A sample of blood worms pulled from a water filter pre filter
There's something in the water —
and it isn't an ice cube. Residents of one small Oklahoma town are
being ordered to sip exclusively bottled water, after tiny red blood
worms started popping up in drinking glasses earlier this week.
The outbreak in Colcord, OK,
has all but shut down the community, home to around 800 people. Schools
are closed, convenience stores can't serve fountain sodas, and residents
have been instructed not to cook or brush their teeth using tap water.
Bathing, fortunately, is still deemed acceptable by local health
authorities.
"The chlorine won't kill them, the bleach won't kill them."
Blood worms — actually the
larvae of the midge fly — are typically small, maxing out at around
half-an-inch in length. They're known to pop up in the southeastern
United States, though not often in municipal water supplies, and are
also sold freeze-dried as fish food. Blood worms tend to thrive in
low-oxygen or heavily polluted water, where they burrow inside mud. And
unfortunately for officials in Colcord, the buggers are also extremely
resilient. "The chlorine won't kill them, the bleach won't kill them,"
Cody Gibby, the town's water commissioner, told a local TV network.
"You can take the worms out of the filter system and put them in a
straight cup of bleach and leave them in there for about four hours, and
they still won't die."
The health risks associated
with ingesting blood worms are unknown, though they aren't believed to
cause adverse effects. But local authorities in Colcord aren't taking
any chances — while they try to figure out how the worms infiltrated
water supplies in the first place, they're also distributing pallets of
bottled water to residents.
Blood worms. This is a picture of blood worms sold as fish food.
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