It’s been a long time since we were this embarrassed to be part of the Long Island press corps.
In case you haven’t heard, the local media landscape was blanketed last week with dire warnings about “flesh eating bacteria” making its way into our waters.
These warnings came from the mouth of one of the most respected marine ecologists working here, Stony Brook’s Dr. Christopher Gobler, who mentioned flesh eating bacteria in passing at a press conference alongside the Peconic River in Riverhead April 21, ahead of his annual State of the Bays address.
He was referencing three 2023 deaths among swimmers in the Long Island Sound, two in Connecticut and one on Long Island, due to wounds infected with the bacteria Vibrio vulnificus.
This bacteria, once found only in the Gulf of Mexico, has been creeping its way up the East Coast as water temperatures have risen. But the substance of Dr. Gobler’s remarks didn’t contain new news about Vibrio vulnificus.
Dr. Gobler said at the State of the Bays address April 24 that he realized there would be trouble after a “25-year-old kid with a a cell phone” working for a local TV news outlet decided to make a social media reel out of a snippet of him talking about flesh-eating bacteria.
Bacteria going viral wasn’t on our Bingo card this year, but perhaps it should have been.
The word spread instantaneously, to the New York Post, CBS News, and even into People magazine. A member of our own advertising staff sent our editorial staff a Patch article about the “flesh eating bacteria” and asked us to spread the word far and wide.
Of course, we declined. We had already covered the substance of what was said at the press conference.
Then we went off to see Dr. Gobler’s actual State of the Bays address.
It was held in an auditorium packed to the gills at Stony Brook Southampton College Friday evening. The college staff seemed thrilled at the turnout, which struck us as odd, given the circumstances.
Before the talk, members of the Long Island Oyster Growers Association passed out a three-page open letter to Stony Brook’s administration asking that Dr. Gobler not be allowed to speak publicly on behalf of the college about marine ecology issues anymore.
And when the questions began, it was clear that this audience had already had enough of the press attention to flesh-eating bacteria.
Several oyster growers said their sales had plummeted after the media circus began, as customers now believed their shellfish were no longer safe to eat.
This “crushes us,” they said, on the heels of their industry’s decimation by the hard icing-in of many local waterways this winter.
And Dr. Gobler himself seemed truly chagrined. He said he had also spent the week fielding upset phone calls, was losing sleep, and was seriously considering not talking to the media anymore.
“That’s very upsetting to me,” he told the oyster growers. After all, he said, he had talked about the successes in cleaning up Long Island’s waters at the press conference.
His offering of the old newspaper adage, “If it bleeds it leads,” as an explanation for what happened didn’t appease the crowd.
Dr. Gobler said that, at that press conference, he’d made reference to longstanding CDC data that shows that 20 percent of Vibrio vulnificus infections are fatal within 48 hours, but he might not have been clear enough about how rare these infections are.
“It’s a high consequence, low probability event,” he told the crowd.
For example, in Galveston, Texas, where Vibrio is far more common than here, swimmers had a .00035 percent chance of death due to infection by the bacteria, he said. By comparison the chance of being infected and dying in New York is “one in ten million.”
“You’re 50 times more likely to drown,” he said, adding that this bacteria is far less likely to be found in water with higher salinity, like ocean beaches.
He said he intends to keep swimming in the open waters across the East End this summer, and he intends one day to take his grandchildren to learn to swim at Tiana Beach in Hampton Bays, where his own daughter took swimming lessons.
The press — aside from our reporter and Michael Wright from the Southampton Press (whom Dr. Gobler thanked for his level-headed reporting) — appeared to be absent from the room.
If you weren’t at the State of the Bays, you may still be afraid to go in the water. And that’s not your fault. It’s the media’s fault. Our industry failed you.
Before the talk, Stony Brook Medicine had issued a bulletin outlining the “symptoms, risks and how to stay safe” when swimming here, noting that only 150 to 200 cases of infection are reported throughout the entire country each year.
But the damage has already been done.
“It’s been a little bit of a weird week for me,” Dr. Gobler told the crowd in Southampton.
It was a little bit of a weird week for everybody in the news business, and watching this circus unfold, we couldn’t help but reflect on how toxic our media environment has become.
It’s not as toxic as flesh-eating bacteria, but we guarantee you’ll run into media everywhere today. Exposure to sloppy news is a high probability, and also a potentially high consequence, event. Let’s do better.
