In 2018 and part of 2019 Southwest Florida experienced a record-setting harmful algae bloom when blue-green algae, or technically cyanobacteria, choked Lake Okeechobee and the Caloosahatchee River and the canals that line it. The thick green gunk made it all the way to meet up with a huge offshore Red Tide bloom that was present at the time.
While toxins produced by red tide are immediately perceptible to most people — you can often feel them in your throat and eyes — airborne toxins produced by cyanobacteria aren’t as obvious to humans. But that doesn’t mean they’re not potentially dangerous.
Earlier this month we talked with neurologist Dr. David Davis from the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine about a paper he co-authored about research that found Alzheimer’s-like brain changes in dolphins linked to cyanobacteria blooms in the Indian River Lagoon on the other coast. That area has experienced similar harmful algae blooms, particularly one in 2016.
The apparent links between human exposure to cyanobacteria toxins and brain health date back to the 1980s — and in the late 1990s an ethnobotanist named Dr. Paul Cox spent time in two villages on the Pacific island of Guam where a huge percentage of residents were dying of a neurodegenerative disorder that’s similar to Alzheimer’s Disease or ALS.
He found links between the villagers’ diet, which included large fruit bats called flying foxes, and cyanobacteria toxins that were accumulating in the seeds of cycad trees, which the foxes would eat. This led to villagers having huge amounts of the toxins in their bodies.
The research on the Indian River dolphin brains is a continuation of that work back then on Guam, and Dr. Cox was a co-author on that paper. He joins us to talk about the work he did on Guam, and where the research is at today.
Guest:
Dr. Paul Cox, ethnobotanist and Executive Director of the Brain Chemistry Labs in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
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