Silver as a water purification tablet?

goangoangone

Never mind....just drink

__________________
GoanGoan......here

vistet

A practical view :

Filters are great for removing large organisms (amobae) and mediumsized microorganisms.Viruses are a lot smaller than bacteria so it becomes a test of faith to rely only on a filter.
In hospitals there are two levels of bacterilogical safety : decontamination and sterilisation.Decontaminated objects are deemed safe for contact with the bodys exterior and intestines. The Hygiene & Microbiology staff are keen to say (but not demonstrate, perhaps for cultural reasons) that a decontaminated bedpan can be used to serve food.
Decontamination is considered to*have taken place(according to a protocol run once a week in the university hospital where I work) once the water reaches minimum 85 C. This is lower than the boiling point in Leh (3500 meters, 89 C). By lengthening the time you can lower the time involved ; a practical use of this principle is the 60 C wash of underwear which will kill intestinal pathogens.This again is lower than the boiling point at Mt Everest (8848 meters, 69 C) .
Both Peter Hackett and the well researched high-atitude site mentioned above states (with published results to back it) that bringing water to the boiling point is adequate all the way up to Everest Base Camp (5400 meters).
Given enough time many microorganisms will die at quite "low" temperatures,which makes fever a good defence mechanism. Spirochetes are among the most heat sensitive buggers ; before the advent of penicillin syphilis was treated by delibrately inoculating the patients with malaria, which then was treated with quinine.
Some posters elsewhere make a grand point about recent finds in deep sea environments ; life has been found to thrive in dark conditions, under high pressure and above the boiling point. But these organisms are adapted to these conditions : they not only survive these conditions, they are dependent on them. The stuff we need to worry about are the things that thrive in conditions similar to our own.We dont survive boiling, neither does the bugs that can use us as hosts.

Coming back to practicalities : as stated above , good tea needs to be boiled, so I´ll trust it.
The most weight and volume effective method is iodine,followed by electrolysis (Miox pen) and in the last place ...filters.

online altitude-boiling point calculator

mira4bai4

Okay so science and best practice says one thing, portable filtration tests say something else and common or traditional practice say something else.

It really all comes down to the bugs that we are dealing with and those that we can tolerate (how much poison before we succumb). Boiling after filtering is sound practice, no point boliing the lumps as they are harder to chew. I understood and this is kind of bush survival stuff not labratory hygiene etc that boiling the water and letting it cool, seal the container, then boil it again before you use it to make sure, will give you 'pretty' good water, this all depends on the fuel resource and the quality of the original water. A fast moving stream is preferred to a slow or ponding area, clear water even though tanin stained to a muddy water way. Indians traditionally store water in copper vessels as they say this purifies it.

If we grew up and ate the correct quantity of dirt as children then our systems were ready for the rest of our life, if were spend our lives washing our hands and destroying the natural barrier of bacteria that is there to keep us healthy then bottoms up guys. I grew up in the mud and swamps, played with horse and cow dung, this week I dug composting effluent out with my bare hands, I grow vegetables in manure, tonight I ran bare foot through the bush in a down pour and caught frogs for my pond and I am 50 years old.

mira4bai4

Supplementary addition.

Nuts maybe Healty Damn right.

vistet

.. and we probably could learn a lot more listening to traditional practices and analysing them. In medicine this approach has given us some of the most potent drugs, like curare and digitalis.

Coming to Asia my first time I was impressed by this kind of knowledge and techniques, drinking from the water vessel without touching it with the lips for example.

I`ve struggled with how the double-boil have come in to practice.With water I cant see any practical value in boiling, cooling , and reboiling.Heat above a certain point(somewhere above the coagulation point for proteins) x time seems a practical formula when it comes to water.
But this wont work with for example milk , which will spoil from being kept hot a long time. Maybe this has come from a working practice with milk, which then has been adapted to water ?

mira4bai4

Well let us not struggle, let us die in the knowledge that some little Bahu bug got the better of all our knowledge and though we did not try everything exhaustively we did try. These things are sent to test us and they were created by the hand of the One Who Knows best to knock the stuffing out of us. It is either a rickshaw, a bug or a tax collector that gets us and the heart always gives out in the end.

Blessed be the bugs as they will inherit this kingdom.