FortMental wrote:RickandRhonda wrote:benjamingray wrote:How many people are boiling the water they've melted from snow? If I know the snow is clean, I'll usually just melt it and call it good.
Clean looking snow isn't always clean- just ask someone who's had Giardia from "clean looking snow" that wasn't boiled.
Nobody gets giardiasis from clean looking snow. Personal hygiene is a much likelier culprit. The following is from a paper entitled, [url=http://www.ridgenet.net/~rockwell/Giardia.pdf]Giardia lamblia and Giardiasis
With Particular Attention to the Sierra Nevada[/url]:
The water that wilderness travelers are apt to drink, assuming that they use a little care, seems almost universally safe as far as Giardia is concerned. The study referred to earlier,3 in which the researchers concluded that the risk of contracting giardiasis in the wilderness is similar to that of a shark attack, is telling. What they did find is that Giardia and other intestinal bugs are for the most part spread by direct fecal-oral or food-borne transmission, not by contaminated drinking water. Since personal hygiene often takes a backseat when camping, the possibility of contracting giardiasis from someone in your own party—someone who is asymptomatic, probably—is real. Recalling that up to 7 percent of Americans, or up to 1 in 14, are infected, it is not surprising that wilderness visitors can indeed come home with a case of giardiasis, contracted not from the water…but from one of their friends.
· Few Giardia cysts survive harsh Sierra winters. Contamination begins essentially anew each year, so springtime water is safer than summer or fall.
· The colder the water is, the more likely it is freshly melted, meaning less opportunity for
contamination.Unless you're boiling your own water, you should bring some hand sanitizer....and make everyone use it. Another interesting read, along the same vein, is the CDC report on how a population of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn got infected with the Trichinosis bacteria.
I respectfully disagree, as I've seen it happen to a partner and hygiene was NOT an issue. He melted snow, I did not. Hygiene certainly didn't appear to be an issue near as I could tell. The stats you mention indicate, "water... seems almost universally safe", but does not say "is 100% safe." "Clean looking" snow looks no different than "clean looking" water, right?
Of course, I'm just some stupid semi-noob who doesn't know what they're talking about, so no need to listen to me. And by the way, I wasn't talking about freshly fallen snow, I was talking about snow that had been there for months, and wasn't the top, exposed layer.
Cheers!