Hacker News Reader

There's a bit of a trope about how in history everyone died in their 30s from war or disease.

http://www.hormones.gr/211/article/article.html concerns Ancient Greece, so not primitive. But, I think you should be cautious about declaring primitive people as having their lives markedly shortened by waterborn pathogens; at least cautious enough to be able to cite some strong evidence?

The Ancient Greeks filtered their water and sought out purer water sources.

I didn’t claim that people died in their 30s or that waterborne pathogens were a major cause of shortened life. The latter certainly seems plausible though. My point there was only that basing your water sanitation on the habits of primitive people is obviously misguided.

And they also added wine to it, which would kill some bacteria and protozoa.

Well, there's cholera, a disease often transmitted by contaminated water, that often killed 10,000-100,000 people at a time in pandemics 100ish years ago. It is still a huge problem in the developing world (eg 65K deaths last year -- http://www.who.int/gho/epidemic_diseases/cholera/deaths_text...). In the United States, the number of cases per year are typically in the teens, with no deaths typically. (https://www.cnn.com/2013/10/16/health/cholera-fast-facts/ind...)

Typhoid fever is another really nasty disease, often contaminated water transmitted, that still kills hundreds of thousands of people per year (http://www.who.int/immunization/diseases/typhoid/en/). But in countries with clean water and good sanitation the infection rate is very little. As an exmaple: the US over time: https://www.wikidoc.org/images/3/30/Typhoid_stats.gif

I can't say how much this shortened the average lifespan overall, but these are some pretty significant diseases which are largely transmitted by contaminated water (or food), and which are largely eliminated by water and sanitation treatment systems. I'm sure there's some others, these are just the first two that came to mind.

Giardia by comparison is more of a "nuisance", but with treatment methods so cheap (I mean, iodine tablets are on the order .15 a tablet or so) I really don't see a reason to take the risk of that or other stomach-upsetting bugs getting in you.

The death toll from cholera in Haiti from the outbreak after the 2010 earthquake has reached just around 10,000 _dead_, 830k cases, according to wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_Haiti_cholera_outbreak

Filter your backcountry water, people.

> Yes, primitive people drank water straight from streams. They built up resistance to a lot of the pathogens, but they also had lots of parasites and diseases, and didn’t regularly live into their 80s, so I’m not sure why you’d model your food and water safety on theirs.

And their streamwater was a lot cleaner than ours. Unless you're high in the mountains, there's a good chance that any given waterway in the US has a farm or factory somewhere upstream.

And they still have beavers in those streams, and those beaver still shit in the woods. Your point is taken, but really, there never was this magical time in the past when unfiltered water was a good thing.

... I bet every regular outdoor campers' head popped reading this article, just like mine. I can't conceive of anything stupider than drinking unfiltered stream water, anywhere (unless you were sure it was springhead, and even then, no).

Oh, definitely. I don't mean to imply their water was perfect and pure, just that ours is even worse.

We hiked the Long Trail last year and people were hacking those sawyer minis into their camelback-like hydration systems, pretty neat.

We brought a sawyer 5L gravity bag that filters out viruses, and drank some flavorful water outta that thing.