The E.P.A. for the first time in its history has released a comprehensive survey, identifying far-reaching threats to human health and issuing warnings to persons in the locales most affected not to eat fish they themselves have caught.

Dr. Robert Huggert, for 30 years a chemical oceanographer and a former E.P.A. administrator who now works through Michigan State University, says that the pollutants loosed in America's environment end up in its waterways. Huggert's studies prove that many of the most poisonous pollutants concentrate in human and animal tissues. Once they are concentrated in riverbed sediment, he explains, they create reservoirs that re-contaminate the environment.

While the foremost concentrations of such environmental contamination are in the northeastern states, including New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and New Jersey, other areas of the nation are equally at risk.

On March 14 central Florida newspapers reported on the spread over a wide area of the state of a microscopic algae species called cryptoperindiniopsis ("crypto" for short) that has killed hundreds of thousands of fish.

Jim Eagan, executive director of the Marine Resources Council, an organization with 70 volunteers who perform monthly tests on lagoons, reports that decaying fish have been sighted as far as a hundred miles from Florida's Martin County site where the worst of such contamination is now said to exist.

Fish with rotting tails, stomachs and other body parts—some with their intestines hanging out—swim past inspectors. According to research records, the decaying fish are rotting from the outside in. Paul Forstchen, a Marine biologist, says "I've never seen fish in that condition before."

Crypto algae exudes a toxin into waterways that eliminates the coatings of slime that protect fish from bacteria and parasites that are the cause of their tumors and lesions.

Crypto, say the scientists, is related to pfiesteria, which was responsible in 1997 for sickening fish-eaters from the Chesapeake Bay to North Carolina. Stormwater runoffs and septic tank excretions are said to be partly to blame. A task force within the Department of Environmental Protection meets March 19 at the University of Miami to discuss what is being called "the Indian River Lagoon outbreak".

Puget Sound, Boston Harbor, Detroit, Los Angeles, Kentucky Lake and the Willamette River in Oregon are also, according to the E.P.A. reports, among the most severely damaged locales. Port cities, say investigators, are among the 96 watersheds where contamination is at its worst.

Harmful effects from pollution are said to exist in nearly 6,000 monitored sites. In a questionable attempt to mollify public concerns the E.P.A. softpedals this alarming statistic claiming it "may" be overblown inasmuch as those areas under surveillance have been chosen because of prior suspicions about them raised earlier. Such locales, say E.P.A. spokespersons, are not necessarily representative of every U.S. waterway.

The E.P.A. report, a three-volume compilation, is merely the first phase—"a screening-level analysis"—that will be used as a stepping stone to closer looks at pollution levels.

On the question of damage reversal and on what should be done to stop the multiplications of frightening growths destroying organic life, the E.P.A. report is silent.