From: Alan R. Hamm (ahamm@alanhamm.com)
Date: Fri Aug 02 2002 - 07:30:24 CDT
Ditto on the hand washing. Things are just not that sanitary out there and there are several ways to get sick. My son came down with Campylobacter jejuni 2 weeeks before our trek. This was not a good thing, especially since it went undetected by the lab for over a week and the doctor was never informed. We got a call from the CDC. He is very small to start with, but lost about 6 lbs. and was almost too weak to go.
We tried to be extra careful about handwashing just because of our new found knowledge about this type of disease and how it is spread. It is spread by NOT washing ones hand and ingesting the bug. It is quite likely that he got it from someone preparing food at a restaurant who did not wash their hands.
As for water purification. I think we came up with a good system. We got 6 of the Platyapus four liter folding "bladders". They weigh nothing when empty and cost about $15 each. We did ALL of our water purification in these. We knew that water was iffy at may locations so we had the ability to carry a ton of extra water if needed. Unfortunately, we did not have enough Polar Pure to handle all of the purification at one time so we generally did it in two batches. Our key was to have a "water person" as a duty for the day. We also assigned an advisor to observe all purification(s) on a rotating basis. We generally had three distinct areas, one for the unpurified water, one for water in progress and one for "good water". We only got confused once and double purified some, just to be sure. After tasting double purified water, you pay a lot more attention so you don't get mixed up again. By having all purification done centrally, we did not have to worry about individual bottles and threads and unpurified water getting into hydration bladders.
My only complaint was our ranger (who was great) always put drink mix into his Nalgene bottle. We had convinced the crew not to do that and several had bought new ones to avoid having to put them into the bear bags at night. However, rangers are COOL and the boys try very hard to emulate everything they do. The result was that I think I was the only one that ended the week with clean Nalgene bottles. Believe me, with the extra food this year, adding the sheer volume of 8 to 10 to 12 Nalgene bottles to a bear bag was often very difficult. And a huge hassle as we were constantly putting the oops bag up and down to add the contaminated drink containers.
Alan Hamm
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