“The plastic bag ban is the main reason for the hepatitis outbreak,” says the homeless man who writes the Homeless Survival Guide. “The hepatitis outbreak was completely predictable — it's why I left San Diego.”
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In April, David Gibson was one of the participants who cleaned up a one-acre site in Grantville, behind the Fairmount Avenue Home Depot. Several dozen people had lived there, some for a few years. Police and San Diego River Foundation volunteers found a big bicycle chop shop with dozens of stolen and stripped bikes. They also found a nauseating stench, said Gibson, who is the executive director of the Regional Water Quality Control Board. Gibson doesn’t think it’s as simple as a lack of plastic bags.
“Given what I saw at the Grantville encampment and other smaller ones, I doubt very much that plastic bags would have made much difference,” he said. “I saw firsthand multiple buckets of waste, most likely fecal, at the Grantville site and no shortage of plastic bags. Moreover, at many sites fecal wastes can be found on the ground in the riverbed encampments as well as in and around parking lots with no shortage of bags then or now.”
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The ban was approved in June 2016 and officially took effect in November, about the time the first cases definitively tied to the outbreak showed up.
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