Drinking Stream Water

This is very important information for those of you who plan on running the Hardrock Ultra. I have presented this in two parts. I believe you will find this informative and interesting to read. Thanks. Go to Kevin Sayers at this web site.

Dave Scudden

I always carry a little baggie with half a dozen iodine pills to purify stream water. The additional pills for killing the iodine taste are nothing but vitamin C: 28 mg each. I buy the iodine pills without the neutralizer (cheaper) and throw in a few regular vitamin C pills. After waiting the requisite 20 minutes to let the iodine do its stuff I crumble a bit of a C into the bottle and presto, the iodine color and taste are gone. No need to worry about OD'ing on the C either.

One fun aspect of using iodine is that if your bottle has anything with starch in it, it will turn the water a brilliant blue.

Brick Robbins#2

In my opinion all the posts saying "I put potable aqua in my water bottle, shake and wait for 10 minutes and I never got sick" are more a testament to the rarity of giardia in surface water than to the efficacy of iodine for killing cysts. It also might reflect the fact that most ultra runners are healthy adults with good immune systems.

Iodine will kill bacteria and viruses that fast, but from all the research available out there, it just takes longer than that to kill giardia (depending on the water temperature).

I personally think that the whole giardia/back country water scare is blown WAY out of proportion by lawyers and water filter salesmen. Some streams are infected, but not many. The closer you are to concentrations of people, the more likely the infections.

A recent study found giardia on table tops in 40% of day care centers studied. You are most likely to get giardia if you have an infant wearing diapers, not from a back country stream. If you do get infected, it is likely that you will have few or no symptoms, depending on your immune system. Then again you could get quite sick also.

Those of you who obsess about cleanliness, worry about germs, and carry pepper spray to protect yourself from cougars (but happily run on the roads beside speeding cars), I encourage to disregard the research, and chemically treat, then boil, then filter your water. By the way, the

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