of how drinking water is affecting pregnant women post Maria.
Sara Reardon writes:
Yet the team –— co-led by José Cordero of the University of Georgia in Athens — has managed to contact several hundred women to begin assessing whether Hurricane Maria has worsened drinking-water contamination, stress and infectious disease that could harm developing fetuses. This wasn’t what the researchers set out to study six years ago when they started a project to assess the impact of pollution on pre-term births. But Cordero's team is one of several research groups have scrambled to quantify Hurricane Maria’s immediate health impacts, even as team members struggle to fulfil their own basic needs.
The devastation that Cordero saw on a recent visit to Puerto Rico, his birthplace, shocked him. “I thought I was prepared, but I wasn’t,” he says.
Even before the hurricane, the island’s 18 ‘Superfund’ sites — areas so polluted that the US Environmental Protection Agency deems them hazardous to human health or the environment — posed a potential risk to pregnant women, says Ingrid Padilla, an environmental engineer at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. Twelve of these sites sit on karst, a geological formation made of porous rock that allows toxic chemicals to flow down from the surface into groundwater.
Padilla’s previous research suggests that flooding and other disturbances can quickly bring toxic substances in groundwater back to the surface, and carry them into the water supply. Now, she and her colleagues are collecting hair and blood samples from the research cohort to determine whether pregnant women are being exposed to hazardous chemicals, such as phthalates and chloroform. Since the hurricane hit, the researchers have begun to collect and test groundwater from karst regions and tap water from the homes of people living there.
Other research teams are worried that water that has pooled in hurricane debris could provide a breeding ground for disease-carrying mosquitoes. At the height of the Zika epidemic in 2016, experts debated whether a massive hurricane would destroy mosquito habitat or enhance it, says Carmen Zorrilla, an obstetrician and gynaecologist at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan. The evidence is still unclear, she says, and logistical problems may make it impossible for researchers to gather enough data to provide answers.
In some areas where hospitals faced extensive storm damage, the only medical care available is emergency treatment. Screening for the Zika virus is a low priority, and infected adults rarely experience severe symptoms and are unlikely to seek medical treatment.