After about a decade of building the foundation for what they call their "dream project," a physician and scientist team from the mainland are putting the territory at the center of a groundbreaking three-year study aimed at preventing fish poisoning in humans.
Such incidences are common in the territory. With help from doctors and patients from Schneider Regional Medical Center and marine researchers from the University of the Virgin Islands, Donald Anderson and Dr. J. Glenn Morris said Friday that enough data can be collected to begin piecing together the answers to some longstanding questions about the risks of ciguatera fish poisoning and how it affects certain populations.
Ciguatera is caused by eating fish that contain toxins produced by the microalgae Gambierdiscus toxicus, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website. At a press conference held at UVI Friday to unveil the project, Morris and Anderson said ciguatera is the "most frequently reported marine toxin disease in the world," whose symptoms can disappear after a few days or weeks only to reappear a few months or a year down the road.
Morris is director of the Emerging Pathogens Institute at the University of Florida, and Anderson is a senior scientist and marine biologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
Interestingly, the symptoms can vary based on demographics, age and the type of fish consumed, among other things, according to Dr. Clayton Wheatley, an emergency room physician at Schneider Regional working on the project. In the territory, fish poisoning patients usually report gastrointestinal or cardiac distress — symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea and muscle weakness — while reports from the Pacific region can include respiratory illness and death brought on by muscle paralysis, he explained.
"It’s a fascinating disease," Wheatley said. "But we have been limited in that a lot of the research that’s here is dated, so we’re really searching for what kind of new improvements we can make in terms of treating patients that have been poisoned."
And that includes being able to tell a patient how long their symptoms are going to last, he added. Will a person relapse if they eat fish again after a few months, drink coffee or eat nuts?
The St. Thomas community will have a large part to play in helping to get some of those questions answered, Morris said. Many of the studies he conducted in the territory some 30 years ago on ciguatera fish poisoning has provided a lot of the baseline data for the new project, which will look at each segment of the food chain, from the toxin-producing algae that cause ciguatera on up to humans and the fish they consume.
A member of the project team will be collecting data from emergency room patients at the hospital being treated for fish poisoning, including meal remnants — pieces of the fish that got them sick. Those patients will be monitored for a year afterward to see how long the symptoms last, he added.
The team will also be conducting an annual island-wide survey to collect data on less severe cases of fish poisoning, and will be working with local residents, scientists, restaurant owners and members of the fishing community to build local knowledge about ciguatera — including areas most likely to have poisonous fish, Anderson said later.
"We need your help," he added.
What kind of impact things like climate change, coral bleaching and certain weather patterns has on the production of the toxic algae is also a focus of the project.
"All the pieces of the puzzle have been studied around the world, but always separately," Anderson said. "This is the first project that looks at everything comprehensively."
Meanwhile, UVI’s Center for Marine and Environmental Studies has been working for the past year on collecting trial data for the project from four of the 16 marine sites already being used for the center’s coral reef health monitoring program, said Tyler B. Smith, the center’s coral reef researcher.
"We do all the analysis for the coral reef health data, and hope to build our capacity to do the algae portion as well," he said after the press conference.
Meanwhile, most of the data entry will be done at the University of Florida. While the university will be the project’s center hub, Morris said what’s unique about the research is that it is being pulled from various places, using a diverse group of individuals to tackle a single problem.
Three years isn’t enough to come up with all the answers, but at the end of about a decade — or maybe a little more — UVI’s Center for Marine and Environmental Studies should have a ciguatera monitoring component, Anderson added later.
The study is being funded through a $1 million grant from the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention, along with grants from the National Science Foundation and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, where Anderson works as a senior scientist.
