Newspaper of two minds on sewage study

After scaring the bejesus out of parents the other day with big headlines suggesting a link between sewage treatment and illness and diarrhea in young children, the Journal Sentinel says in an editorial today people shouldn't overreact to the study that prompted the original story.

A Saturday editorial will get nowhere near the readership the top line scare story did, of course. And it still fails to mention that two of the principals who conducted the study have connections to a group that is suing MMSD -- an important piece of information the newspaper continues to ignore.

But there is this:

What the initial look by researchers at Children's Hospital, the Medical College of Wisconsin and Friends of Milwaukee Rivers found is what the authors call an "association" between bypasses and an increase in the number of emergency room visits by children. A spokesman for the district, which hotly disputed the study, said the authors did not "have a clue" what caused the increase in emergency room visits. He's right. The authors were careful to say that they did not find a cause-and-effect relationship, only that their findings warranted further study.

And this, after several years of stories intended to make MMSD seem incompetent, and treating every sewage overflow as though it is a federal crime:

No one should conclude that the area's sewage treatment is in incompetent hands. There are problems that still need to be fixed, but there are far fewer overflows and dumpings of sewage now than there were in previous years, and water quality is better than it was. Do some overflows and blendings still occur? Yes. Should the district do what it can to reduce that number? Absolutely. Can it eliminate all overflows and blendings? Not unless citizens want to build a system that would bankrupt the region for generations and stifle economic development altogether.

Indeed. Welcome to reality.

In fairness, I should say that the editorial board has recognized the scope of the problem and has been supportive of MMSD's efforts to improve its performance. The newsroom's coverage driven by Managing Editor George Stanley has been consistently unfair and alarmist. And it appears the two are not about to be on the same page anytime soon.