Caribbean Coral Catch Disease From Sewage

NPR: Human beings occasionally get diseases from animals, such as swine flu, rabies and anthrax. A new study finds that humans can also spread disease to wildlife, with grim results. A bacterium from our guts is now rampaging through coral reefs in the Caribbean.

Those reefs were already in slow decline, but they took a huge hit starting in 1996, when a disease called white pox appeared in the Florida Keys.

"Since that time, elkhorn coral — the species it affects — has declined 88 percent in the Florida Keys," says Kathryn Sutherland, a reef ecologist at Rollins College in Florida. "And we've seen similar declines elsewhere in the Caribbean."