Can you drink from a fresh water stream?

pretty well harmless. we're not as robust as we once were but usually its ok. Of course there was the time when my dad drank from a stream and then found a dead sheep further upstream :D

mind you, since im telling you about it i guess there was no harm done.
 
begbo said:
Most of the times as long as its fairly fast flowing you will be fine. Used to do it in cadets all the time, water was brown but when you have been walking for hours on end you really don't care!
Never done me any harm, just make sure you wash it down with some beer later ;)
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Beer aint going to hide or stop the fact the water could be heavily polluted and infected and cause you some really serious problems down the line. ;) . I personally would never take the chance.
 
iirc the tv advert says 2 billion people don't have access to clean drinking water and something like 2 hundred million die because of it every year, .... so your probably ok as most of those don't have health care or antibiotics.
 
Tefal said:
iirc the tv advert says 2 billion people don't have access to clean drinking water and something like 2 hundred million die because of it every year, .... so your probably ok as most of those don't have health care or antibiotics.
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It's a real sad fact :(
 
Moses99p said:
how much are your water bills? It costs money to process all that water.
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So your saying we automatically had money when we arrived in Europe thousands of years ago and didn't only have access to unclean water till we did somthing i.e built those plants:/

and yes we moved close to rivers why don't they move away from where they are closer to water sources ?
But i guess this isn't the right thread for this.
 
Moses99p said:
how much are your water bills? It costs money to process all that water.

what is average earnings of the people that don't have access to water?

also, we live where there are rivers that work etc, rather than drought ridden areas of Africa etc.
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It was a stupid thing to say IMHO but like I said I don't think It's worth getting into it in this thread.
 
I used to drink water from a stream on the northeast coast of Scotland when I was a kid, and it did me no harm at all.

If you really want to be sure, just boil it for a few minutes.
 
I quite frequently used to drink water from the burn that flows through my parents garden and as far as I can recall I was never ill because of it, that doesn't necessarily make it a good idea though. The water at my parents house is probably the best I've ever tasted though as it comes straight from a burn in the hills anyway. :)
 
If the water is clear and fast flowing, you can usually skip the filtration phase, but you still need to purify it.

In regards to getting clean drinking water in the past, there are quite a few methods that our ancestors developed such as sip and 'gypsy' wells and filtering through a layer of moss and charcoal then simply boiling it on the fire to purify it . They also tapped into the most obvious resource of safe drinking water, the atmosphere, by making depressions lined with clay etc to capture rain. We also must remember that our immune system and such is very different today as it would have been in our past; it could well be true that a man in the mesolithic period would have been able to drink freely from a pretty revolting looking pool without any problems!

In Britain, the further north you go the cleaner generally the water is, up in the mountains of the lake district and the highlands of scotland etc. you can find a lot of out of the way sources that are usually perfectly safe to drink straight from the stream. In a lot of scandinavian countries the water in the many lakes and rivers is so crystal clear it tastes like nothing you've ever had and is far cleaner than the crap you get through the taps!!

Even if I was suffering from dehydration I would not drink from a stream without purifying the water first, whether by chemical means, or simply by boiling it. It really is not worth the risk, if you get dyssentry or diarrhoea it will only make your dehydraton worse and make for a very unpleasant journey. Anybody who says drinking untreated water from a stream in dartmoor is completely harmless is woefully misinformed and if the idea of a parasitic worm growing inside you doesn't put you off I don't know what will, still, you might want to encourage it if you need to lose some weight!!
 
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ScottC said:
In Britain, the further north you go the cleaner generally the water is, up in the mountains of the lake district and the highlands of scotland etc. you can find a lot of out of the way sources that are usually perfectly safe to drink straight from the stream. In a lot of scandinavian countries the water in the many lakes and rivers is so crystal clear it tastes like nothing you've ever had and is far cleaner than the crap you get through the taps!!
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It's true what you say about water being cleaner, the further north you go.

I used to come down into England from northeast Scotland, and on every first day I came here when I had tea/water, I'd usually feel ill.

I still remember lining my Uncle's front path with puke. :eek::D:o
 
Skyfall said:
A lot of it is from man made pollutants, but in the past they didn't get clean water, they just died...
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Or, commonly, they drank alcoholic drinks. It was healthier than the water in many places - the alcohol in the drink killed parasites, bacteria, etc.
 
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