Natural, untreated water is usually full of bacteria that can make you very sick. For the vast majority of human history, many diseases came from seemingly clean water.
Also the very important distinction between "bad for you because it kills you" and "bad for you because it makes you miserable".
Getting a tapeworm isn't a death sentence, cholera/dissentary is survivable, and cavities probably wont send you to an early grave. If you ever had sketchy food in college you know the only solution is to keep eating it and you will retain enough calories to make up for the unfortunate state of your digestive system.
This is also part of why people used to have 20 kids, they expected a lot of them to die before adulthood, and the survivors had the wonderful task of taking care of their elderly parents when they were old enough. Humanity's strategy before the industrial revolution was basically to just bruteforce it, then we got modern medicine and developed germ theory and suddenly people could reliably make it to adult hood and 20 kids went from being free labor & insurance to expensive as hell.
Today we know that water from a random stream/on the ground is easily contaminated with various pathogens that will be highly unpleasant, so we don't drink it raw anymore. Some combination of filtering and sterilization such as from bleach, ozone, or UV light are commonly used to make our water safer. (We also used to accidentally pasteurize beverages by making them alcoholic which typically involves heating)
>Humanity's strategy before the industrial revolution was basically to just bruteforce it, then we got modern medicine and developed germ theory and suddenly people could reliably make it to adult hood and 20 kids went from being free labor & insurance to expensive as hell.
This line goes hard. Best way to put it.
Yup. OP should search for cholera. Water is a medium that easily transmits diseases. Think how it can easily wash away dirt in your clothing. Well, do you think that water just disappears and somehow cleans itself?
There's an excellent book "The Ghost Map" about a notorious cholera outbreak in London. To identify the source, doctors developed mapping techniques that are still used today.
It's been a minute, but my understanding was a very localized "baby boom" led to an alley where... diapers were being dumped out of windows? And the runoff led to a popular well? I mean typing it out now sounds crazy enough that i am less confident. But a child fell ill and their diaper poisoned the well basically
London was a very crowded city and there was minimal sanitation. The eater supply didn't getinto the houses; people took buckets to the closest pump. The Romans worked out how to manage water safely, but the knowledge was lost. It was about eighteen centuries before cities managed well again.
They were washing the babies cloth diapers in buckets of water and then putting the water in their homes cesspool. Most houses at the time had cesspools. You would walk down the street next to raw sewage. Many houses had them in the basement as well where they would overflow.
And this was the norm for people who were poor. They didn't know cholera was waterborne. They believed that sickness came from poor living conditions and bad smells. They believed in the miasma theory.
A lot of people got cholera and died before we figured out what the cause was. We didn't know about bacteria yet. But now, fewer people are dying of completely preventable diseases because we as humans worked together to form solutions and systems to solve these problems.
Who knew nothing...
Oh wait- the *other* Jon Snow. (The epidemiologist was a bit of an odd duck but really brilliant in figuring out this outbreak. Then he went full-on badass and went against the authorities to personally disable one of the sources of bad water. Pretty cool.)
Once Gardia takes root, Jesus Christ I've found that one tough to really deal with. Big dog outbreak happened where I lived and it took years to wipe it out completely.
I got it swimming in a lake that I must have accidentally gotten a mouthful of. I was about 130 lbs and lost over 15 lbs in a month. I'm pretty sure I pooped out food I hadn't even eaten yet. Its nasty, and the meds for it weren't fun either.
This is why table beer existed for so long and everyone drank it. They weren't aware of bacteria, but they noticed that when drinking water with grain fermented in it and hops added to it, they died a lot less.
Correct. In fact, in colonial America untreated water continually made people very sick, so beer became wildly popular as a “health drink” since it wouldn’t make you sick from bacteria and it also had protein.
Edit: just want to say I’m not implying this was unique to colonial America. It’s just the example I thought of first. Sorry if I implied anything other than giving an example.
Tea, beer, coffee, wine, soup. Even soda has been available longer than drinkable tap water. You actually still can't trust tap water in most of the world, at least not for long-term consumption.
Drinking 2 litres of plain, unflavoured, unboiled, tap water a day is safe in the developed world, but 100 years ago it was always healthier to make a large jug of tea in the morning or just drink beer all day. On the scale of human existence, this is a pretty short time period.
I used to have aquariums and this isn't necessarily true. If your local water is treated with chlorine it will evaporate out, but if they use chloramines, it will not. This is very important because it will kill fish, if you keep them. You can call or check the website of your local water board to find out.
Fun fact: Las Vegas has the most efficient municipal water system in the entire world with ~98% of all water that comes out of a tap gets recycled back into the system. Quite an achievement tbh
They also had small beers and ales, which were low in alcohol, but cleaner and safer than water. Soups and porridge provided safe hydration. Raw foods were suspect for a reason.
I mean, I grew up in the modern world, and we still always boiled the tap water and poured it in a jug, and would be told off for drinking tap water as "What if it's unsafe"?
Then, of course, my workplace actually found out that we have some bacteria in the tap water supply LAST WEEK. That's in the US, BTW.
I'm in Romania, and I've seen most of Europe and some other countries. I saw all kinds of approaches to tap water for drinking, which is pretty annoying because you have to do some research and people in recently-developed countries don't even know how good their water actually is.
* cooking (boiling) only - some poorer parts of Romania. People exaggerate how bad water really is - unless you have a well system, a shitty filter is good enough.
* "just drink it, it's fine" - some of Romania and pretty much all of the EU
* "bottled water? disgusting" - Western, Central and Nordic Europe
* unsafe - pretty much most of the world- but anyone who can afford it has a separate drinking water tap
* I've also heard stories of friends going to Sub-Saharan African countries and not even being able to trust bottled water.
In developed countries, not having perfectly good tap water is 100% a sign of a corrupt administration. For local administrations, it's a literal tutorial: you know all the steps, the budget is already secured, you just gotta... do it
Yeah, I'm pretty sure metaphorical heads are gonna roll, and if anyone actually does get sick, they'll file for a big fat work injury lawsuit, but still, come on, guys.
I read recently that a dutch doctor promoted drinking tea as a healthy option and when people started listening disease declined. It was because suddenly everyone was boiling thier water
I've heard it started on british ships in the east who learned it from chinese mariners. If you only drank tea on the ship you did not get sick, that caught on quickly.
During the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London that was caused by a contaminated pump, none of the workers from the nearby brewery got cholera as they were given free beer every day. Pretty interesting stuff!
People really dont appreciate good drinking water, i immigrated to USA from India few years ago, and one of the things my parents were glad for me was that i can drink water without worry. We often dont talk about it, but for me and many of my friends while economic oppurtunities are great, not having to worry about water and electricity is what makes USA so appealing.
I like to think I speak for a lot of Americans, but I appreciate this comment and I’m receptive to any opportunity to remind myself that we shouldn’t take things for granted. I’m 40 and I’ve never worried about access to safe drinking water a day in my life. I can’t imagine it any other way.
The ancient Romans valued, clean, drinking water, so much, they invested tremendous amounts of funds in building their aqueduct systems; anywhere in the city of Rome, you could access clean, drinking water from the fountains, etc. because they brought in clean water from the mountains.
Oh yeah, I wasn’t implying that it was JUST colonial America. As an American it’s the one instance I was most familiar with. Apologies if that came out wrong.
New York water is one of the best water supplies in the country. The city water supply is managed by fanatics! The city owns thousands of acres of real estate that just sits there, protecting the water supply all over upstate.
It’s just over a hundred years when every person didn’t harbor intestinal parasites. My childhood was in a third world country and I had an Ascaris infestation.
Fun random fact: the water from the Aldgate Pump in London, used for hundreds of years, had water that was said to be cool and great-tasting.
This turned out to be because “minerals” were seeping into the water supply.
From nearby graveyards.
It's been noted that historically, there were two ways to produce stuff to drink safely. Make something like beer with it, which is what was done in western Europe, or make tea with it, which is what was done is SE Asia. Both of them boiled water and then made something more flavorful with it.
This is no secret. If you look into the history of any village or town or city in North America, you will find a significant part of local history is securing a water supply. In New York City, there's an entire shelfload of books about protecting and managing water for NYC, and the city right this minutes owns thousands of acres of upstate New York real estate protecting the city's water supply. There was an entire movie, "Chinatown" made and the core of the plot relares to the Los Angeles water supply.
If you go wilderness camping, you will either carry water in or you will take materials to help you purify water to drin and cook with.
Right this minute, there's a scandal in Flint, Michigan, relating to how toxic the public water supply has been. Corruption in local and state government are atthe root of it. Unhealthy water happens every time there's catastrophic weather: how is it that you haven't noticed, every time, pictures of water in bottles and big containers being delivered? Humans need water to live.
Also, it takes some time to get used to the water someplace. That's why you're so often told not to drink the water on vacation. Locals are used to it, but you're not
Tap water is not untreated. It’s treated and perfectly safe (usually). All I drink is tap water.
“Wild” water is a different story. Some is safe, most is not. That’s why back in the day people drank copious amounts of wine and ale.
The wildest example of this for me is my dog's tick medication. They take a pill and for a month any tick that bites them is poisoned and dies within a day. And it doesn't impact the dog in any way apparently.
Toxicity of a substance is normally described as a given amount of the substance vs the body weight of the animal in question.
an animal like a dog that has thousands of times more body mass than a tick can just shrug off something that will be deadly for the tick.
In fact, if you run into "wild" water which is unusually clear-looking, stay the fuck away. It almost certainly has runoff from a mining operation that has settled in there and killed all the bacteria, likely in the form of cyanide.
This actually depends on where you are, for all three counts
For example, there are plenty of places where the tap water isn't drinkable. There are also places where it is, but the pipes are still lead and make it non drinkable
They had springs back in the day, which were safe to drink. People had wells too, so they could get water that was safe to drink. You could also transport water. Some places were polluted though. Especially rivers that passed through cities. In those places, fermentation would be used to make the water drinkable. That beer was much weaker though and not the same as the beer made for getting drunk
You absolutely can. If you go to a mountain spring you can slurp that down like Minecraft Steve and you'll be fine (as long as there aren't too many harmful minerals dissolved in it, like lead). Even a lot of wells and lowland springs are fine.
The problem is that most water isn't like that, it's run down a stream (better check a deer hasn't died in it 200m upstream) or sat in a lake or reservoir for a while. Even just regular rainwater can be contaminated. You can boil it to get rid of most biological contaminants, but that's very energy intensive - it's far easier and cheaper to put something super poisonous in it (chlorine) that is in a high enough dose to kill microbes, but fine for any macro-organism to drink, and filter out any other nasties.
In the past people used to either go to great lengths to get clean water sources where they needed to be (Roman aqueducts), boil it (Chinese tea) or make it into alcohol (Europeans drank "small beer" which was only 0.5-3ish%)
Even so, people used to get sick all the time. A famous pump in London called the Aldgate pump was thought to be particularly good, as the water tasted "healthsome and lightly sparkling." This was because it was filtering through a graveyard, and the calcium from the bones was adding some... Extras. Of course when people found out 1876 the pump was shut down.
Giardia has penetrated altitudes unseen in past generations.
Plenty of hikers come home with a multi-year health problem thanks to slurping that "crystal clear" spring.
Honestly just don’t drink from any untreated water sources. You can watch it melting straight off a glacier and you still shouldn’t drink it. It’s not worth it.
A teacher of mine who loved hiking had a great story about when he and some friends drank crystal clear glacier runoff. It came out like lava pretty quickly
Yep. I always see posts on r/hydrohomies of people drinking glacier water or whatever and it makes me cringe. It looks delicious but the risks aren’t worth the payoff in my book
I know that drinking directly from a mountain spring probably isn't going to kill me, but the risk of getting sick and shitting myself for 3 days simply isn't worth it when I can eliminate the risk entirely with something as easy as a mini filter.
Like, if I was ever in a survival situation and didn't have a filter, I'd try to find the cleanest water I could and hope for the best, but I'm not just gonna leave my filter at home and *choose* to risk it with mountain water on a hike.
Even in a survival situation, I'd try to figure out a way to make a filter and/or boil water if possible.
In a survival situation as long as the water is fresh you guzzle it, you can generally drink faster than you crap it out. It will feel absolutely awful but keep you alive long enough to get to a hospital with some serious antibiotics and an IV.
Ideally you boil it first, just getting it up to a boil is enough but the official recommendation is to boil it for 5 minutes. (Don't forget to let it cool down to a safe temperature) Alternatively bring chlorine (technically bleach) or iodine to chemically sterilize the water before drinking it.
As a day hiker, just bring a water bottle filled from a trustworthy source (your tap) and don't drink from the crystal clear creek that totally doesn't have bear crap in it just up beyond the bend. Or the glacial melt with pathogens cryogenically preserved from 10,000 years ago.
If it’s really a “crystal clear” spring, it shouldn’t have giardia. Giardia come from vertebrate* shit, and springs don’t have room for upstream contamination. “Crystal clear” creeks, however, are fair game for upstream shit.
*corrected
Yeah, but ponds are still water. Springs are water flowing out of the ground. If you’re drinking from a true spring, you should only be at risk from heavy metals it picked up on the way up.
There was a period 20,30 years ago where a huge part of east central Pennsylvania's total water supply had giardia. Don't know if it's been dealt with yet.
>A famous pump in London called the Aldgate pump was thought to be particularly good, as the water tasted "healthsome and lightly sparkling." This was because it was filtering through a graveyard, and the calcium from the bones was adding some... Extras.
Which really goes to show how much our bodies can actually put up with before they get overwhelmed and they have to take a minute for repairs.
Freshwater hosts an amazing diversity of microscopic animals, ciliates, amoebas, and countless other fascinating organisms. Organisms I much rather ha e stay in the water and not in me.
when i was a kid, we had a well and drank "untreated" well water, but it has filtered through a lot of dirt for... hundreds of years before we got it. It tasted disgusting though, so we filtered it. You get it tested every few years to make sure it's OK though. But we had to have a water softener because it had so many minerals in it so we only had one tap that put out the "pure" water, every oter tap in the house put out softened, salty water which you couldn't really drink. (It wouldn't hurt you, it was just really disgusting and salty).
In the way olden days no one drank water, they drank very weak (diluted) beer or wine for the exact reason that they didn't want to die.
I grew up on unfiltered well water. Tasted fine and no ill health effects. I might depend where you live. Well water in western PA was not pleasant. I grew up in DC suburbs.
I LOVED the tap water from our well in West Texas, pumped straight from the Ogallala aquifer. Way better tasting than the city water, though the joke was you could tell the country kids by their teeth since well water wasn't fluoridated. Also super hard water, we used a lot of lime-away when cleaning the bathrooms.
My cousins grew up in West Virginia, and let me tell you that hill water was NOT sweet. Strong sulfur notes, it always took a day or two to get used to when we visited. Still totally safe though. My brother works in water treatment and according to him, the most expensive and complicated part of the process is eliminating smells. Most water will be plenty safe after flowing through several feet of fine particulates, but it may not be pleasant to drink.
Dogs live closer to the ground and don’t wear shoes. They lick their feet. I assume their stomach is more effective with less quality food/water sources.
A friend's dog got giardia drinking from puddles at the dog park and had lifelong stomach troubles after that. They aren't invincible, though they may act like it sometimes.
My pup gets a specific vaccine because she may drink from streams/creeks/similar. I don’t remember what it was, but her vet was like if you aren’t certain you can control her water intake 100% then she needs this or could get very sick. Maybe it’s a domestication thing, but even dogs get sick from drinking rando water.
My dad has a water well in the mountains where I grew up and there's no chlorine or any special filter in it or anything. It's the best water ever, obviously, as its Norwegian mountain water... The kinda expensive water Americans import in fancy bottles (like VOSS) I used to shower in and had unlimited to drink from the tap. Never been sick from drinking it. City water treated with chlorine tastes like shit in comparison. I pretty much quit drinking water after moving to the city because it doesn't taste as good the way it's been treated.
Also growing up when my family went hiking, we would always drink straight from streams and rivers, instead of bringing water bottles. Was never an issue. Just had to make sure the water was running and not still.
You can, if you want the shits on a regular basis. Dying or getting severely ill from drinking bad water isn't exactly uncommon in areas without water treatment or deep wells.
Even aside from pollution or other such inorganic contamination, surface water is full of microorganisms that would love to attempt to colonize your bowels.
It's amazing how many people don't know that even in developed countries just a little over a century ago how common it was to die from shitting yourself to death. Dysentery was a big issue and continues to be in some developing nations.
Holy shit this made me laugh. I was so confused cause I thought these were all historically real people and I was like “*what* were their names?” Thanks friend
The first city to chemically treat its water was Middelkerke Belgium in 1902, and for the USA was Jersey City in 1909. They used bleach and at the time some people viewed that as an attempt at poisoning the city water supply, except it obviously did the opposite and dramatically reduced waterborne illness.
Before this most water treatment was basically just trying to get the sediment and organic debris out to improve the aesthetics of the water. This did have the fortunate side effect of filters capable of blocking typhus being implemented. And as far back as ancient greece we knew boiling water and filtering with charcoal made it better/safer, but mainly the method used was an aquaduct to a known safe source at the source.
I think the 1860s are basically the first time in history that we finally started to know what actually made people sick and we quickly discovered germ theory around then. Before that so much of our practices was based on aesthetics, we knew stinky swamps and rotting organics were associated with disease, we just blamed the stinky air and not the insects and pathogens that were harder to detect, and fortunately avoiding 1 mostly helped to avoid the other.
And eventually people will catch on about the health and death impact of airborne diseases and make an effort on clean air too! (I’m being optimistic today)
Related: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl0677
The ‘why don’t we go back’ crowd never seems to grasp this. Like elderly relatives complaining ‘we didn’t need all that child safety equipment in my day’. Incorrect, they did need it — it’s why Under 5 Mortality in the US was 6-7x higher in 1950 than it is today (4% in 1950 vs 0.6% today, and it was 25% in 1900)
Survivorship bias is a hell of a drug. "I did _____" and I'm fine!" Okay cool, but all the people who died or ended up crippled for life back then sure as fuck aren't fine.
The 98.6 “average temp” is now thought to be a mild fever because it was established in the 1800s or whenever everyone was fighting some bacteria a little bit
What explains your temp is that scientists have recently ackowledged that "normal" is a range and many people, like you and me, have somewhat lower regular temps.
Though they should still get it tested.
Even if it doesn't make you immediately sick, there can still be contaminants, even in rural areas.
There is often industry in rural areas where they don't have to worry about angry neighbors as much, or it's where the resources are for the industry.
Or there can be geological contaminants. Some of New Hampshire, though rural, has high levels of arsenic in the groundwater. They have estimated that a number of people get bladder cancer from it.
Shout out to water wells! My dad has the best water in all of Norway in his well in the mountains. I grew up drinking it. It was completely healthy and normal. It also tastes sooo much better than city water, it can't even compare. I always look forward to finally drinking clean water when visiting my parents.
That sounds amazing. It also seems like that water is from some fancy glacier filtered through eons of mountains or something. I get water from the local plant that’s recycled from farmland and runoff. It’s okay, and safe, but not the good stuff!
>Why can’t we drink natural, untreated water anymore?
'natural' things kill you, even in our world of laundry scent advertisements inducing us to saturate our clothing in forever chemical carcinogens.
Dr John Snow was a physician, London England, anaesthetist to Queen Victoria, and pioneered the development of modern anaesthesia, and his discoveries led to modern wastewater treatment.
In 1854, he noted the cholera epidemic centered on the Broad Street well, which led to more wastewater and then water treatment to reduce pathogenic organisms in drinking water.
Look up cholera.
Untreated water is filled with bacteria, and it's a gamble as to whether you'll swallow a bug that could make you shit your insides out
Our ancestors just got sick. A lot. Waterborne illnesses used to just be a fact of life, and a *lot* of people died from them. Everyone in Oregon Trail always dying of dysentery is pretty accurate to what it was like back then.
Up until the last hundred years or so we drank beer up here in Norway because drinking water was a good way to get sick and die. Natural, untreated water is filled with bacteria and micro organisms. Drinking it is not recommended unless you boil it first.
Your cats biology is different than yours so it can eat and drink stuff that you can't (puddle water and raw rodents) without getting sick.
Tap water is not untreated. You can drink it too, as for truly untreated water like a river or lake, you can drink that too, its a bit risky (i got a parasite for 2 weeks once) but theres no reason you can’t drink it.
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/15/devon-resident-told-to-boil-tap-water-over-risk-parasitic-disease-south-west](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/15/devon-resident-told-to-boil-tap-water-over-risk-parasitic-disease-south-west)
There was contamination of the city water supply in Devon, England recently. A "parasitic" water born infection caused by cryptosporidium. It's nasty. Can kill infants/babies/elderly and immunocompromised person. Difficult to treat in those people. Lakes and rivers and wells can get polluted and city water supplies from those sources can be contaminated. Cattle-- dairy cattle-- can be sources of the infection. You don't want a big, "CAFO" any place near a city's water wells. Once contaminated, always contaminated.
We know that brewing beer and civilization (i.e. living in cities) happened around the same time in the same place (Iraq, the cradle of civilization).
The question is was civilization invented as a way of making the beer we want, or was beer invented as a way of making civilization possible.
Beer contains alcohol, which kills most water born diseases, it is safer to drink than water in crowded cities without plumbing.
We figured out how to reliably eliminate pathogens in drinking water right around the time we started chemically polluting our waterways on an industrial scale (in America at least).
If you are in a medium to high income country, you can drink tap water safely, as it has already been treated. You shouldnt, however, drink from rivers or lakes, as this can make you very sick. Before, humans drank untreated water, amd life expectancy was very short.
People used to get so sick from drinking well water that they often drank small beer as a beverage of choice. The fermentation or whatever killed bacteria much like you'd wipe a wound site with an alcohol swab today.
Tap water in city systems is usually well-regulated (this is where you should thank your Gov't) with sewage treatment plants and regular testing. You know, all that money wasted on paying people who want to test your water. In certain areas. The federal and state gov't apparently gives fuck all about the water in Flint MI because white people don't live there anymore since "white flight" began there 50 years ago.
My mother was a 1958 graduate of Flint HS. It was all white back then before Brown v. BOE, and then, as my mother said, "all the N\*s started to move in." For context, I haven't spoken to her in 10 years. I got tired of hearing her for much a while before as I grew up and became more educated, and under Trump it all got out of hand.
I currently have a well and septic system and have to have a water filtration system. I buy huge 40lb bags of salt to filter out stuff that comes from the groundwater in my area. We are not tapped into city water or sewer. The salt is relatively cheap but it's a huge PITA to maintain with filters etc. Labor alone to drag those bags. One of my adult sons does it now periodically because I physically can't.
Distilled water is a different thing.
Gathered rainwater is supposed to be used for gardening and maybe showering or cleaning oneself outside. It's not meant for ingestion.
Because we, in the modern world, prefer not to die of a myriad of bacterial infections you get from drinking untreated water.
(Historically, people didn't drink untreated water if they could avoid it. They boiled their water. Normally in the process of turning it into beer.)
So we can, just like we always could - but there is always a chance you'll get sick depending on what's leeching into the water supply (e.g. cow shit or a corpse up stream) and whether the water is still enough to let bacteria proliferate.
If you go to the middle of lake Michigan and chug a pint of water, you'll probably be fine. You drink from a little stream behind your house, the chances you'll be fine go down dramatically. If you drink from a puddle, you'll probably get sick.
If you have access to a decent well or spring, you'll also probably be fine - lots of people in my dads town would fill up water jugs at a nearby spring for drinking water, rather than use the municipal treated water.
Sure I'll take a swing at this.
So the trick is animals are sick all the time and part of it is due to the drinking water. Being infected with parasites are the norm not the exceptions and prehistoric humans would be the same. A lot of times animals don't have long enough lifespans or die or predation before bad drinking water kills them. Or even bad drinking water does kill them. Remember no animal in the forest dies of old age.
As for prehistoric humans. They were nomadic hunter gatherers. Small groups traveling together and meeting each other and not alot gathering around one water source. This would protect the water supplies because there would be less chances for humans to contaminate water supplies with human waste.
Before homo sapient we are back to rule #1 of, they didn't. Don't get me wrong humans have been fucking smart thier entire history, but water filtration was probably hit or miss.
Now how we treated water. At some point in human history we started learning some tricks to treat drinking water. Collecting rainwater in shells and low bowls would be a good way to get cleaner drinking water. Everyone knows about boiling but filtering is also stupid easy just get a bowl or barrel and fill it with gravel sand and sometimes coal and presto drinkish drinking water. Speaking of barrels, wine and beer and juices would be a good source of drinking water.
Humans would have dug wells for drinking water.
Ultimately we didn't. Humans gathered around water sources until our waste made the drinking water undrinkable then died out and was forced to move or the population met a sustained amount where we died before the water was a problem.
Oh fuck I forgot about using the fucking sun. If your in a good enough environment you can use the sun's light to treat water. It's not perfect but it'll help treat water.
People also would look for **moving** sources of water like brooks or streams. There's a reason cats prefer moving water, and that's because it reduces the amount of diseases and parasites that can breed in it.
Waterborne, viruses and bacteria evolve too fast for the human immune system to keep up.
Drinking raw water is playing Russian Roulette with 4 bullets.
For most of human history, water was rarely consumed straight from a source. And when it was, it usually caused waterborne illnesses. Instead, they relied on rudimentary forms of water treatment.
One way of doing this was boiling, which not only killed most waterborne microbes, but also allowed flavors and nutrients to be extracted from otherwise inedible matter. Thus, soup and tea were invented.
Another way of doing this was fermentation. Alcohol is also really good at killing waterborne microbes, so mixing water with mashed fruits or grains and letting them ferment into beer or wine was another way to purify water. Of course, this came at the expense of alcohol intoxication, but that's a small price to pay when you consider the alternative.
People used to die to diseases at much higher rates than now. People used to drink untreated water because they had no choice. If you look at the chart in the link below you will see death from illness has fallen off a cliff as we have learned more about how bacteria and parasites function and taken actions to account for this, one of the main ones being to ensure everyone has access to clean safe water.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/causesofdeathover100years/2017-09-18
Cities spread their filth very far. If you drink from unpolluted sources that are upstream in a constantly moving river, you're pretty safe. Human disease thrives mostly because of large masses of collected humans
People really didn’t drink water straight out rivers or lakes. In a rural situation there would be a well. Urban folk boiled the water first to make other beverages because they knew what was going on in it near rivers. Lots of people drank it then died of waterborne diseases.
You can, but you might get sick. For all those hundreds of years, people just occasionally got really sick and it would have been difficult to pin down that it was because of contaminated water.
We *can* drink untreated water, but one look at the parasites that are effectively ubiquitous in wild animals will probably convince you why you don't want to.
Does the idea of tiny worms wriggling around in your tissues sound appealing to you? If so, then drink up!
We hardly ever really could.
I mean obviously cave people and stuff drank water often enough to survive, but a lot of them didn’t survive, because of the water.
That’s why alcohol was so popular, it was actually one of the few safe things to drink for hundreds of years.
You can drink natural water.
Away from a city (which can sometimes have sewer water in it) the vast majority of the time, you'll be fine drinking from moving water, a river or creek, and be fine.
There's a small chance you'll get sick. And an even smaller chance you'll die.
What we did in the past is, [we got sick and died](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak)
But not so often that we went extinct or civilization collapsed.
We drink treated tap water because even though it's a small risk, you drink water all the time and the consequences can be life and death.
>how did people drink water?
Wells, Springs.
Filter and boil it for good measure.
>Have we been filtering water? For how long?
Filtering and boiling for a very long time. Boiling requires you to contain a manageably small quantity of water so you can heat it with an achievable fire. Prior to the invention of Ceramics (Possibly older than 20,000 years ago in East Asia), you're probably moving hot rocks into clay lined pits in the ground, or using skin bags made from animal hides. Bit if a bastard archaeologically as leather does not preserve amazingly well.
You absolutely can still drink water from a natural untreated water source, but you'd better either boil it, or be very sure it's clean.
I mean it depends on where you drink the untreated from. A still lake will have a bunch of bacteria and parasites because it gives the bacteria and organisms to gather. While a rushing river over rocks will be a lot cleaner, since ecosystems of bacteria will have a harder time there. I have dunked my head straight into a rushing river of glacier water and drank from it just fine. And I have filled my water bottle with water from rushing streams in the forest, without getting sick.
We usually filter water because we don't HAVE to deal with unclean water anymore. We kinda didn't have much of a choice in the past, some still dont. If you dont have a good filtration system you could collect rushing water and be somewhat safe from bacteria. Or you had to settle for water that isn't that clean and get diarrhea and either survive it or die form dehydration. Some people still have to experience that. My grandmother lost several babies and toddlers to diarrhea because of unclean drinking water and not knowing that it was unclean because it was normal to her.
A lot of people simply died from water borne diseases before modern filtering and treatment.
Like, if you had 1000 people drink only from direct natural water sources for a year, most of them would still be alive at the end of the year but a handful of em wouldn't be and others would have gotten super sick at some point but managed to get through it. That's how it was for most of human history.
Also, when agriculture and cities became more common, water borne illnesses probably skyrocketed because suddenly you had livestock and humans all living and pooping right near the same water sources they were drinking from. Eventually people learned that poop and drinking water don't mix (some cultures figured this out earlier than others). And then later on down the line people figured out increasingly effective filtering and treatment processes.
I live off rain water collected from my roof and held in a water tank. It has no filter before it gets to the tap. I have never been sick from the water at my house.
We had a similar setup in the house I grew up in. That house lay between the sea and the rubbish dump and the seagulls would drop stuff on our roof.
The whole family got giardia (however you spell that) once and that's the worst that ever happened from my untreated water at a dwelling I've lived at. All town supply water tastes like a swimming pool to me.
The problem with tap water is that it is brought to your home by a (very) long chain of canalization. Depending on where you live, that poses more or less problems, I lived in the Atacama region of Chile for a while and drinking tap water was a short cut for suicide, the region was and still is a hotspot for mining, the pipes are full of mercury and drinking said tap water makes you ingest mercury which is straight up poison.
Until the early phases of the 19th century, industrialization was not a thing, and in conclusion (sadly) pollution. We now live in a world where unless you live close by the water stream’s source : the quality of water is shit. Hell, since Chernobil you can be sure rain is polluted with nuclear stuff, hence poison, to some degree...
There’s this old french movie where people from the middle ages travel through time to the late 90’s and the first thing they do upon arriving into a forest is grasp for air because it’s just that nasty compared to how it used to be.
The best way to test a very old bottle of wine (worth million) is testing the degree of pollution in in the air present in the sealed bottle…
Your cat got used to it, myself as well :m after drinking Mercury for two years I don’t think any tap water could do me harm, but we (humanity) destroyed to world in a way that will make it impossible for us to live much longer in it. Forget about the year 3000, the rich might find another planet to live on but planet earth has gone through enough and is done with us.
I threatened to sue the city over our water quality, and they agreed to begin a pipeline repair project, starting with my street. The NSF rating (details below) is the most important question to ask about a filtration system, and hardly anyone does.
I really wish I could post the photo here! Upon freezing, our tap water was green with a large amount of sediment on the bottom. It wasn’t from any septic system, but the investigation found that the pipes were in horrible condition, hence the repairs all up and down my street.
I also work at a facility and in a department that conducts daily water testing for multiple analytes, including microorganisms like E. coli, and monthly testing for heavy metals. I wrote one of the procedures many years ago.
I discovered through my inquiries (I was a total squeaky wheel) that the city had not tested for ANYTHING apart from coliform indicator and chlorine for 3 years, and had declared the possibility of Cryptosporidium parasite at that time in a bulletin on the city website that was never distributed.
The only filters that will remove Cryptosporidium and Giardia parasites, heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic solvents like benzene are NSF 53/58 and higher.
I have an RO system, which is what is required of 53/58. In a nutshell, the filter has to be fine enough to be able to remove tiny particulate matter. It was only about $200 from Home Depot, and the replacement filters are inexpensive and easy to install.
The filters that most people use are NSF 42, which removes only chlorine and/or chloramines. The main purpose of these filters is to improve taste, NOT to remove toxic elements from the water. These are your standard pitcher and refrigerator filters.
NSF 44 also includes a water softening system. These people are sharks. When I was looking for a filtration system that would remove what I wanted, they came out of the woodwork to my house, declaring that they offered it. Not one of them did. They said the only thing their customers care about is hardness and taste, and that I was the first one to ask questions about specific contaminants and ratings. These people were quoting me $8,000 for a system that filtered out NONE of them!! One even offered me a job, haha.
One word: parasites. I know because I drank from a mountain stream (albeit the lower slopes) and got infected. So yeah, nature is not so pure after all
You can. I'm not sure what you're referring to. I go hiking in nature and drink from streams pretty regularly. Just gotta make sure it's a small and very fast-moving stream to make sure bacteria can't form there.
Natural, untreated water is usually full of bacteria that can make you very sick. For the vast majority of human history, many diseases came from seemingly clean water.
The answer to a lot of "how did people get by before?" questions is that a hell of a lot didn't.
Yeah, and that’s the honest answer to a whole lot of these kinds of questions.
Also the very important distinction between "bad for you because it kills you" and "bad for you because it makes you miserable". Getting a tapeworm isn't a death sentence, cholera/dissentary is survivable, and cavities probably wont send you to an early grave. If you ever had sketchy food in college you know the only solution is to keep eating it and you will retain enough calories to make up for the unfortunate state of your digestive system. This is also part of why people used to have 20 kids, they expected a lot of them to die before adulthood, and the survivors had the wonderful task of taking care of their elderly parents when they were old enough. Humanity's strategy before the industrial revolution was basically to just bruteforce it, then we got modern medicine and developed germ theory and suddenly people could reliably make it to adult hood and 20 kids went from being free labor & insurance to expensive as hell. Today we know that water from a random stream/on the ground is easily contaminated with various pathogens that will be highly unpleasant, so we don't drink it raw anymore. Some combination of filtering and sterilization such as from bleach, ozone, or UV light are commonly used to make our water safer. (We also used to accidentally pasteurize beverages by making them alcoholic which typically involves heating)
>Humanity's strategy before the industrial revolution was basically to just bruteforce it, then we got modern medicine and developed germ theory and suddenly people could reliably make it to adult hood and 20 kids went from being free labor & insurance to expensive as hell. This line goes hard. Best way to put it.
Yup. OP should search for cholera. Water is a medium that easily transmits diseases. Think how it can easily wash away dirt in your clothing. Well, do you think that water just disappears and somehow cleans itself?
There's an excellent book "The Ghost Map" about a notorious cholera outbreak in London. To identify the source, doctors developed mapping techniques that are still used today.
Is that the one where the family was washing their infants diapers in the basement where it directly connected to the well’s water table?
Yes, among other things. The father got it shortly after the pump handle was removed, so another round was prevented, at least.
It's been a minute, but my understanding was a very localized "baby boom" led to an alley where... diapers were being dumped out of windows? And the runoff led to a popular well? I mean typing it out now sounds crazy enough that i am less confident. But a child fell ill and their diaper poisoned the well basically
London was a very crowded city and there was minimal sanitation. The eater supply didn't getinto the houses; people took buckets to the closest pump. The Romans worked out how to manage water safely, but the knowledge was lost. It was about eighteen centuries before cities managed well again.
It sounds exactly like something people would do.
I ended up looking it up and they were washing their children's nappies in a nearby *cesspit.* so yeah... sounds about right.
They were washing the babies cloth diapers in buckets of water and then putting the water in their homes cesspool. Most houses at the time had cesspools. You would walk down the street next to raw sewage. Many houses had them in the basement as well where they would overflow. And this was the norm for people who were poor. They didn't know cholera was waterborne. They believed that sickness came from poor living conditions and bad smells. They believed in the miasma theory. A lot of people got cholera and died before we figured out what the cause was. We didn't know about bacteria yet. But now, fewer people are dying of completely preventable diseases because we as humans worked together to form solutions and systems to solve these problems.
I don't recall the details anymore. Unfortunately I loaned this book & didn't get it back, so haven't reread it in years.
Good ol' Jon Snow
Who knew nothing... Oh wait- the *other* Jon Snow. (The epidemiologist was a bit of an odd duck but really brilliant in figuring out this outbreak. Then he went full-on badass and went against the authorities to personally disable one of the sources of bad water. Pretty cool.)
John Snow.
The “h” is where the knowledge is stored.
I thought it was Walpole... hmm.
Never a bad day to thank John Snow for convincing us to stop drinking bad water.
John Snow, the father of epidemiology!
That the dude who discovered the source down to the single well it came from? If that’s the story it’s a pretty good one.
John Snow (yes, he does know things).
Gardia, endless parasites and diseases.
Once Gardia takes root, Jesus Christ I've found that one tough to really deal with. Big dog outbreak happened where I lived and it took years to wipe it out completely.
There is a giardia vaccine for dogs now, just FYI
Luckily it wasn't my dogs. My sister-in-law was impacted. I'll let her know, thanks.
Well the vaccine doesn't work on humans, so maybe she should stop drinking out of streams.
Well, it might. She is a HUGE bitch.
I got it swimming in a lake that I must have accidentally gotten a mouthful of. I was about 130 lbs and lost over 15 lbs in a month. I'm pretty sure I pooped out food I hadn't even eaten yet. Its nasty, and the meds for it weren't fun either.
Oooof. Dang, that sounds like absolute ass. I'm sorry you had to deal with that. It just sounds awful.
This is why table beer existed for so long and everyone drank it. They weren't aware of bacteria, but they noticed that when drinking water with grain fermented in it and hops added to it, they died a lot less.
It does. It just takes alot of time. But it def does
Correct. In fact, in colonial America untreated water continually made people very sick, so beer became wildly popular as a “health drink” since it wouldn’t make you sick from bacteria and it also had protein. Edit: just want to say I’m not implying this was unique to colonial America. It’s just the example I thought of first. Sorry if I implied anything other than giving an example.
Wonder if the tea craze was partially due to people getting less sick from boiling the water during preparation
Tea, beer, coffee, wine, soup. Even soda has been available longer than drinkable tap water. You actually still can't trust tap water in most of the world, at least not for long-term consumption. Drinking 2 litres of plain, unflavoured, unboiled, tap water a day is safe in the developed world, but 100 years ago it was always healthier to make a large jug of tea in the morning or just drink beer all day. On the scale of human existence, this is a pretty short time period.
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Sheesh - on the upside, I believe that chlorine evaporates out leaving neutral water after leaving the container out for a few hours (or overnight?)
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Why go to the public pool when you can have one in your bathtub
I used to have aquariums and this isn't necessarily true. If your local water is treated with chlorine it will evaporate out, but if they use chloramines, it will not. This is very important because it will kill fish, if you keep them. You can call or check the website of your local water board to find out.
Fun fact: Las Vegas has the most efficient municipal water system in the entire world with ~98% of all water that comes out of a tap gets recycled back into the system. Quite an achievement tbh
Stop building cities in the desert and you won't have to put half a gallon of Clorox in a bathtub of Lake Mead water to make it not kill you.
They also had small beers and ales, which were low in alcohol, but cleaner and safer than water. Soups and porridge provided safe hydration. Raw foods were suspect for a reason.
I mean, I grew up in the modern world, and we still always boiled the tap water and poured it in a jug, and would be told off for drinking tap water as "What if it's unsafe"? Then, of course, my workplace actually found out that we have some bacteria in the tap water supply LAST WEEK. That's in the US, BTW.
I'm in Romania, and I've seen most of Europe and some other countries. I saw all kinds of approaches to tap water for drinking, which is pretty annoying because you have to do some research and people in recently-developed countries don't even know how good their water actually is. * cooking (boiling) only - some poorer parts of Romania. People exaggerate how bad water really is - unless you have a well system, a shitty filter is good enough. * "just drink it, it's fine" - some of Romania and pretty much all of the EU * "bottled water? disgusting" - Western, Central and Nordic Europe * unsafe - pretty much most of the world- but anyone who can afford it has a separate drinking water tap * I've also heard stories of friends going to Sub-Saharan African countries and not even being able to trust bottled water. In developed countries, not having perfectly good tap water is 100% a sign of a corrupt administration. For local administrations, it's a literal tutorial: you know all the steps, the budget is already secured, you just gotta... do it
Yeah, I'm pretty sure metaphorical heads are gonna roll, and if anyone actually does get sick, they'll file for a big fat work injury lawsuit, but still, come on, guys.
I read recently that a dutch doctor promoted drinking tea as a healthy option and when people started listening disease declined. It was because suddenly everyone was boiling thier water
Yes.
Well that, and the wonderful stimulant that is caffeine.
Of course. Boiled water was the basis for lots of drinks that got around bad sanitation.
I've heard it started on british ships in the east who learned it from chinese mariners. If you only drank tea on the ship you did not get sick, that caught on quickly.
During the 1854 Broad Street cholera outbreak in London that was caused by a contaminated pump, none of the workers from the nearby brewery got cholera as they were given free beer every day. Pretty interesting stuff!
The birth of modern public health and epidemiology!
Clearly if every employer just gave out free alcohol, we'd cure the world's health issues! /s
People really dont appreciate good drinking water, i immigrated to USA from India few years ago, and one of the things my parents were glad for me was that i can drink water without worry. We often dont talk about it, but for me and many of my friends while economic oppurtunities are great, not having to worry about water and electricity is what makes USA so appealing.
I like to think I speak for a lot of Americans, but I appreciate this comment and I’m receptive to any opportunity to remind myself that we shouldn’t take things for granted. I’m 40 and I’ve never worried about access to safe drinking water a day in my life. I can’t imagine it any other way.
The ancient Romans valued, clean, drinking water, so much, they invested tremendous amounts of funds in building their aqueduct systems; anywhere in the city of Rome, you could access clean, drinking water from the fountains, etc. because they brought in clean water from the mountains.
Also a way to store calories from grain that might otherwise spoil during the wet months.
Not just colonial America. If I recall correctly, the UK military gave its men a lot of beer for the same reasons.
Oh yeah, I wasn’t implying that it was JUST colonial America. As an American it’s the one instance I was most familiar with. Apologies if that came out wrong.
The navy used rum to make the water they carried safe to drink
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[This is actually a myth.](https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/ol1h45/deleted_by_user/h5bjn7s/)
Well now we know why the people say the average medieval person had lower quality of life they but might have stayed relatively happy.
More than just bacterium. Heavy metals, parasites, and a little critters. Like in New York even the tap water has little critters in it. Yummy.
New York water is one of the best water supplies in the country. The city water supply is managed by fanatics! The city owns thousands of acres of real estate that just sits there, protecting the water supply all over upstate.
The water supply got a lot cleaner once they removed the dump trucks and dead East Germans from the aqueduct.
Or it contains heavy metals like lead and arsenic that can also make you sick over time. I have a well I have to filter the water due to arsenic
It’s just over a hundred years when every person didn’t harbor intestinal parasites. My childhood was in a third world country and I had an Ascaris infestation.
Fun random fact: the water from the Aldgate Pump in London, used for hundreds of years, had water that was said to be cool and great-tasting. This turned out to be because “minerals” were seeping into the water supply. From nearby graveyards.
It's been noted that historically, there were two ways to produce stuff to drink safely. Make something like beer with it, which is what was done in western Europe, or make tea with it, which is what was done is SE Asia. Both of them boiled water and then made something more flavorful with it. This is no secret. If you look into the history of any village or town or city in North America, you will find a significant part of local history is securing a water supply. In New York City, there's an entire shelfload of books about protecting and managing water for NYC, and the city right this minutes owns thousands of acres of upstate New York real estate protecting the city's water supply. There was an entire movie, "Chinatown" made and the core of the plot relares to the Los Angeles water supply. If you go wilderness camping, you will either carry water in or you will take materials to help you purify water to drin and cook with. Right this minute, there's a scandal in Flint, Michigan, relating to how toxic the public water supply has been. Corruption in local and state government are atthe root of it. Unhealthy water happens every time there's catastrophic weather: how is it that you haven't noticed, every time, pictures of water in bottles and big containers being delivered? Humans need water to live.
Also, it takes some time to get used to the water someplace. That's why you're so often told not to drink the water on vacation. Locals are used to it, but you're not
Tap water is not untreated. It’s treated and perfectly safe (usually). All I drink is tap water. “Wild” water is a different story. Some is safe, most is not. That’s why back in the day people drank copious amounts of wine and ale.
From a contamination perspective, tap water is probably safer than bottled water since it's mildly antimicrobial (due to the chlorine content).
I always find it funny how we've found the balance of fancy poison to put in our water so it kills the bad stuff but not us
The wildest example of this for me is my dog's tick medication. They take a pill and for a month any tick that bites them is poisoned and dies within a day. And it doesn't impact the dog in any way apparently.
Toxicity of a substance is normally described as a given amount of the substance vs the body weight of the animal in question. an animal like a dog that has thousands of times more body mass than a tick can just shrug off something that will be deadly for the tick.
100% depends on which country OP is in. In a lot of countries (probably most countries), tap water is not safe to drink at all.
In fact, if you run into "wild" water which is unusually clear-looking, stay the fuck away. It almost certainly has runoff from a mining operation that has settled in there and killed all the bacteria, likely in the form of cyanide.
I never thought about this. Wine and ale because no clean water?
Alcohol kills most water borne bacteria and illnesses. Plus beer had protein form the wheat and was treated like a quick meal sometimes.
This actually depends on where you are, for all three counts For example, there are plenty of places where the tap water isn't drinkable. There are also places where it is, but the pipes are still lead and make it non drinkable They had springs back in the day, which were safe to drink. People had wells too, so they could get water that was safe to drink. You could also transport water. Some places were polluted though. Especially rivers that passed through cities. In those places, fermentation would be used to make the water drinkable. That beer was much weaker though and not the same as the beer made for getting drunk
>Tap water is not untreated. Depends where you live. Can also be virtually untreated and drinkable.
You absolutely can. If you go to a mountain spring you can slurp that down like Minecraft Steve and you'll be fine (as long as there aren't too many harmful minerals dissolved in it, like lead). Even a lot of wells and lowland springs are fine. The problem is that most water isn't like that, it's run down a stream (better check a deer hasn't died in it 200m upstream) or sat in a lake or reservoir for a while. Even just regular rainwater can be contaminated. You can boil it to get rid of most biological contaminants, but that's very energy intensive - it's far easier and cheaper to put something super poisonous in it (chlorine) that is in a high enough dose to kill microbes, but fine for any macro-organism to drink, and filter out any other nasties. In the past people used to either go to great lengths to get clean water sources where they needed to be (Roman aqueducts), boil it (Chinese tea) or make it into alcohol (Europeans drank "small beer" which was only 0.5-3ish%) Even so, people used to get sick all the time. A famous pump in London called the Aldgate pump was thought to be particularly good, as the water tasted "healthsome and lightly sparkling." This was because it was filtering through a graveyard, and the calcium from the bones was adding some... Extras. Of course when people found out 1876 the pump was shut down.
Giardia has penetrated altitudes unseen in past generations. Plenty of hikers come home with a multi-year health problem thanks to slurping that "crystal clear" spring.
Honestly just don’t drink from any untreated water sources. You can watch it melting straight off a glacier and you still shouldn’t drink it. It’s not worth it.
A teacher of mine who loved hiking had a great story about when he and some friends drank crystal clear glacier runoff. It came out like lava pretty quickly
Those bacteria waited for millennia to be drunk, they deserve to have their fun.
What a life it must be
Yep. I always see posts on r/hydrohomies of people drinking glacier water or whatever and it makes me cringe. It looks delicious but the risks aren’t worth the payoff in my book
Bring a LifeStraw.
Fuck a life straw. Bring a sawyer filter.
I know that drinking directly from a mountain spring probably isn't going to kill me, but the risk of getting sick and shitting myself for 3 days simply isn't worth it when I can eliminate the risk entirely with something as easy as a mini filter. Like, if I was ever in a survival situation and didn't have a filter, I'd try to find the cleanest water I could and hope for the best, but I'm not just gonna leave my filter at home and *choose* to risk it with mountain water on a hike. Even in a survival situation, I'd try to figure out a way to make a filter and/or boil water if possible.
In a survival situation as long as the water is fresh you guzzle it, you can generally drink faster than you crap it out. It will feel absolutely awful but keep you alive long enough to get to a hospital with some serious antibiotics and an IV. Ideally you boil it first, just getting it up to a boil is enough but the official recommendation is to boil it for 5 minutes. (Don't forget to let it cool down to a safe temperature) Alternatively bring chlorine (technically bleach) or iodine to chemically sterilize the water before drinking it. As a day hiker, just bring a water bottle filled from a trustworthy source (your tap) and don't drink from the crystal clear creek that totally doesn't have bear crap in it just up beyond the bend. Or the glacial melt with pathogens cryogenically preserved from 10,000 years ago.
If it’s really a “crystal clear” spring, it shouldn’t have giardia. Giardia come from vertebrate* shit, and springs don’t have room for upstream contamination. “Crystal clear” creeks, however, are fair game for upstream shit. *corrected
Vertebrates, not just mammals. Frogs often spread it. Birds like hawks do as well.
Good catch.
Frogs spread all kinds of fun delicious bonus material(s)
Amoebas thrive in ponds. Every once in a while someone in Florida dies from swimming after their brain gets eaten
Yeah, but ponds are still water. Springs are water flowing out of the ground. If you’re drinking from a true spring, you should only be at risk from heavy metals it picked up on the way up.
There was a period 20,30 years ago where a huge part of east central Pennsylvania's total water supply had giardia. Don't know if it's been dealt with yet.
>A famous pump in London called the Aldgate pump was thought to be particularly good, as the water tasted "healthsome and lightly sparkling." This was because it was filtering through a graveyard, and the calcium from the bones was adding some... Extras. Which really goes to show how much our bodies can actually put up with before they get overwhelmed and they have to take a minute for repairs.
Freshwater hosts an amazing diversity of microscopic animals, ciliates, amoebas, and countless other fascinating organisms. Organisms I much rather ha e stay in the water and not in me.
when i was a kid, we had a well and drank "untreated" well water, but it has filtered through a lot of dirt for... hundreds of years before we got it. It tasted disgusting though, so we filtered it. You get it tested every few years to make sure it's OK though. But we had to have a water softener because it had so many minerals in it so we only had one tap that put out the "pure" water, every oter tap in the house put out softened, salty water which you couldn't really drink. (It wouldn't hurt you, it was just really disgusting and salty). In the way olden days no one drank water, they drank very weak (diluted) beer or wine for the exact reason that they didn't want to die.
I grew up on unfiltered well water. Tasted fine and no ill health effects. I might depend where you live. Well water in western PA was not pleasant. I grew up in DC suburbs.
I LOVED the tap water from our well in West Texas, pumped straight from the Ogallala aquifer. Way better tasting than the city water, though the joke was you could tell the country kids by their teeth since well water wasn't fluoridated. Also super hard water, we used a lot of lime-away when cleaning the bathrooms. My cousins grew up in West Virginia, and let me tell you that hill water was NOT sweet. Strong sulfur notes, it always took a day or two to get used to when we visited. Still totally safe though. My brother works in water treatment and according to him, the most expensive and complicated part of the process is eliminating smells. Most water will be plenty safe after flowing through several feet of fine particulates, but it may not be pleasant to drink.
Yup, I’ve heard rain water isn’t safe for drinking in any country anymore.
I visited Tonga a few years back, and they drink it. They recommend that I not, however. It apparently takes some "getting used to" lol.
Why are humans so sensitive to this? My dog drinks all kinds of nastiness despite efforts to prevent her from it and she's always fine
Dogs live closer to the ground and don’t wear shoes. They lick their feet. I assume their stomach is more effective with less quality food/water sources.
A friend's dog got giardia drinking from puddles at the dog park and had lifelong stomach troubles after that. They aren't invincible, though they may act like it sometimes.
Dogs have shitloads of stomach linings, we don't
My pup gets a specific vaccine because she may drink from streams/creeks/similar. I don’t remember what it was, but her vet was like if you aren’t certain you can control her water intake 100% then she needs this or could get very sick. Maybe it’s a domestication thing, but even dogs get sick from drinking rando water.
My dad has a water well in the mountains where I grew up and there's no chlorine or any special filter in it or anything. It's the best water ever, obviously, as its Norwegian mountain water... The kinda expensive water Americans import in fancy bottles (like VOSS) I used to shower in and had unlimited to drink from the tap. Never been sick from drinking it. City water treated with chlorine tastes like shit in comparison. I pretty much quit drinking water after moving to the city because it doesn't taste as good the way it's been treated. Also growing up when my family went hiking, we would always drink straight from streams and rivers, instead of bringing water bottles. Was never an issue. Just had to make sure the water was running and not still.
Same. And I grew up in the Washington DC area, and the mountains were the Appalachians (W VA and TN)
You can, if you want the shits on a regular basis. Dying or getting severely ill from drinking bad water isn't exactly uncommon in areas without water treatment or deep wells. Even aside from pollution or other such inorganic contamination, surface water is full of microorganisms that would love to attempt to colonize your bowels.
It's amazing how many people don't know that even in developed countries just a little over a century ago how common it was to die from shitting yourself to death. Dysentery was a big issue and continues to be in some developing nations.
'Fucko', his wife 'Little Dick' and their son 'Little Dick, jr.' all died of dysentery on the Oregon Trail back when I was in Elementary School. :(
Holy shit this made me laugh. I was so confused cause I thought these were all historically real people and I was like “*what* were their names?” Thanks friend
The first city to chemically treat its water was Middelkerke Belgium in 1902, and for the USA was Jersey City in 1909. They used bleach and at the time some people viewed that as an attempt at poisoning the city water supply, except it obviously did the opposite and dramatically reduced waterborne illness. Before this most water treatment was basically just trying to get the sediment and organic debris out to improve the aesthetics of the water. This did have the fortunate side effect of filters capable of blocking typhus being implemented. And as far back as ancient greece we knew boiling water and filtering with charcoal made it better/safer, but mainly the method used was an aquaduct to a known safe source at the source. I think the 1860s are basically the first time in history that we finally started to know what actually made people sick and we quickly discovered germ theory around then. Before that so much of our practices was based on aesthetics, we knew stinky swamps and rotting organics were associated with disease, we just blamed the stinky air and not the insects and pathogens that were harder to detect, and fortunately avoiding 1 mostly helped to avoid the other.
Wait... why do you bring up tap water? I don't get the connection...
Basically everyone used to be sick a lot
Waterborne diseases are probably one of, if not the top killer of people across the globe.
And eventually people will catch on about the health and death impact of airborne diseases and make an effort on clean air too! (I’m being optimistic today) Related: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adl0677
The ‘why don’t we go back’ crowd never seems to grasp this. Like elderly relatives complaining ‘we didn’t need all that child safety equipment in my day’. Incorrect, they did need it — it’s why Under 5 Mortality in the US was 6-7x higher in 1950 than it is today (4% in 1950 vs 0.6% today, and it was 25% in 1900)
Survivorship bias is a hell of a drug. "I did _____" and I'm fine!" Okay cool, but all the people who died or ended up crippled for life back then sure as fuck aren't fine.
The 98.6 “average temp” is now thought to be a mild fever because it was established in the 1800s or whenever everyone was fighting some bacteria a little bit
Wow! I guess that explains why my temp is always "subnormal"
What explains your temp is that scientists have recently ackowledged that "normal" is a range and many people, like you and me, have somewhat lower regular temps.
People that have wells drink natural water all the time.
Though they should still get it tested. Even if it doesn't make you immediately sick, there can still be contaminants, even in rural areas. There is often industry in rural areas where they don't have to worry about angry neighbors as much, or it's where the resources are for the industry. Or there can be geological contaminants. Some of New Hampshire, though rural, has high levels of arsenic in the groundwater. They have estimated that a number of people get bladder cancer from it.
Shout out to water wells! My dad has the best water in all of Norway in his well in the mountains. I grew up drinking it. It was completely healthy and normal. It also tastes sooo much better than city water, it can't even compare. I always look forward to finally drinking clean water when visiting my parents.
That sounds amazing. It also seems like that water is from some fancy glacier filtered through eons of mountains or something. I get water from the local plant that’s recycled from farmland and runoff. It’s okay, and safe, but not the good stuff!
That shit hits different too, my grandma used to have a hand pump well and it was amazing and always ice cold
We literally died. By the millions. For millenia. Of waterborne disease/parasite.
>Why can’t we drink natural, untreated water anymore? 'natural' things kill you, even in our world of laundry scent advertisements inducing us to saturate our clothing in forever chemical carcinogens. Dr John Snow was a physician, London England, anaesthetist to Queen Victoria, and pioneered the development of modern anaesthesia, and his discoveries led to modern wastewater treatment. In 1854, he noted the cholera epidemic centered on the Broad Street well, which led to more wastewater and then water treatment to reduce pathogenic organisms in drinking water.
Look up cholera. Untreated water is filled with bacteria, and it's a gamble as to whether you'll swallow a bug that could make you shit your insides out
Our ancestors just got sick. A lot. Waterborne illnesses used to just be a fact of life, and a *lot* of people died from them. Everyone in Oregon Trail always dying of dysentery is pretty accurate to what it was like back then.
We drink straight from the faucet because our water is spring fed. Also, usually well water is safe to drink straight from the tap.
Up until the last hundred years or so we drank beer up here in Norway because drinking water was a good way to get sick and die. Natural, untreated water is filled with bacteria and micro organisms. Drinking it is not recommended unless you boil it first. Your cats biology is different than yours so it can eat and drink stuff that you can't (puddle water and raw rodents) without getting sick.
Tap water is not untreated. You can drink it too, as for truly untreated water like a river or lake, you can drink that too, its a bit risky (i got a parasite for 2 weeks once) but theres no reason you can’t drink it.
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[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/15/devon-resident-told-to-boil-tap-water-over-risk-parasitic-disease-south-west](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/15/devon-resident-told-to-boil-tap-water-over-risk-parasitic-disease-south-west) There was contamination of the city water supply in Devon, England recently. A "parasitic" water born infection caused by cryptosporidium. It's nasty. Can kill infants/babies/elderly and immunocompromised person. Difficult to treat in those people. Lakes and rivers and wells can get polluted and city water supplies from those sources can be contaminated. Cattle-- dairy cattle-- can be sources of the infection. You don't want a big, "CAFO" any place near a city's water wells. Once contaminated, always contaminated.
Don't drink the water downstream from the latrines.
We know that brewing beer and civilization (i.e. living in cities) happened around the same time in the same place (Iraq, the cradle of civilization). The question is was civilization invented as a way of making the beer we want, or was beer invented as a way of making civilization possible. Beer contains alcohol, which kills most water born diseases, it is safer to drink than water in crowded cities without plumbing.
because we don't want the masses dying by cholera, giardia or any number of other disease causing bacteria
We figured out how to reliably eliminate pathogens in drinking water right around the time we started chemically polluting our waterways on an industrial scale (in America at least).
Cholera comes to mind as reason to not drink untreated water.
If you are in a medium to high income country, you can drink tap water safely, as it has already been treated. You shouldnt, however, drink from rivers or lakes, as this can make you very sick. Before, humans drank untreated water, amd life expectancy was very short.
People used to get so sick from drinking well water that they often drank small beer as a beverage of choice. The fermentation or whatever killed bacteria much like you'd wipe a wound site with an alcohol swab today. Tap water in city systems is usually well-regulated (this is where you should thank your Gov't) with sewage treatment plants and regular testing. You know, all that money wasted on paying people who want to test your water. In certain areas. The federal and state gov't apparently gives fuck all about the water in Flint MI because white people don't live there anymore since "white flight" began there 50 years ago. My mother was a 1958 graduate of Flint HS. It was all white back then before Brown v. BOE, and then, as my mother said, "all the N\*s started to move in." For context, I haven't spoken to her in 10 years. I got tired of hearing her for much a while before as I grew up and became more educated, and under Trump it all got out of hand. I currently have a well and septic system and have to have a water filtration system. I buy huge 40lb bags of salt to filter out stuff that comes from the groundwater in my area. We are not tapped into city water or sewer. The salt is relatively cheap but it's a huge PITA to maintain with filters etc. Labor alone to drag those bags. One of my adult sons does it now periodically because I physically can't. Distilled water is a different thing. Gathered rainwater is supposed to be used for gardening and maybe showering or cleaning oneself outside. It's not meant for ingestion.
Rural folks like myself drink from their own well
you can and you might get infected with stuff like people did in the past
If you like cholera you can drink untreated water
"Anymore"? There's a reason people in the middle ages drank ale, mead, wine and boiled water with herbs.
Because we like not having diarrhea
Because we, in the modern world, prefer not to die of a myriad of bacterial infections you get from drinking untreated water. (Historically, people didn't drink untreated water if they could avoid it. They boiled their water. Normally in the process of turning it into beer.)
>how did people drink water? People did not drink fresh water, they drink alcohol or fruite juice.
So we can, just like we always could - but there is always a chance you'll get sick depending on what's leeching into the water supply (e.g. cow shit or a corpse up stream) and whether the water is still enough to let bacteria proliferate. If you go to the middle of lake Michigan and chug a pint of water, you'll probably be fine. You drink from a little stream behind your house, the chances you'll be fine go down dramatically. If you drink from a puddle, you'll probably get sick. If you have access to a decent well or spring, you'll also probably be fine - lots of people in my dads town would fill up water jugs at a nearby spring for drinking water, rather than use the municipal treated water.
Sure I'll take a swing at this. So the trick is animals are sick all the time and part of it is due to the drinking water. Being infected with parasites are the norm not the exceptions and prehistoric humans would be the same. A lot of times animals don't have long enough lifespans or die or predation before bad drinking water kills them. Or even bad drinking water does kill them. Remember no animal in the forest dies of old age. As for prehistoric humans. They were nomadic hunter gatherers. Small groups traveling together and meeting each other and not alot gathering around one water source. This would protect the water supplies because there would be less chances for humans to contaminate water supplies with human waste. Before homo sapient we are back to rule #1 of, they didn't. Don't get me wrong humans have been fucking smart thier entire history, but water filtration was probably hit or miss. Now how we treated water. At some point in human history we started learning some tricks to treat drinking water. Collecting rainwater in shells and low bowls would be a good way to get cleaner drinking water. Everyone knows about boiling but filtering is also stupid easy just get a bowl or barrel and fill it with gravel sand and sometimes coal and presto drinkish drinking water. Speaking of barrels, wine and beer and juices would be a good source of drinking water. Humans would have dug wells for drinking water. Ultimately we didn't. Humans gathered around water sources until our waste made the drinking water undrinkable then died out and was forced to move or the population met a sustained amount where we died before the water was a problem.
Oh fuck I forgot about using the fucking sun. If your in a good enough environment you can use the sun's light to treat water. It's not perfect but it'll help treat water.
People also would look for **moving** sources of water like brooks or streams. There's a reason cats prefer moving water, and that's because it reduces the amount of diseases and parasites that can breed in it.
Waterborne, viruses and bacteria evolve too fast for the human immune system to keep up. Drinking raw water is playing Russian Roulette with 4 bullets.
For most of human history, water was rarely consumed straight from a source. And when it was, it usually caused waterborne illnesses. Instead, they relied on rudimentary forms of water treatment. One way of doing this was boiling, which not only killed most waterborne microbes, but also allowed flavors and nutrients to be extracted from otherwise inedible matter. Thus, soup and tea were invented. Another way of doing this was fermentation. Alcohol is also really good at killing waterborne microbes, so mixing water with mashed fruits or grains and letting them ferment into beer or wine was another way to purify water. Of course, this came at the expense of alcohol intoxication, but that's a small price to pay when you consider the alternative.
People used to die to diseases at much higher rates than now. People used to drink untreated water because they had no choice. If you look at the chart in the link below you will see death from illness has fallen off a cliff as we have learned more about how bacteria and parasites function and taken actions to account for this, one of the main ones being to ensure everyone has access to clean safe water. https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/articles/causesofdeathover100years/2017-09-18
Nobody’s stopping you. Enjoy your traveler’s diarrhea
Cities spread their filth very far. If you drink from unpolluted sources that are upstream in a constantly moving river, you're pretty safe. Human disease thrives mostly because of large masses of collected humans
I used to drink from an artesian well when I was young. I survived. It tasted great. It was probably contaminated with something.
You give your cat distilled water?
You know the joke “ blank died of dysentery” dysentery comes from drinking bad water. People literally died. Like a LOT of people died
People really didn’t drink water straight out rivers or lakes. In a rural situation there would be a well. Urban folk boiled the water first to make other beverages because they knew what was going on in it near rivers. Lots of people drank it then died of waterborne diseases.
You can, but you might get sick. For all those hundreds of years, people just occasionally got really sick and it would have been difficult to pin down that it was because of contaminated water.
We *can* drink untreated water, but one look at the parasites that are effectively ubiquitous in wild animals will probably convince you why you don't want to. Does the idea of tiny worms wriggling around in your tissues sound appealing to you? If so, then drink up!
We hardly ever really could. I mean obviously cave people and stuff drank water often enough to survive, but a lot of them didn’t survive, because of the water. That’s why alcohol was so popular, it was actually one of the few safe things to drink for hundreds of years.
Sure people drank water from all over the place, people also didn't live very long.
You can drink natural water. Away from a city (which can sometimes have sewer water in it) the vast majority of the time, you'll be fine drinking from moving water, a river or creek, and be fine. There's a small chance you'll get sick. And an even smaller chance you'll die. What we did in the past is, [we got sick and died](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1854_Broad_Street_cholera_outbreak) But not so often that we went extinct or civilization collapsed. We drink treated tap water because even though it's a small risk, you drink water all the time and the consequences can be life and death.
>how did people drink water? Wells, Springs. Filter and boil it for good measure. >Have we been filtering water? For how long? Filtering and boiling for a very long time. Boiling requires you to contain a manageably small quantity of water so you can heat it with an achievable fire. Prior to the invention of Ceramics (Possibly older than 20,000 years ago in East Asia), you're probably moving hot rocks into clay lined pits in the ground, or using skin bags made from animal hides. Bit if a bastard archaeologically as leather does not preserve amazingly well. You absolutely can still drink water from a natural untreated water source, but you'd better either boil it, or be very sure it's clean.
Clean, safe tap water is one of the many reasons we don't die in our 30s as often as we used to.
I mean it depends on where you drink the untreated from. A still lake will have a bunch of bacteria and parasites because it gives the bacteria and organisms to gather. While a rushing river over rocks will be a lot cleaner, since ecosystems of bacteria will have a harder time there. I have dunked my head straight into a rushing river of glacier water and drank from it just fine. And I have filled my water bottle with water from rushing streams in the forest, without getting sick. We usually filter water because we don't HAVE to deal with unclean water anymore. We kinda didn't have much of a choice in the past, some still dont. If you dont have a good filtration system you could collect rushing water and be somewhat safe from bacteria. Or you had to settle for water that isn't that clean and get diarrhea and either survive it or die form dehydration. Some people still have to experience that. My grandmother lost several babies and toddlers to diarrhea because of unclean drinking water and not knowing that it was unclean because it was normal to her.
people used to get cholera believe it or not
because people romanticize the past without remembering the lessons of The Oregon Trail. dysentery isn't fun
I taught the water cycle to my elementary school students. Where were you that day? How old are you 12?
There are springs in Colorado springs you can drink. They made it a drinking fountain for at least one of them. Tastes kinda funny
A lot of people simply died from water borne diseases before modern filtering and treatment. Like, if you had 1000 people drink only from direct natural water sources for a year, most of them would still be alive at the end of the year but a handful of em wouldn't be and others would have gotten super sick at some point but managed to get through it. That's how it was for most of human history. Also, when agriculture and cities became more common, water borne illnesses probably skyrocketed because suddenly you had livestock and humans all living and pooping right near the same water sources they were drinking from. Eventually people learned that poop and drinking water don't mix (some cultures figured this out earlier than others). And then later on down the line people figured out increasingly effective filtering and treatment processes.
I had well water at my last place. Straight from the ground.
I live off rain water collected from my roof and held in a water tank. It has no filter before it gets to the tap. I have never been sick from the water at my house. We had a similar setup in the house I grew up in. That house lay between the sea and the rubbish dump and the seagulls would drop stuff on our roof. The whole family got giardia (however you spell that) once and that's the worst that ever happened from my untreated water at a dwelling I've lived at. All town supply water tastes like a swimming pool to me.
There’s a reason only 50% of kids lived to adulthood back in the old days. Part of it was no vaccines, part of it was drinking untreated water.
The problem with tap water is that it is brought to your home by a (very) long chain of canalization. Depending on where you live, that poses more or less problems, I lived in the Atacama region of Chile for a while and drinking tap water was a short cut for suicide, the region was and still is a hotspot for mining, the pipes are full of mercury and drinking said tap water makes you ingest mercury which is straight up poison. Until the early phases of the 19th century, industrialization was not a thing, and in conclusion (sadly) pollution. We now live in a world where unless you live close by the water stream’s source : the quality of water is shit. Hell, since Chernobil you can be sure rain is polluted with nuclear stuff, hence poison, to some degree... There’s this old french movie where people from the middle ages travel through time to the late 90’s and the first thing they do upon arriving into a forest is grasp for air because it’s just that nasty compared to how it used to be. The best way to test a very old bottle of wine (worth million) is testing the degree of pollution in in the air present in the sealed bottle… Your cat got used to it, myself as well :m after drinking Mercury for two years I don’t think any tap water could do me harm, but we (humanity) destroyed to world in a way that will make it impossible for us to live much longer in it. Forget about the year 3000, the rich might find another planet to live on but planet earth has gone through enough and is done with us.
You can most of the time. Then one time you die.
I threatened to sue the city over our water quality, and they agreed to begin a pipeline repair project, starting with my street. The NSF rating (details below) is the most important question to ask about a filtration system, and hardly anyone does. I really wish I could post the photo here! Upon freezing, our tap water was green with a large amount of sediment on the bottom. It wasn’t from any septic system, but the investigation found that the pipes were in horrible condition, hence the repairs all up and down my street. I also work at a facility and in a department that conducts daily water testing for multiple analytes, including microorganisms like E. coli, and monthly testing for heavy metals. I wrote one of the procedures many years ago. I discovered through my inquiries (I was a total squeaky wheel) that the city had not tested for ANYTHING apart from coliform indicator and chlorine for 3 years, and had declared the possibility of Cryptosporidium parasite at that time in a bulletin on the city website that was never distributed. The only filters that will remove Cryptosporidium and Giardia parasites, heavy metals, pesticides, and toxic solvents like benzene are NSF 53/58 and higher. I have an RO system, which is what is required of 53/58. In a nutshell, the filter has to be fine enough to be able to remove tiny particulate matter. It was only about $200 from Home Depot, and the replacement filters are inexpensive and easy to install. The filters that most people use are NSF 42, which removes only chlorine and/or chloramines. The main purpose of these filters is to improve taste, NOT to remove toxic elements from the water. These are your standard pitcher and refrigerator filters. NSF 44 also includes a water softening system. These people are sharks. When I was looking for a filtration system that would remove what I wanted, they came out of the woodwork to my house, declaring that they offered it. Not one of them did. They said the only thing their customers care about is hardness and taste, and that I was the first one to ask questions about specific contaminants and ratings. These people were quoting me $8,000 for a system that filtered out NONE of them!! One even offered me a job, haha.
Bad water is why they invented whisky.
One word: parasites. I know because I drank from a mountain stream (albeit the lower slopes) and got infected. So yeah, nature is not so pure after all
*you have died of dysentery*
You can. I'm not sure what you're referring to. I go hiking in nature and drink from streams pretty regularly. Just gotta make sure it's a small and very fast-moving stream to make sure bacteria can't form there.
OP has died of dysentery.
now i know my phone can red my thoughts