An outbreak of salmonella poisoning in Alamosa spread Thursday, with 111 people likely sick from the dangerous bacteria that appears to have contaminated the city’s tap water, officials said.
“This may be the tip of the iceberg,” Julie Geiser, Alamosa County’s director of nursing and public health, said during a midday news conference.
“We think there are a lot more people out there who have or have had this illness,” Geiser said.
Wednesday, the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment issued a bottled water advisory for Alamosa, a southern Colorado town of about 8,500 people.
At that time, 79 people were confirmed or suspected of salmonella poisoning.
Geiser and other officials laid out an emergency plan Thursday, telling residents where to pick up 1 free gallon of bottled water a day.
Officials also urged people to check on neighbors who may be in need of help in coping with illness or obtaining safe water.
The priorities now are to flush the water system, prevent further sickness and treat patients, said state health department spokesman Mark Salley.
While there will be an effort to track down the source of the contamination, Salley said, “we may never know.”
At Milagro’s Coffee House, manager Steve Sumner said business was slow Thursday, but everyone who came in was speculating about how salmonella got into the city’s water.
“There’s a lot of gossip out there,” Sumner said, saying many people wondered about sabotage or an accident at a water treatment plant now under construction.
That treatment plant, expected to be in operation later this year, will remove natural arsenic from the city’s water, said Ken Carlson, an environmental engineering professor at Colorado State University.
Alamosa’s water comes from five deep wells, Carlson said, and it is not disinfected.
That is not unusual, he said. More than half of the drinking water in the United States is untreated groundwater.
In theory, groundwater never comes into contact with potentially- contaminated surface waters and it does not need treatment, Carlson said.
“Generally, that’s been a good assumption — there have been very few outbreaks in these systems,” Carlson said.
In the past 20 years, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has found five cases of municipal water contaminated with salmonella, said Michael Beach, the associate director for healthy water at the CDC.
One case was similar to Alamosa’s with untreated groundwater somehow becoming contaminated, Beach said.
In two other outbreaks, the bacteria got into the water distribution system through breaches, Beach said, and in the two remaining outbreaks, a disinfection problem allowed the bacteria to thrive. Going back to 1971, none of the 15 known cases of salmonella contamination in U.S. water systems were caused by sabotage, Beach said.
Ricardo Velasquez, medical director of Valley Wide Health Systems, which runs two clinics in Alamosa, said so many worried residents are calling, the clinic has set up a triage system to focus on the very young, the very old and those who have compromised immune systems.
Salmonella can cause diarrhea, fever and cramping, according to the state health department.
For more information, call 877-462-2911.
Katy Human: 303-954-1910 or khuman@denverpost.com
