As the summer winds down, Alaska is seeing a decrease in the rate of new coronavirus infections across the state — but it doesn’t mean the pandemic is ending. Far from it. Alaska’s top medical team is urging residents to remain diligent heading into fall and winter, to resist widespread misinformation about the virus, and to hold fast against mounting fatigue over the pandemic.

Over the last week, the number of non-resident infections in Alaska has dropped significantly, to only one or zero per day. This doesn’t mean we’ve whipped COVID-19 in Alaska. It means that the fishing season has just about wrapped up, and seafood processors and other essential industries that imported workers in the summer are sending them home.

Alaska residents are still becoming infected at around 100 new cases per day. And there is a lot of misinformation going around.

“We’re hearing more and more ‘I don’t trust the CDC (Centers for Disease Control), I don’t trust the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), but I trust this YouTube video I just watched on Facebook,” said Coleman Cutchins, a pharmacist with Alaska’s Department of Health and Social Services.

“Just understanding that these are reliable sources. And with that, the understanding that with most diseases we have a decade or so of studying them to make recommendations and guidelines. With covid, we’ve had to come up with them really fast,” he said.

Cutchins says that official recommendations have changed as researchers accumulated more data. This was evident when the FDA first gave an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for the drug hydroxychloroquine back in February, but later rescinded it. 

It has been confusing at times. Cutchins and other members of the department’s Coronavirus HUB team discussed the role misinformation plays in the fight against the pandemic, among other topics, in their weekly forum with the state’s media on Thursday (9-10-20).

Dr. Joe McLaughlin, the head of Alaska Section of Epidemiology, pushed back against misinformation promoted by the White House and elsewhere, that COVID-19 was of little risk to children.

“I think one of the other big misperceptions is that children and young adults don’t get severely ill from covid. And that’s just not true — they can,” said McLaughlin, referring to national statistics. “There have been quite a number of pediatric hospitalizations and deaths.”

On the other end of the spectrum, McLaughlin offered information that used to be considered incorrect, but now appears true: That masks protect both the wearers and those around them.

“There’s good evidence now to suggest that if you’re exposed to less of the virus, you’re at a decreased chance of getting a more serious infection,” McLaughlin said. “Because it’s a lot easier for your body to fight off a small amount of the virus than a large amount of the virus right away.”

McLaughlin also referred to a report from the US Centers for Disease Control suggesting that dining out in restaurants and bars increased someone’s risk of contracting the virus, since wearing masks in those environments was impractical.

The speed that everything is moving and the variability of the official recommendations has contributed to a lack of faith by some members of the public. The HUB team seems to get this: They’re asking Alaskans to be responsive to the best information available at the moment. The state’s chief medical officer, Dr. Anne Zink, says it’s meant to be enlightening — not frightening.

“I think in medicine we’ve really moved to this different place of shared decision-making with patients over the last ten years, ‘Here’s my information and what’s there,'” Zink said. “And the same thing is happening in public health right now, where we have lots of citizen-scientists who are actively engaged. And so us sharing this information is not to scare people, not to frighten people — it’s there to keep them informed. I think sometimes we get pushback that we’re trying to scare or frighten, when we’re trying to provide tools and resources so that Alaskans can make decisions about their own health, and can have that shared decision-making with us.”

Zink said that much of the state’s fight against the pandemic hasn’t been obvious to the public: Ramping up the testing capacity of the state lab from 300 to 3,000 tests per day; developing a digital network to track data (instead of faxes), and preparing for the eventual introduction of a covid vaccine. 

She wants Alaskans to hang tough.

“I think fatigue of covid is huge, and so what ways can we engage the public to make sure that they’re still taking it seriously, making sure they still get tested if they have symptoms,” said Zink. “I keep feeling like this is the dark before the dawn. We still have fall and winter to get through, but there’s a lot of hope on the horizon. But we have to get through this winter, and how do we keep up that strength? There’s a lot of conversation happening around that.”

Lab manager Michael Jamros stands with Chris Whitehead, founder of the Southeast Alaska Tribal Ocean Research group. The lab hopes to be regional testing hub for commercial and casual shellfish harvesters alike. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

With warming ocean temperatures, the risk for paralytic shellfish poisoning can linger all year round. And Alaska has only one FDA-certified laboratory to test shellfish. There are no labs to protect those digging for their dinner, but that may soon change.

At the end of the month, the Sitka Tribe of Alaska will open an environmental research laboratory and – with all hope – take a bite out of the testing market.

Downloadable audio.

This time last year, the room in the corner of Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s (STA) Resource Protection Department was bare. And now, it’s got a fume hood, test tubes in every color, and a $49,000 machine.

KCAW: This is the thing. This is the big exciting thing.
Chris Whitehead: It goes Beep.
Michael Jamros: It looks like a big box.
KCAW: It’s your own R2-D2. It’s your own little robot.

Michael Jamros is the lab’s new manager. And the “robot” in question is a plate reader, one of several machines that can analyze toxins in shellfish. After the shellfish arrive, Jamros shucks all the meat out and puts it in a blender to homogenize it. He then extracts the toxins and removes the solids using a centrifuge.

Using a pipette, Jamros will dispense the solution in 96 tiny wells on one plastic plate. Imagine filling a tray with batter for 96 muffins, but instead of putting it in an oven, he feeds it into a plate reader.

A plate reader, used by Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s new environmental lab to test small quantities of highly concentrated shellfish tissue for toxins. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

Jamros is running an ELISA assay, measuring the toxicity of each well. The results appear on his laptop. “From here we have our data that we can calculate from and figure out how much toxin is in our samples,” he said.

You hear that? Data. Cold, hard numbers that take the guesswork out of eating butter clams or blue mussels. In Southeast, there’s never been a way for subsistence harvesters to assess the risk of paralytic shellfish poisoning or measure harmful algal blooms, or HABs, which load shellfish with toxins. Until now.

Chris Whitehead coordinated a partnership with thirteen Southeast tribes, to monitor local beaches for toxins. Their goal is to make it safe for locals to harvest shellfish. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

Chris Whitehead is STA’s environmental program manager and the driving force behind the lab, set to open in May. “Native people have been harvesting clams for thousands of year. A lot of the elders I talk to don’t do it anymore because they just don’t know. So, to be able to bring that back and be able to utilize that resource is huge,” Whitehead said.

If you like this, see KCAW’s previous reporting on the lab…
PSP Part 1: Tribal partnership seeks modern solution to an ancient problem
PSP Part 2: With new lab, STA takes a gamble on shellfish testing

When he came to Sitka in 2013, Whitehead wanted to create a warning system for clam diggers, like in Washington state. “The Washington Department of Health has a great website so you can see what beaches are open or closed. And when I got to Alaska there wasn’t anything.”

Whitehead  called up Alaska’s Department of Environmental Conservation, which tests all commercial shellfish for the state. He discovered, however, there would be a time lag to ship shellfish to Anchorage and await results. “The turnaround time for the [DEC] data – to actually be usable for us and to prevent human health issues – wasn’t going to work,” he said.

Given this, Whitehead decided to pursue a local solution by creating his own marine biotoxin program right here in Southeast. He locked in $1 million in grant funding for the next three years. He formed Southeast Alaska Tribal Toxins (SEATT), a coalition of thirteen other tribes in the region and organized trainings for them with state and federal agencies, like NOAA, to be “eyes in the water,” monitoring local beaches for toxic blooms.

“So those sites will be monitored at the expense of the tribe and the resources that the tribes have every other week. So every tide cycle pretty much,” Whitehead said.

The lab uses new technology, including the ELISA and receptor binding assay (RBA), to test for the presence of toxins in shellfish, without resorting to live mice. (Emily Kwong/KCAW)

Jerry Borchert was in Sitka to lead one of those trainings. Borchert coordinates marine biotoxin management for the state of Washington.

In speaking with KCAW, he said, “My first time here was a year ago in September. It was a smaller group. I think there were six tribes at the time and for a lot of these folks, this was brand new to them. Looking at plankton, trying to identify what a harmful species looks like, how to record it, how to share this information, and it’s those same tribes in the beginning who are now the teachers and the program is expanding. This is amazing.”

With the new laboratory, subsistence harvesters can hopefully send their shellfish to Sitka and get test results back in one business day. Eventually, the lab hopes to run tests for commercial entities – like shellfish growers and processors.

But some hurdles remain. The lab needs the blessing of an alphabet soup of agencies, like the FDA, to become a full-fledged regulatory lab, on par with the one on Anchorage. Borchert said, “Long term stability is something I’m a little concerned with. The state regulatory folks are finally coming to these workshops and I’m hoping they can recognize what can happen.”

For his part, Whitehead is taking it one step at a time. The lab is running test samples all this month and sending their results to NOAA in Seattle, for verification. If those check out, the lab will begin accepting subsistence shellfish as early as May.

To test shellfish, the lab needs 5 ounces of tissue (e.g. 10-12 butter clams or 20 little neck clams). For more information about how to submit, click here. 

The Southeast Alaska Tribal Toxins (SEATT) network includes the Central Council of Tlingit and Haida in Juneau, as well as tribes in Douglas, Kake, Petersburg, Ketchikan, Hydaburg, Craig, Klawock, Kasaan, Hoonah, and Yakutat.

Jeff Feldpausch and Chris Whitehead stand in the soon-to-be biotoxin testing lab at STA’s Resource Protection Department, intended to test shellfish for commercial entities. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

Despite the risk of paralytic shellfish poisoning — or PSP — Southeast Alaska has a robust dive fishery that includes geoduck clams. The entire industry hinges on weekly testing results from the Department of Environmental Conservation laboratory in Anchorage.

This scenario could change in the not-too-distant future. In part 1 of our 2-part series, KCAW’s Emily Kwong reported on efforts by Sitka Tribe of Alaska to monitor the waters of Southeast for PSP. In part 2 today, she tracks their plans to launch a commercial testing lab.

Downloadable audio.

If you’ve ever seen Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, you may remember that scene with the golden eggs.

Willy Wonka: These are the geese that lay the golden eggs.

Veruca Salt: Are they chocolate eggs?

Willy Wonka: Golden chocolate eggs.

The green haired Oompa Loompas weigh the eggs on a scale to decide if they’re good or bad.

Wonka: If it’s a good egg, it’s shined up and shipped out over the world. But if it’s a bad egg, down the chute.

China imposed a five month ban on geoducks from Alaska in December of 2013 out of concerns for PSP toxins. (Photo courtesy of KRBD and the Alaska Department of Fish & Game)

The same could be said for geoducks. These giant bivalves, with lolling necks like space worms, have a high market value, where they’re called xiàngbábàng (象拔蚌) or elephant trunk clams in China. Because these clams run the risk of carrying PSP toxins, divers cannot harvest an area before a few of it’s clams have been sent to the DEC and cleared for consumption.

“If you’re lucky you get the sample on a plane that day and it gets up to the lab in Anchorage,” said Larry Trani, a diver and member of the Southeast Alaska Regional Dive Fisheries Association, or SARDFA. Harvest has to happen within a week, which means that by the time divers get a test result, they tend to do all their actual harvest in just one day. And that’s not a lot of time.

“Time is off the essence on this,” said Trani, “As far as making all the connections from Southeast Alaska to Hong Kong, or wherever they’re going.”

Divers like Trani go down to the bottom of the ocean floor, breathing surface supplied air through a diving hookah, and walk the bottom, blasting the sand with a water gun and prying gooey ducks from their beds. It’s dangerous work, which Trani believes could benefit from the kind of lab Sitka Tribe wants to open.

“I can see that that would save time on the sampling and give us more days in which to conduct our diving,” said Trani. “I think it’s an excellent idea.”

That’s the appeal of a lab in Southeast, one Sitka Tribe hopes will persuade divers like Trani, shellfish growers, and harvesters to relocate some of their testing work to Sitka.

“It was two offices so we removed a wall and made this one large space…”

The man with the plan is shellfish biologist Chris Whitehead, who pitched the idea for a biotoxin lab to Sitka Tribe two years ago.

“I got really busy at writing grants and somehow they all got funded, said Whitehead. “Now it’s a matter of doing the work.”

That includes over half a million dollars from the Administration for Native Americans’ (ANA) Environmental Regulatory Enhancement Program to build the lab from scratch.

Jessica Gill is the tribe’s fish biologist and said, “When we get our first order, it’s going to be like Christmas!” 

The most eagerly anticipated order is for the receptor binding assay, or RBA machine. The machine isn’t authorized to test gooey ducks for PSP yet, just mussels and soft shell clams, but Chris Whitehead believes that will change soon. And the exciting thing about the machine is that it eliminates the traditional testing method, practiced by labs throughout the country.

Whitehead explained, “They run whats called a mouse bioassay. So they inject this slurry of shellfish into a mouse…”

And time how long it takes for the mouse to die. Based on that number, the lab can calculate the relative toxicity of the gooey duck for humans. With the RBA method, no mice need be harmed.

Jessica Gill, for her part, is relieved. She said, “I don’t think I could take the lab manager job thinking, ‘Oh, we’re going to kill a bunch of rats today.'”

With staff to be trained and testing to launch, STA has secured 1.3 million dollars in grant money for the PSP project for the next three years. That includes $210,000 from the Environmental Protection Agency’s Indian General Assistance Program (IGAP) for fiscal year 2015, with plans to continue through 2017, $48,000 from the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), $527,000 from ANA to the build the new lab, and an additional $150,000 to support SEATT to conduct cellular toxin analysis, as detailed in Part 1 of our series.

AmeriCorps volunteer Esther Kennedy is helping STA launch an early warning system for beaches in Southeast, so harvesters can know when it’s safe to dig and when to steer clear. (Emily Kwong/KCAW photo)

Jeff Feldpausch, the Resource Protection Director, recognizes it’s a luxury that won’t last.

“We couldn’t keep this lab open on grants forever,” Feldpausch said. “It was going to have to be something that could stand on it’s own.”

And that means attracting commercial business. The goal is for the lab to become a source of unrestricted funds for the tribe.

But among SARDFA and other potential customers KCAW spoke with, the big question on their minds was this: Would the state of Alaska by okay with handing PSP testing over to a commercial entity?

Elaine Busse Floyd, the Environmental Health Director of the DEC, said, “Well I think that if they achieved FDA certification, that would be a terrific benefit to the Southeast Alaska community.”

Busse Floyd said that while it would nice to have a lab servicing Southeast, it’s never been done before and for good reason. The state does PSP testing for free.

“So it’s possible that the big influx of customers that you might think you were going to get because of being closer, you might not get because you’d be charging and we wouldn’t be,” Bussy Floyd said. 

But the state may not always be there. Funding for PSP testing is safe this fiscal year, but that may change with future budget cuts.

The lab in Sitka would also have to earn certification from an alphabet soup of agencies, such as the FDA and the International Shellfish Sanitation Commission. Easier said than done, but STA’s Chris Whitehead has determination in spades.

“For a long time, there’s probably been a need to do something like this,” said Whitehead.
“I don’t know if I lucked out and just came in the right time to start it, but doors are opening for us to do this.”

Whithead hopes to win FDA certification by 2017 and to first test shellfish collected through subsistence, through the Southeast Alaska Tribal Toxins Group, or SEATT. It’s an ambitious plan trying to address a basic problem.

“It all started out I just wanted to go dig clams and I had no one to call to see if it was safe or not.’

And Whitehead hopes this little-lab-that-could can answer that call. 

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The US Food and Drug Administration announced the recall by Big Blue Fisheries on September 30. It covers all vacuum-packed smoked fish produced by Big Blue — for the last two years.

Greg Johnstone, the Environmental Health Officer with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, inspected Big Blue on September 20 and discovered that a recording graph on Big Blue’s smoker was not working.

“On a commercial smoker there needs to be a chart recorder that records the internal temperature of the fish in the smoker on a continuous recording graph. And for smoked fish in Alaska — anywhere throughout the US — it needs to reach an internal temperature of 145-degrees for at least 30-minutes. And there has to be a continuous record of that. Big Blue’s recorder was broken, and they hadn’t been keeping records as required.”

Mike Keating, with Big Blue, says his company cooperated with the DEC and the FDA, which distributed the recall notice nationwide. Keating says he destroyed about $20,000-worth of product with the DEC standing by. He’s used his invoicing records to notify customers of the recall directly.

Keating stresses that no dangerous bacteria was discovered in any of his company’s product. And, given the two-year extent of the recall, it’s likely that much of the product is not around anyway.

Greg Johnstone, with the DEC says this is probably the case.

“The likelihood that they’ll recover much of the smoked product is pretty slight, because it probably will have been eaten.”

Mike Keating says he’ll replace or refund any product returned to him in Sitka. He says he’s already spoken with some customers who prefer to keep their fish, despite the recall. He thinks the DEC and the FDA have blown the issue out of proportion.

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About 100 people rallied in Sitka to protest what they see as the first step in introducing scientifically modified animals into the American diet. For Southeast Alaska, it’s especially worrisome because the area depends largely on fishing for its livelihood.

Lance Preston owns and operates a boat called, “The Sea Boy” in Sitka. He’s made a living as a fisherman since 1993 and says these new fish could bankrupt Alaska.

Commercial fishing is the number one employee in the entire state,” said Preston, “and the vast majority of those jobs are salmon jobs, so it’s really the economic engine of the state. It’s a big deal. You know, it could put the state out of business. You’ll watch the population decline and suffer.”

Nicknamed “frankenfish” by critics, this new fish is an Atlantic salmon developed with an added growth hormone from a Pacific Chinook salmon and a gene from an eel-like fish called an ocean pout that activates the growth hormone. While a natural Atlantic salmon reaches 28-30 inches long and 8-12 pounds after two years at sea, the new GE salmon will reach that in half the time.

Protesters Saturday said they’re worried the genetically engineered salmon could escape aquatic farms and crossbreed with wild fish.

The company behind developing this new hybrid is called AquaBounty. It’s a biotech company in Massachusetts that formed in 1991 and has spent nearly $70 million since it started. It claims that the fish are not a threat to wild stocks, and that the genetic modifications are no greater than changes that occur naturally in species.

The FDA is now in a 60-day public comment period. The deadline to submit a comment to the FDA is Feb. 25, 2013.

You can find more information on the FDA’s pending approval process of genetically engineered salmon and leave a comment online.

UPDATE: 2/13/2013 — The FDA has decided to extend the comment period through April 26.