What’s Lurking in Your Showerhead | Hacker News Reader

What’s Lurking in Your Showerhead

newyorker.com

58 pointsanthotny65 comments

“You may have worms,” Dunn told me. “There’s even some evidence in the Netherlands of little crustaceans.”

Ok so I have been living in the Netherlands for 46 years and I have never heard about crustaceans in our showerheads :) I can't find any sources about this on the Internet. Has anybody ever heard about this or is this just nonsense?

The tap water in the Netherlands is in the top of the world so I really can't imagine crustaceans in my showerhead unless someone put them there.

The presence of crustaceans has nothing to do with cleanliness. New York City also has famously good water, and it has crustaceans: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/07/nyregion/the-waters-fine-b...

That's pretty fascinating. Basically, no one has actually been able to keep true Kosher until the advent of water filters and microscopes.

> and microscopes

All microscopic creates are kosher. It must be visible to the naked eye to be non-kosher.

According to Kosher law you are supposed to check your water after drawing it, to make sure it has no insects in it. This is the backstory for the test in Judges 7 BTW.

Now in modern times people expect drinking water to be clean. So it was quite a surprise to find visible insects in New York water.

> All microscopic creates are kosher.

That seems like an after-the-fact retcon, given folks thousands of years ago being unaware of a microscopic world's existence.

Thanks for linking to that article. It send me down a rabbit hole to learn more about copepods. It also led me to this amusing logo for a conference: http://invertebrates.si.edu/copepod/images/13ICOClogo.jpg

New York City also has famously good water

Not true! NYC does not have "famously good water". I found that out when I had to change my counter-top water filter after about one year of use.

It was more than gross. Imagine having to drink that water without the benefit of a water filter. By the way, I don't think water people drink in many restaurants are filtered.

But couldn't that just be the pipes in your building? The water comes from the Catskills, and when it leaves there, at least, it's extremely clean.

The water towers on top of NYC buildings tend to not be maintained especially well:

  With their quaint barrel-like contours and weathered 
  cedar-plank sides, rooftop water towers are a constant on 
  the New York City skyline. And though they may look like 
  relics of a past age, millions of residents get their 
  drinking water from the tanks every day.

  But inside these rustic-looking vessels, there are often 
  thick layers of muddy sediment. Many have not been 
  cleaned or inspected in years. And regulations governing 
  water tanks are rarely enforced, an examination by The 
  New York Times shows.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/27/nyregion/inside-citys-wat... (warning: autoplay video)

That the water at the source is clean may be true, but you judge the water by its nature at the final destination, because in the final analysis, that is where the grade of quality matters to those who'll be drinking it.

The water sources to NYC are very high quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_water_supply_sys...

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/24/nyregion/how-n...

Anyway, all water filters get very funky after a year.

True, "all water filters get very funky after a year", that funkiness is an indication of the true quality of the water that reaches your house or apartment.

That's how you tell what you'd have been drinking without filtration.

It might just be some calcium. The horror!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_water

Nope, what I saw in that filter wasn't calcium.

You seem really bothered by this. What did you see in your filter after a year? Some tiny amount of algae? Some mineral deposits? Do you prefer your water taste like a chlorinated pool?

Wait until you find out what's in your food!

"more than gross" is hardly a scientific analysis of cleanliness, though I guess in line with this article (which is why I flagged it).

Did you want me to scientifically analyse my drinking water before I can comment about it on HN?

I'm talking about the water that reaches my faucet, not the one somewhere upstate NY.

> Imagine having to drink that water without the benefit of a water filter.

We don't have to imagine it. Plenty of people do.

Concentrate a year's worth of tiny impurities and you'll wind up a bit of sludge, yes. You'd probably get it even with pure distilled water from dust and microbes in the air.

Chances are you're breathing a lot more nasty in from taxi exhaust and human feces from farts than you're getting from that water.

Variability of invertebrate abundance in drinking water distribution systems in the Netherlands in relation to biostability and sediment volumes.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0043135412...

"He suggested that the female reputation for making tastier bread may derive from the fact that the skin on women’s hands is more likely to be colonized by fermentation-friendly lactobacilli from their vaginas."

This is the weirdest thing I've heard in a while and I wonder if there is even a slight possibility that this is true.

As a homebrewer who consumes the end product of microorganism processes, an unexpected infection almost always yields off-flavors that are counted as defects in the beer. That said, there are some beer types that are "spontaneously fermented" by environmental yeasts, that end up with a sour taste as a desirable characteristic, and the rest of the beer flavor profile is crafted to harmonize with it.

I think there is a slight possibility the claim is true, but only for sourdough breads.

Apparently the answer is "gross stuff". I didn't see much more usable detail than that in the article?

"Gross stuff which can maybe cause weird diseases."

Or help boost our immune systems by exposure? I couldn't tell from the article.

That's the point of the article; they know almost nothing about it, so there are currently data collection efforts so they can get a big picture. From there they can ask the detailed questions like that.

Gross stuff which is actually a collection of microorganisms. And reading further, there's the idea that our exposure to this gross stuff may be beneficial and one of the few ways we're still exposed to it. Or harmful.

Very interesting stuff in my opinion. Have studies like this been made more accessible due to cheaper sequencing?

And seeing as our bodies are colonies of microorganisms...

Why the focus on showerheads only and not water faucets which people drink much more water from rather than bathe?

It's probably the fact that shower heads have so much more surface area for stuff to grow on and live in. One minute it's wet, and then it's drying for the rest of the day. A water faucet is less hospitable to growing gunk.

Hmm; I could see it being the exact opposite. The shower head, by drying out after a single daily use, could be less hospitable to organisms that need moisture. Meanwhile a faucet, used several times throughout the day, has areas which never dry completely.

They're studying human microbiome, not the health impact of drinking different stuff. Anything living in your showerhead is going to get deposited on your skin every day, so it may be a reservoir for your personal microbes, or something that interferes with them.

there's an element of aerosolisation with showerheads, so you might be breathing this stuff in.

You can (mostly) sterilize your showerhead if you want.

Turn up your hot water tank to the highest setting (150F) and wait for it to finish heating, then just run straight hot water for about 10 minutes.

It won't kill everything, but it'll kill most things.

It sounds obvious, but this is incredibly dangerous scalding risk if someone else turns on hot water expecting it to be a reasonable temperature while you're doing this. Even if

Much easier to take your fixtures off and bleach/disinfect.

> Much easier to take your fixtures off and bleach/disinfect.

You have a very different definition of "easier" than me.

And I don't know about you, but hot water is HOT, and I never use it directly while expecting not to get burned - I always mix it with cold.

> He suggested that the female reputation for making tastier bread may derive from the fact that the skin on women’s hands is more likely to be colonized by fermentation-friendly lactobacilli from their vaginas.

Not really what you want to read while eating sourdough toast.

Oh, I thought it was going to be the flow regulators. I keep meaning to remove mine.

Click bait or not, now I have to clean my shower head. Thanks a lot! :(

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