An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure....especially the low price ($ and time) of prevention in this case. The last thing I want on a long/thru hike is to get sick from something that I could have easily prevented.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure....especially the low price ($ and time) of prevention in this case. The last thing I want on a long/thru hike is to get sick from something that I could have easily prevented.
25% of people are already infected with giardia and are asymptomatic.
You can interpret from that that 25% of people will not show symptoms even when affected. So yeah there's a substantial possibility that you don't need to filter water, at least 25%. No need to take years to build immunity or such hogwash.
Other people get you sick
Not your own restroom hygeine necessarily
But their hygeine
Very rarely the water
The norovirus outbreaks demonstrate the sickness vector
Don't be foolish enough to think that's the only sickness from people. It's just a really pervasive one due to long life on inanimate objects
Just the same, there's nothing wrong with treating your water if it's simple and easy. But generally is not something to stress about if you can't for some reason...with mountain spring water.
Surface water running thru a cow pasture is a different story altogether.
Last edited by MuddyWaters; 02-03-2018 at 00:19.
The average lifespan in the US today is approaching 80 years. This number has progressively increased because we have learned to treat and prevent disease. Everything is a roll of the dice so you do your best to weight the odds in your favor. The more times the dice come up in your favor, the more rolls you get.
Those that are infected by giardia, but are lucky enough to never show symptoms, are still carriers. People that are infected can pass along the infection by touch. So please, if not for your sake, filter your water for the sake of all the other people out there that you have contact with.
As a teacher around thousands of sniffling students for several years, what you say about the transference of microbes causing sickness is true. Out of 8 years being a teacher, I got sick (a cold) in two of those years which is pretty good. This is considering the exposure and the area of the world I taught in didn't believe in toilet paper or soap in school bathrooms. I attribute this to washing my hands often, carrying sanitizer and using it everywhere I went in school. Imagine just the stairway handrails and door knobs for starters. People often don't understand why cold weather is cold and flu season. It's mostly that infectious germs survive much longer on surfaces in the colder environment allowing for increased exposure and a higher incidence of infection.
Washing your hands often and using sanitizer is a sure way to lower your risk of getting a sickness anywhere and I think filtering water on a highly used hiking trail is just good preventative sense.
No problem STE.
Over the past two years I have filtered from scores of different water sources.
In so doing, I presumably concentrated a relitively small number of cooties present in some of these water sources into a much more densely packed and far less benign concentration inside my Sawyer Mini.
I expect this dense concentration of cooties (pathogens?j is alive and well in the filter right now. They may even be multiplying inside that filter in my nice warm closet.
So my question is this:
Even if my hose/leak management is better than most, should I be concerned that the months I have spent collecting and concentrating cooties in a $25 filter might have created a time bomb?
Or to put the question mor generically, has anyone seen studies about how effective filters as they are actually being used — and is it even possible they could do more harm than good under some conditions?
Last edited by rickb; 02-03-2018 at 04:45.
Yes.
But that because we are affecting the low end marginally.
I find it funny that I have numerous ancestors that lived 80-101 yrs old......150-300 yrs ago. Before sanitation, before running water, before understanding of germs and disease. In fact, people have commonly lived that long for thousands of yrs. Our lifespans aren't actually getting any longer, less just die prematurely from sicknesses or accidents or childbirth today. But, we are killing ourselves with poor diet, poisons in our environment instead.
Last edited by MuddyWaters; 02-03-2018 at 05:29.
Sawyer recommends flushing the filter with diluted bleach in between trips and for long term storage. Don't know if that's totally effective, but I'm sure it improves the situation. Personally I buy a new mini every year, at $25 a piece I'd rather just have a new clean one each spring.
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
Interesting article, my take away has to do with the numbers thing, some folks worry themselves into a tizzy with contamination of their treated water with a couple drops of "dirty water" during filtering saying something like " all it takes is a single microbe to make me sick", or something like that. Not true, and this article seems to further confirm that.
But I'll keep treating, except some places, like those glorious clear springs along the AT....
And as already said, I've never been in an accident, why on earth have i wasted time with those silly seatbelts?
I think I will replace mine, too.
Given that Sawyer recommends a bleach flush between trips, one cannot help but wonder what their recommendation would be for an AT thru hike — which others have observed can be a series of 26 week-long trips.
Just as seatbelts are not so good for children without a car seat, an otherwise good filter might not be so good for thru hikers without special attention.
I take a Visine bottle of bleach with me into the field. Every few days I put a few drops of bleach into my plunger and back wash my filter with bleach water.
I had a hiking partner get giardia and I saw it practically cripple her. She was so dehydrated her tears were only salt. If you've seen somebody with giardia that has 3 days to get to town I think everyone would take the extra time to filter water.
If you don't stand for something, you will fall for anything.
The thread should have been closed after the quoted post. When did it become not good enough for an adult to do their research, evaluate their risk tolerance, and make their own informed decision? Instead, it goes a step further when having made their own personal decision, they now must seek to impose their decision on everyone else and castigate anybody who dares disagree. Is it too much ego or too much insecurity?