Drinking water

[rik_uk3]

No good for backpacking but

http://www.lifesaversystems.com/lifesaver-products-1/lifesaver-jerrycan-10000

"The LIFESAVER technology is the world's first and only portable water filter to filter out ALL waterborne viruses, bacteria, cysts and parasites. It achieves this by filtering down to 15 nanometers / 0.015 microns in size and as a result LIFESAVER technology removes the smallest known waterborne virus; parvovirus at 18 nanometers / 0.018 microns in size and the smallest known bacteria at 400 nanometers / 0.4 microns in size. With LIFESAVER technology, you can be 100% confident that you will only ever drink safe, clean water. LIFESAVER technology does not require chemicals, power, mechanically advanced disinfection or UV light to operate."

 

[British Red]

Lifesave systems products are not currently being dispatched as it seems there is evidence that they may not filter out viruses

http://www.lifesaversystems.com/documents/LIFESAVER_Warning.pdf

 

[rik_uk3]

The LIFESAVER WATER BOTTLE 6000uf caused the problem but they are testing all their range which should be finished shortly. The Jerry Can IMHO the best group solution on the market.

 

[OldJimbo]

I don't have much to add to Red's article on "The Science of Water".

Well maybe some observations..

The purest water in the world discovered so far seems to come from springs near Elmvale Ontario:
www.canadiangeographic.ca/magazine/jun11/purest_drinking_water.asp

I'd drink it right from the ground when visiting my brother. The trouble with pure, is that well - it's pure. It's much better with some rye, coffee or tea added to spice it up.

Around here I haven't drunk from clear streams or even springs in decades. This is hard rock country and so water from a spring has probably simply run through a crack in the rock rather than been filtered. I'm of the over-boiling group. That's probably due to having found dead stuff upstream in the past and so for psychological reasons. But I also like to make sure that the wire bail on the pot has received more than enough heat after it was dipped into water when filling the pot. It also takes time to sterilize the cup since last time I was out I may have rinsed it cold in a stream when cleaning up. Cross-contamination is something to worry about - well at least I worry.
While I have never gotten sick using my methods, that could just be due to the fact that my few trillion internal pets overcame any nasties in short order. I eat salads, even pre-packaged salads and if you like them too, you shouldn't investigate the bacterial content.

Something I haven't thought much about in a long time is chemical contamination. When I lived in mid Wales there were some wells where the water tasted fine initially, but left overnight in a bucket to warm up, the next morning you could smell the sulphides breaking down. And that meant lead and arsenic were likely in high concentration. Here in northern BC, contaminated areas are well known, but when I'm in a heavily fracked place like W Alberta where pipelines and separator packages are everywhere, I do worry about chemical contamination.

 

[Robson Valley]

OJ, you got that right. I was a part of an algae sampling study in the local mountains = some are indicators of serious pollution (cattle crap,) some are clear.
For self-serving purposes, I will never drink mountain runoff. No. Not going to happen.

 

[OldJimbo]

Not suggesting anyone should just be tapping ('cuse the pun) into any old water source and not purifying it before drinking, but at some point humans must have... it isn't just modern pollution that contaminates the water... if a cow is lying dead in the stream 2 miles up, all the water is being filtered through rotting flesh... so did the earlier humans just rely on pot luck?

I watched a show from a Canadian documentary series, "The Nature of Things", a few days ago. The specific episode was called "It Takes Guts" and was about the trillions of bugs living inside us. Those little critturs have far more effect on us than most would believe since they send chemical signals to the brain. Anyway in the show anthropologist Jeff Leach went to live with a nomadic hunter gather tribe living as they do which means he had hands in the guts of animals during butchering, drank water from the same waterholes (even if it had floating baboon faeces in it), etc.. His object was to see if living that way would diversify his internal flora and fauna. If that doesn't sound extreme enough, he also performed a faecal transplant on himself (from an HIV and hepatitis negative tested source) so he could diversify his gut bacteria faster...
http://humanfoodproject.com/the-people/founder-jeff-leach/
http://humanfoodproject.com/americangut/

A key concept is that if a person gets something like giardiasis, then it is the body's immune system in combination with efforts by the body's already established few trillion pets which kills off the giardia often with no external help via drugs. Unfortunately with the modern diet which has far less fibre, food is digested early and absorbed leaving little to make it through to the large intestine where lots of our critturs live, and so diversity shrinks in short order. Without a diverse and settled internal zoo/botanical garden, often the body's defences on their own don't do well against invaders.
This is very plausible since we know that weakened patients who have had their internal bugs killed off by antibiotics are very susceptible to antibiotic-resistant Clostridium difficile. The standard first line defence is faecal micro-biota transplant (FMT) and it usually works which is good considering the alternative. People who undergo bariatric surgery where reducing stomach size obviously restricts appetite also have less complete digestion and research shows that since more food makes it through to the large intestine the microbes there start diversifying.

Anyway as I said, I haven't drunk unboiled water from streams for decades, but I used to once and didn't get sick. Where things have changed is in the amount of giardia in the water due to more hikers etc., animals getting infected and simply carrying the bug. When the sand filtration layer was washed off our water supply intake, giardiasis was widespread despite chlorine treatment of the water supply. I'm also cautious in case some far more dangerous bacteria have gotten into the water as happened in the Walkerton tragedy where the deadly E. coli O157:H7 strain got into the water supply. Boiling kills them all...