From leaky taps in Queens to crusty ladles in the Sinai, this question is largely answered by chance.
You may have heard that your health is at risk every time you open your mouth, but the planet is suffering too. Drinkers of bottled water worldwide contribute to the looming ecological catastrophe in the form of discarded PET bottles.
To protect myself, my tried and true method of avoiding bacterial invasion is to gulp down a glass of local tap water immediately upon arriving in a strange land.
Insane? Perhaps, but it introduces my refined euro-belly to the various little organisms that will, inevitably, find their way indoors. Better still, it all happens in the comfort of my three-day hotel buffer where a relatively clean toilet is close at hand.
In ten years of travel, drinking well water in Egypt and brewing tea from the Mekong’s waters, this method has never once failed me.
After this inoculation, I am comfortable ordering the salad and crunching the ice cubes at the bottom of my glass of single malt.
However, there’s the rest of the planet to consider and here’s an alternative.
The MIOX purifier from MSR is a tiny, incredibly reliable and dead simple little gadget that will guarantee you fresh drinking and cooking water for the duration of your traveling life.
It works by creating a highly acidic brine of mixed oxidants using local water and salt, which is then dumped into the water you wish to treat.
Put a thimbleful of water in the cap, shake it up, open the cap, press the button and voila! One shot from the MIOX spells death to 99.9% of all bad guys, even the much-maligned Cryptosporidium.
Given the staggering environmental impact store-bought PET bottles have, especially in less developed countries, a MIOX purifier paired with a nice water bottle like the snazzy Black Panther aluminum bottle ($29.99) from Swiss manufacturer SIGG, can turn your mountain of refuse into a molehill.
Plus, you don’t get Delhi belly – Traveler’s Diarrhea. Everyone wins.
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Want an in-depth review of various water purification options? Check out Plastic or Pills? Choosing an option for treating your water.
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Wow… 5 days of antibiotic resistant love is no good at all… It could be an amoebic infection, which needs to be treated by a doctor, especially if you have a fever too. If you’re in a doctor free zone, get yourself some paracetamol for the fever and drink lots and lots of water – preferably with electrolyte packets (or lightly salted, if you can handle it). In any event, you should be tested ASAP for all manner of nastiness, including hepatitis. Good luck…
There is always a chance you could get something truly nasty from the tap water method, BUT the chances are good that you won’t and the benefits of having that inoculation of local bacterial flora far outweigh the downside, in my opinion. Remember that you can get the infections from just about anything – an unwashed fork or spoon, a bit of raw carrot or an ice cube – the tap water method just gives you a better shot of developing immunities in the comfort of an environment you choose. Infections occur because your body doesn’t know how to deal with a particular new bug – better to deal with it in a nice hostel bathroom than behind a bush during a hike up to some remote village in the Himalaya…
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Oops, forgot to add that antibiotics don’t “cure” anything. Rather, as the name implies, they kill nearly everything. A Z-pack on the road is going to do most people much more harm than good, especially if you’re in a place blessed with much bacteria. Avoid them if at all possible and if you must pack a round, be sure to make room for a bottle of probiotics to re-establish your local flora after a sickness. Yogurt is also good for this, although not as helpful as decent probiotics.
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