I even attended a meeting for travelers (my Austria trip looms as well), in which a local health official laughingly made reference to "Montezuma's Revenge." I've since had a change to discuss it with the hosts of the meeting, who agreed that "ha ha ha, we can't drink their water because they're poor" was inappropriate.
At first "why not?" seemed like a stupid question. Further, is there a "Washington's Revenge?" - Do people in other parts of the world have trouble drinking my water? I also wondered, do locals drink the water? Do they suffer as a result, or have they built up an immunity to the bugs that live in it? Does it hold back the Global South? Can something be done, like creating more infrastructure?
Up to Date Patient Information: General Travel Advice says travelers can get infectious diarrhea (traveler's diarrhea), hepatitas A, and trichnellosis. They also say don't drink, make ice cubes with, or brush the teeth with local water. Drink boiled tap water. Don't eat unpeeled fruit or raw vegetables. I knew most of this -Thomas Mann's character Aschenbach died as a result of eating the strawberries that represented the lure of the Global South.
The Center for Disease Control discusses the science behind traveler's diarrhea, and the implication is that the traveler should be wary, but not the local. They also include an unsurprising map:
Focusing on travel diarrhea implies that its a travel issue, that in fact locals are able to adapt to non-potable water. However, UN Millennium Development Goal #7, ensure environmental sustainability, includes a stated goal to reduce by half the number of people living without sustainable access to clean drinking water.
The World Health Organization notes some interesting H2O statistics in a fact file:
- 4 in 10 people globally live without access to clean drinking water. This is "getting worse because of population growth, urbanization and an increase in domestic and industrial use."
-By 2025, 2 billion people will live with a water shortage.
- The WHO recommends a level of 500 cubic metres of water per person per year, for healthy and hygienic living.
- Water scarcity means people rely on unsafe sources of drinking water.
- "Poor water quality can increase the risk of diarrhoeal diseases including cholera, thyphoid fever, salmonellosis, other gastrointestinal viruses, and dysentery. Water scarcity may also lead to diseases such as trachnoma, plague and typhus. Trachnoma, for example, is strongly related to a lack of water for regular face washing."
- "Water scarcity encourages people to store water in their homes. This can increase the risk of household water contamination and provide breeding grounds for mosquitoes - which are vectors for dengue, dengue haemorrhagic fever, and malaria and other diseases."
- Good water management reduces breeding sites for disease vectors, reducing disease.
So to answer some of my earlier questions, no, I can't drink the water there. People who come to the US don't face issues with our water, despite what the government of San Jose is having difficulty realizing. Locals really shouldn't drink the water there either, but they have to. There is no immunity, it does hold back the Global South, and something can be done. However, there is not enough water to go around, so it will become increasingly difficult to keep what we do have clean.
The answers raise an important new question: how do you live and care for your family without clean drinking water?
