By Scott Cendrowski

The State News

It's not lost, it's not dead and it's certainly not beyond repair.

The dark, usually murky water of the Red Cedar River, which some call the "Dead Cedar," can be misleading, but the winding waterway is in much better shape than it was in the 1960s, when a film of sludge and algae skimmed the top.

As a result of the Clean Water Act of 1972, the Red Cedar has become a cleaner, safer river.

But even so, E. coli can still rise to unsafe levels while river advocates continue the fight to erase the river's dark shadows of raw sewage drains and dangerous water.

In spring 2004, Joan Rose, the Homer Nowlin Chair in water research at MSU, used tracking methods to discover human fecal matter and single-celled parasites that cause diarrhea and other complications in the Red Cedar River.

After screening the bacteria found in the river to show fecal material, Rose said in her group's larger study, they found evidence of fluctuation in these parasites and fecal matter with evidence of human sewage entering the river.

"The real goal was whether we could find parasites in the river