[pct-l] Some Sierra Water Shown to be Unsafe

Austin Greavette austin.greavette at gmail.com
Wed Sep 5 12:44:44 CDT 2012


Thanks Buck - excellent research. Been reading into it myself and and I
agree. A good debate on the subject never hurts, but looks like you've done
yours quite well. Will be filtering and treating as I always do.

Oz

On Wed, Sep 5, 2012 at 11:22 AM, Bruce 'Buck' Nelson <buck at bucktrack.com>wrote:

> >From a 2010 article: "As director of the emergency room at University
> of California Medical Center, Robert Derlet always wondered what made
> people sick.
>
> Each summer, on hiking trips into the high Sierra, he brought that
> curiosity along, asking himself: Where do you get infections in the
> wilderness? The most obvious possibility, he believed, was the water.
> Now, after 10 years of fieldwork and 4,500 miles of backpacking,
> Derlet knows for sure. What he has learned, after analyzing hundreds
> of samples dipped from backcountry lakes and streams, is that parts of
> the high Sierra are not nearly as pristine as they look.
>
> Nowhere is the water dirtier, he discovered, than on U.S. Forest
> Service land, including wilderness areas, where beef cattle and
> commercial pack stock — horses and mules — graze during the summer.
>
> There, bacterial contamination was easily high enough to sicken hikers
> with Giardia, E. coli and other diseases." (Derlet has been considered
> a "skeptic" in this debate, but I have a lot of respect for him.)
>
> The salient points: High Sierra, pristine looking wilderness, some of
> it unsafe to drink because of Giardia and other disease causing
> organisms.
>
>
> http://www.modbee.com/2010/05/08/1158938/fouled-waters-sierra-lakes-streams.html#
>
> And from Rockwell's paper: "One conclusion of this paper is that you
> can indeed contract giardiasis on visits to the high mountains of the
> Sierra Nevada, but it almost certainly won’t be from the water. So
> drink freely and confidently."
>
> Having gotten Giardiasis after reading and believing the Rockwell
> paper, I wish I had read the former much more recent quote first. I
> WAS selective with my water sources. It was too late when I saw one of
> my safe looking sources had been fouled by cattle.
>
> I have cited a major study and a survey, both of which show the
> giardiasis infection rate for those not treating backcountry water is
> triple.
> http://bucktrack.blogspot.com/2011/03/waterborne-giardia-for-backpackers-no.html
> There are clickable links to those and many other sources on that blog
> post which I've linked to in each of my prior posts.
>
> The EPA, Rockwell and all the other sources that say it takes a
> minimum of 10 cysts to become infected are wrong as I show in my blog
> post. Look at the graph showing where the "10-25 cysts" quote comes
> from. Many inaccuracies are repeated over and over in science without
> people digging down to see the original work.
>
> On the under-reporting of Giardiasis to health departments: "Several
> backpackers appear weekly at Centinela Mammoth Hospital in Mammoth
> Lakes sick enough with giardiasis to need urgent care, said Dr. Jack
> Bertman, an emergency physician, who noted, 'We publicize it a great
> deal more in Mammoth.' "
>
> http://articles.latimes.com/1988-07-26/news/vw-6536_1_day-care-program
>
> My Doc, also in Mammoth, said he treats many cases of backpacker
> Giardiasis but doesn't report them. You know how many cases of
> Giardiasis were reported in that county (Modoc) in 2010? Zero.
> Including my case.
>
> http://www.cdph.ca.gov/data/statistics/Documents/GIARDIASIS.pdf
>
> "Neither health department surveillance nor the medical literature
> supports the widely held perception that giardiasis is a significant
> risk to backpackers in the United States. In some respects, this
> situation resembles (the threat to beachgoers of) a shark attack."
> Robert Rockwell
>
> That conclusion is solidly refuted by all the backpackers actually
> getting Giardiasis requiring urgent care in the Sierras and the more
> recent study cited at the top.
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