J. Thomas: How about if I pick on Bob Murchelano in terms of fish disease? If 
fish disease has been around a considerable time in Boston Harbor as badly as you say~I'm 
not saying that it's been around a long time, but if it is as bad as you say and that 
condition has been there for some time-then we would/either assume that the disease has 
not had much effect on the population or that the disease is new. Any comment on that? 
R. Murchelano: Well, the latter statement is really a fundamental one as to 
whether it's had an effect on the population. To really address that and assess that would 
be incredibly difficult. 
In addressing it from the perspective of whether the situation is status quo, 
has become worse, or will improve on the basis of limited information of this particular 
disease, there is no way to determine its effect on pollution. This is a very, very small 
assessor of a phenomena at one point in time, and there's no way of estimating, at least, 
what its effect is and what its rate of change has been. Those are very, very complex 
questions. 
Whether there should be research to determine that, whether we should 
undertake research to determine whether those questions are answerable, is very vague in 
my mind. If we reference the extent or prevalence of analogous diseases, or the same 
disease in a population from an area which has not been ecologically affected to any large 
degree, such as Georges Bank, and find the spontaneous rate of this disease is non-existent 
there, then we have to implicate some article as a source other than genetic. And I bring 
that out, right to the fore, that a genetic difference in susceptibility from a local genetic 
stock might be something that pertains. But if we can discount the fact or accommodate 
to the fact that a reference population does not have any spontaneous occurrence of the 
disease, then the disease most probably is caused, by virtue of where it occurs—in what 
tissue, its manifestation, its analogy to homeotherms—by an outside source. 
So on that basis alone, if we stop some of the introductions—whether they be 
via primary, secondary, sewage outfalls, industrial plants, or whatever we want, 
radioactivity from laboratories, all of these possibilities—and start to control them, then 
we make a step toward reducing the phenomenon which we have studied or identified. 
Very pragmatic. 
J. Thomas: Could I shift to either Leigh or Richard? How about closure of 
shellfish beds? Are you closing more and more, and is the area expanding year-by-year? 
Or is the area getting smaller, staying the same, or shifting from one area to another? Is 
it increasing or decreasing? 
L. Bridges: On a state wide basis we are closing more and more shellfish areas 
every year, principally because of the reason I mentioned before. Everybody wants to live 
on the coast. We have more waste being dumped directly into the open waters even from 
individual septic systems. We've closed another 2 or 3,000 acres of shellfish areas on the 
Cape. 
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