What's the deal with tap/drinking water in Delhi?

theyyamdancer

To drink tap water is to play Russian roulette. It has nothing to do with the strength of your immune system! It has everything to do with the strength of the microbes pullulating in that tap water.

Two weeks is nothing in the life-cycle of a waterborne disease.

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Aishah

In the ten years I have lived here, Mr K has also had typhoid four times. Drinking untreated tap water is indeed, Russian roulette as Theyyamdancer points out.

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Haylo

It is not alarmist.

ONE THOUSAND Indian children die EVERY DAY from contracting "some awful sickness"; unfortunately their families are not in your privileged position of having a choice about safe drinking water.

Bullshit. A healthy immune system does nothing whatsoever to combat typhoid, cholera, E. coli or amebic dysentry.

Which proves what exactly?

You asked the question, if you don't like the answer that long term even lifelong Indian residents are giving you, that's unfortunate, but I certainly don't think that spending two weeks in India qualifies your comments to negate in any way any of the opinions I've seen on here!

When you have your first delivery of 20 litre water containers, you pay a small deposit on each water bottle; the company then takes the empty containers away for reuse when they make each further delivery.

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zsonia2993

Oh, cool.

dzibead

Amen to everything Haylo, Aishah, theyyamdancer and Nick said.

For the OP to conclude that just because she didn't immediately contract some acute water-borne disease (like cholera, which has a short incubation period and dramatic symptoms) within the first two weeks of drinking tap water, is - not to put too fine a point on it - ridiculous, or at the very least ignorant. Some diseases (typhoid springs to mind) can have an incubation period of two to three weeks, depending on the number of bacteria ingested. And with typhoid, a person can become only mildly ill and apparently recover or actually never show any signs of illness at all, but be an asymptomatic or "healthy" carrier. Every hear of Typhoid Mary? One might well drink tap water for quite a while without ill-effect, but it IS playing Russian roulette. And what's the point? So you can brag about your tough immune system and be dismissive of "alarmism" from people who have far more experience (in some cases a lifetime) in the country than you? Well, good luck with that!

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Nick-H

I don't think that the incubation period is relevant.

Say you drank water infected with a disease with a three-week incubation period in your second week of a 2-week hol... that just means that you would develop the illness two weeks after getting home. It make it less obvious that the disease was from india, of course, but that is a different thing.

edwardseco

When I lived in South Delhi (many moons ago) the city water was infamous and the family I lived with boiled it..

delhiwala

Many people still do !

But now more and more pepole are opting for Bisleri/Aquafina for drinking water needs.

My cousin sister doesn't use tap water to wash her hair, it's bisleri for her.......

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Paleface

Crikey, expensive woman!! First time i've heard it DW... where will it end?

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Nick-H

That's the rich people! We used to buy canned water at one-third the price!

My wife also sometimes uses treated water to wash her hair, but, as I've mentioned, there are days when I water is delivered with a fair amount of salt in it. I don't bother; which is probably why my hair is falling out

delhiwala

Oh ! When I tease her on this, she says all her friends also do same.....

And Nick, yes we do have non branded, locally filtered water available in Delhi, but I think it's of dubious quality. Almost all middle class households now have RO water filters....

MonkeyBoy4u

Never ever drink water straight out from the tap ! Delhi has one of the worst water supplies I have ever come across !

Get a water purifier installed at your place. But please be careful when buying the filters for the water purifier after it has been installed as there is lots of spurious stuff out there.

I had to bear the brunt of a spurious water filter. I have now been diagnosed with liver lesions just because of drinking Delhi water !!

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Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference

~ Robert Frost

edwardseco

I laughed at first. Then I remembered a young lady that explained why she used rain water as opposed to tap water to wash her hair. It was less hard than the tap water and made her hair softer. I checked that statement out but don't remember anything else..

KABAARY

Damn ! And all this while I thought that it was the Old Monk which should make me worry about my liver. But then...thank god I'm not lily livered....

dzibead

It's certainly relevant to the argument in the OP's first couple of posts.

I raised the incubation period because the OP said she had been drinking tap water/city water for two weeks and was fine so she thought all the warnings she had been given were alarmist nonsense. Well, for all she knows, she might have ingested Salmonella typhi bacteria on her third or fourth day (or first day) and she hasn't yet become symptomatic.

As I pointed out, above, not all water borne diseases manifest themselves immediately and dramatically, so the OP could not reasonably conclude, on the basis of her limited experience, that everything was just hunky-dory and would continue to be so.