[Paddlewise] Sweet Water Filters

Personally, I try to avoid drinking water that may be contaminated with
fecal matter. I don't care how it is filtered or chemically doctored.

How hard can it be to find a reasonably clear stream, not downstream of
someone's outhouse or sewage outfall, to use as a source for your filter?  

Of course animal fecal matter is a good possibility, and is the probable
reason for the spread of giardia, etc., throughout the watersheds of the
world, also the reason the watersheds don't get a chance to clean themselves
out. But that is protozoan and/or bacterial infection.  I haven't heard that
human viruses were being spread by this means.  I hope not!

If you want to be 199% safe, you are in the wrong sport.  Filtering the
water,  even with your filter, and choosing the source to begin with, should
reduce the risk to an acceptable minimum, just as we do for all the other
risks we take.

Rob. 

(In Terrace, BC, where we can still drink the water straight off the
hillside, although we probably shouldn't.)

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