Viruses for cleaner water

Hey there, Colorado, and welcome to another edition of The Temperature, where we again have viruses on the brain.

Well, not ON the brain. Or in the brain — hopefully. Just, there's a lot of news that involves viruses, which is always wild, how these rogue, nonsentient bits of genetic scraps, basically dice in nucleic acid form, can have such a profound impact on human life, both for the negative and, as Shannon Mullane reports below, potentially for the positive.

If this stuff tickles your imagination as it does mine, be sure to join us this fall for SunFest, where I will be moderating a panel on how to identify and stop the next pandemic. We have an ace researcher from Colorado State University lined up, plus more experts to help us understand whether we are better prepared now, post-COVID, to do battle with pathogens.

The event is Sept. 27 at the University of Denver. We'll take questions from the audience, and I'll also be hanging around after, so we can confess our infection anxieties to one another.

Get your tickets now at ColoradoSun.com/SunFest.

Now onto the news.

John Ingold

Reporter

TEMP CHECK

ENVIRONMENT

Is a killer virus the answer to cleaning up one of the biggest messes left by fracking?

"Under the microscope, at the atomic scale, it's scary. It's an all-out civil war between bacteria and viruses. But from the human perspective, it's totally innocuous."

— Zacariah Hildenbrand, a University of Texas researcher

Viruses in general have been getting a lot of bad publicity lately. But what if a specific kind of virus could actually help by — hear us out — cleaning up wastewater left by fracking?

That wastewater, called produced water, is the major waste stream generated by oil and gas production.

The water can include a cocktail of naturally occurring carcinogenic compounds and radioactive materials. Bacteria in the water can cause costly corrosion. It's so salty that, if used for irrigation, it could kill plants. When fresh water is used to drill for oil and gas, that water should never re-enter the irrigation and drinking water supply.

In Colorado, fresh water used for fracking averaged about 26,000 acre-feet per year from 2011 to 2020, or about 0.17% of the water used in the state, according to the Colorado Division of Water Resources. One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water used by two to three households.

Increasingly, officials are looking at ways to clean and reuse produced water instead of re-injecting it below drinking water aquifers, letting it sit in ponds to evaporate or releasing it into streams.

With water quality in mind, one group of University of Texas researchers looked to the medical industry and its use of a renewable technology: bacteriophages.

Bacteriophages are viruses that infect specific bacteria. They look a bit like the spiders in the "Starship Troopers" movie, said Zacariah Hildenbrand, part of the six-person University of Texas research team.

Once the phage finds its host bacteria, it hooks into the surface of the cell, injects its DNA into the center of the bacteria, and hijacks the bacteria's replication mechanisms.

Then it reproduces until the bacteria explodes.

"Under the microscope, at the atomic scale, it's scary. It's an all-out civil war between bacteria and viruses," Hildebrand said. "But from the human perspective, it's totally innocuous."

And the researchers showed that phages can take out bacteria in produced water in their study published in the peer-reviewed journal Water in April.

The virus, however, won't be enough — and the researchers will have to jump big hurdles to take their tech to the industrial scale.

Stay tuned for more in an upcoming article from water reporter Shannon Mullane on ColoradoSun.com.

Section by Shannon Mullane | Water Reporter

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MORE ENVIRONMENT NEWS

* A very sick mountain lion helps advance disease science. The video is terribly sad: A Douglas County homeowner in 2023 captured a partially paralyzed mountain lion dragging herself across the ground on her unstable front paws, clearly distressed. Colorado Parks and Wildlife officers had to euthanize the 1-year-old female cat. But Colorado State University has helped turn the awful moment into great science, establishing the first known case of "staggering disease" in North American mountain lions and pinpointing more dangers of the rustrela virus, Michael Booth writes.

— The Colorado Sun

* EPA grants $328 million to Colorado climate projects. Two major grants from the Biden administration could trim greenhouse gases and other pollutants from big buildings, and from methane leaks at landfills and coal mines, Mark Jaffe reports. DRCOG will get one grant to retrofit buildings for mandatory greenhouse gas reductions. The Colorado Energy Office will disburse the other big grant to attack methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas even than carbon dioxide.

— The Colorado Sun

* Voracious zebra mussels have eaten their way to the Colorado River. Western Colorado is starting to sound like the Midwest, subject to decades of intense warnings about keeping the fast-multiplying mussels out of new waters. Too late, the state announced. Signs of the mussels are now in the Colorado River and associated irrigation canals, and may be headed downstream to other basin states. The mussels can damage everything from boats to water intakes to canals and headgates, while stealing all the food supply of native wildlife species.

— The Colorado Sun

* Xcel claims price of clean energy conversion is rising fast. The big energy utility has the right to pass on some of the costs of meeting Colorado clean energy mandates to its paying customers, but is now facing some pushback after saying inflation is raising the potential bill. Mark Jaffe reports on consumer advocates questioning what Xcel is asking for, and how state officials will determine what's fair in meeting a key state greenhouse gas goal.

— The Colorado Sun

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HEALTH

State expands testing for bird flu at dairy farms

48

The number of dairy herds in Colorado that have reported outbreaks of bird flu

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The Colorado Department of Agriculture this week stepped up efforts to stop a runaway outbreak of bird flu cases on dairy farms by issuing an order requiring testing for the virus on all commercial cow dairies licensed by the state.

The state has seen at least 48 cases of bird flu on dairy farms since April, meaning close to half of all commercial dairies in Colorado have been affected. Around 30 of those cases have happened in the past 30 days.

Colorado's outbreak continues to surge even as others have dwindled nationwide — no other state has seen more than four cases in the past 30 days, and some major dairy-producing states like Wisconsin and California have never reported any cases.

In issuing the order, state veterinarian Dr. Maggie Baldwin said the virus, while not causing deaths of many cattle, has still been a devastating disruption to Colorado's dairy industry.

"We have been navigating this challenging, novel outbreak of HPAI in dairy operations for nearly three months in Colorado and have not been able to curb the spread of disease at this point," Baldwin said in a statement, using a shorthand term for the virus, which is also known as highly pathogenic avian influenza.

Baldwin noted that, as the dairy outbreaks rage on, they are also generating spillover cases in other animals. Most notably, Colorado has begun seeing infections again in commercial poultry operations.

There have been two major, confirmed outbreaks at egg-laying operations in Weld County, while a third, suspected outbreak is also under investigation. Those outbreaks have resulted in the culling of more than 3.2 million chickens just in July, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Colorado has now seen 33 commercial poultry flocks affected since 2022, with more than 6.3 million domestic birds culled.

Then there's the human toll. One of those poultry outbreaks led to an unprecedented cluster of cases among workers who were doing the culling. Six workers were confirmed positive for bird flu, though their symptoms were relatively mild and none required hospitalization.

Section by John Ingold | Reporter

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VIROLOGY

The good news in the RNA of the bird flu virus that infected a Colorado worker

"The human health risk currently remains low."

— A CDC assessment of bird flu, based on the results of a genetic analysis of a virus that infected a Colorado worker

We just mentioned that the recent human infections in Colorado were acquired at a poultry farm but connected to the outbreaks at dairy farms. But how do we actually know that?

Genetics, baby.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention took a virus sample from one of the Colorado workers and sequenced its genome. (While some viruses are made up of DNA, flu viruses are made up of RNA, the single-stranded cousin to DNA.)

The analysis produced some interesting findings:

* The virus' genetics are closely related to those of viruses found in animals from other recent outbreaks at poultry and dairy facilities. Among human cases, the Colorado worker's virus is most similar to the virus that infected a dairy worker in Michigan earlier this year.

* The Colorado virus "maintains primarily avian genetic characteristics," according to the CDC, meaning it isn't especially adapted to infect people or spread person-to-person. It does, however, have one mutation that makes it better at infecting mammals. That mutation has been found in more than 99% of infections among cattle.

* There were no mutations found that indicate the virus is evolving resistance to existing antiviral drugs.

* There are also no changes to the virus suggesting it is more capable of causing harm to humans.

* The virus is closely related to a couple bird flu samples available to vaccine manufacturers, meaning companies could start producing a bird flu vaccine quickly if needed.

So, to recap: Nothing about the Colorado case suggests the bird flu virus has become better able to infect people, hurt people or spread to other people. The CDC said the analysis "supports CDC's conclusion that the human health risk currently remains low."

The CDC also reported some more good news last week: Blood tests of Michigan dairy workers were boring.

Michigan's public health department conducted what is known as a seroprevalence study of workers with known exposures to infected cows. The goal was to see if workers who showed no symptoms of bird flu actually had antibodies against the virus. If they did, it would suggest that they had been silently infected and that human cases might be more common than known.

Instead, the results from every nonsymptomatic worker tested came back clean — no antibodies against bird flu.

"This is an important finding," the CDC wrote in a weekly update, "because it suggests that asymptomatic infections in people are not occurring."

Section by John Ingold | Reporter

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COLORADO OPTION

The Colorado insurance commissioner makes a bold claim

"We're bending the cost curve with the Colorado Option."

— Colorado Insurance Commissioner Michael Conway

In talking about proposed prices for health insurance plans next year, Colorado's insurance commissioner made a bold claim about the Colorado Option, one of the Polis administration's policy babies.

Michael Conway said the proposed rates were, essentially, proof the controversial insurance product is working — despite the fact that prices for Colorado Option plans, as with other insurance plans, look set to rise next year.

"We're reducing costs," he said. "We're bending the cost curve with the Colorado Option. That was something people used to say couldn't be done."

The Colorado Option is a government-designed health insurance plan that private companies are required to offer. Its goal is to deliver richer benefits at lower prices, and Conway has some ability to reduce hospital contract prices with insurers if the Colorado Option plans don't hit rate targets.

He hasn't done that yet, but Conway says that's because hospitals have been lowering prices on their own. As to why Colorado Option plans are going up in price next year — though less than what other plans are — Conway pointed to other components of a health insurance plan's price, including pharmaceutical costs.

"What has happened is hospitals have reduced contractual costs," he said. "We've reduced the contractual costs between insurance companies and hospitals by 20% every year the program has been up and running."

That's a pretty bold claim, so we asked the Colorado Hospital Association what it thought. And the association's response didn't exactly refute Conway's argument.

"Colorado's hospitals have been working proactively to improve affordability for ALL consumers," the statement read. "That includes negotiating with health insurers and investing significant resources to reach agreements on Colorado Option plans that have resulted in reduced costs."

About a third of people shopping on the state's insurance exchange last year bought a Colorado Option plan. We'll keep an eye on whether that increases this year.

Section by John Ingold | Reporter

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MORE HEALTH NEWS

* Extreme heat in Colorado may have contributed to an extraordinary outbreak of bird flu in people. One last bird flu story today for the infectious disease fans: Since we now know that the virus didn't change significantly to better infect people, what caused that big cluster of cases in Colorado workers? It was likely a failure of personal protective equipment. And extreme temperatures may have been to blame for that.

— The Colorado Sun

* Two Coloradans join first-ever commercial spacewalk to research ways for people to live on Mars. So, two people with Colorado ties are among the four astronauts working for a billionaire's space-tourism company who will strap into a capsule sitting atop a rocket from a different billionaire's space company and will blast off toward the highest Earth orbit ever achieved, all with the goal of studying how we can build colonies on the moon and Mars, perhaps in as little as two decades, according to that second billionaire. "It's going to be quite a thrill," one astronaut said.

— The Colorado Sun

* Some Colorado insurers next year will have to cover abortion services. Carriers selling plans in the individual and small-group markets — for people buying coverage on their own or for small employers buying plans for their workers — will have to cover abortion services, according to a new bulletin from the Colorado Division of Insurance. The rule stems from a bill state lawmakers passed in 2023.

— DOI

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CHART OF THE WEEK

One big reason why the Front Range is choking under dangerous levels of drifting wildfire smoke and PM2.5 pollution is explained by a glance at the world map above, with sirens going off in bright red. June set another worldwide average temperature record — on the high side, yes — another in a series of monthly average records in recent years.

All that heat, which we experienced in late June moving into July throughout Colorado, dried out the West and southwestern Canada, creating prime conditions for another bad season of wildfires.

"The June global surface temperature was 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average of 59.9F, making it the warmest June on record and the 13th consecutive month of record-high global temperatures," NOAA said. The agency's global outlook says "there is almost a 60% chance that 2024 will rank as the warmest year on record and a 100% chance that it will rank in the top five."

Section by Michael Booth | Reporter

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Hey, fancy meeting you here down at the bottom. Your brain has now been thoroughly inoculated with knowledge, so go forth with immunity from misinformation.

We say it often here, but we can never say it often enough: We really appreciate you, you beautiful, precious, sparkling human. Take care of yourself, so we can spend more time together, will you?

Until next time.

— John & Michael

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