Red Tide

I found an article that really caught my interest from last week, which I’m sure you’ve probably already heard all about, maybe even took part in. It’s about the ten-year study on red tide that Mote Marine finished up last Thursday.

I had never heard of red tides until last year when I had some friends in the Ecology of Water class and they had to do an assignment on it. My family has a condo on the Atlantic coast in Cocoa Beach that I used to visit at least once every summer, but even then I never knew about it. Actually, I’m not even sure if they have red tides on the East coast or not, that’s something I’ll have to look up later.

Anyway, the study is the “most cohesive and longest-running scientific study looking at how humans are affected by Florida’s red tide.” What I found most interesting was not the negative side effects to human health that was tested, but rather the findings that could lead to potential new drug treatments. K. brevis was found to have approximately twelve toxins that could be harmful, yet there are at least three antitoxins as well. One of them is being used to develop a drug to treat cystic fibrosis. It makes sense to me that there would be an antitoxin to a lung disease when the blooms themselves cause problems in the lungs. I’m relating it to a snakebite and how the anti-venom comes from the snake itself.

Here’s a link to the article on the Mote Marine website: http://www.mote.org/index.php?src=directory&view=topic&srctype=detail&back=topic&refno=1179