>>2403062These threads always bring out the guys who have watched too many YouTube survivalist videos. No one who actually goes out boils their drinking water. We filter it or treat it with chemicals.
Anyway, the entire idea about treating water is overblown and location dependent. First, there are no good statistics on it in the US. All of the data on waterborne illness are skewed toward population densities. Cryptosporidium and giardia make up 80% of all infections, and norovirus makes up another 10%, but they don’t just spring from the ether; they’re spread via human shit and vomit. This can be a serious problem in a city with poor sanitation, but is it really an issue in the woods and mountains? Also, they rarely test individuals for these infections. If you show up sick from being outside, it will be written up as RWI (recreational water illness) and they’ll only treat the symptoms, because you have an immune system. If it’s really bad they’ll treat it with broad spectrum medication (including the horse paste, in pill form).
We’re really treating our water while outdoors for the remaining 10%, which might be really common (I don’t know). But our ancestors never faced the modern mountains of human shit that would have polluted their water.
The “1tbsp per day until you get sick” thing probably wouldn’t work, as a lot of this stuff takes several days to incubate and produce symptoms.
Anecdotally, I switched from a filter to Aquamira drops probably 10 years ago. It basically doesn’t work against cryptosporidium (takes like 4 hours). According to the /out/ experts, I should be dead by now.
