By SKIP KNOWLES
Oct 17, 2000 (The Salt Lake Tribune)—2K hype was good for something besides canned corn and green Jell- O sales.
Straining muddy water through a sock will always be the first line of aquatic filtration. But the fear of water-system failure during the millennium mayhem-that-wasn't has led to a boom in affordable, portable potable water options.
"Sales of our recreational products went up 40 percent last year because of Y2K," said Shawn Hostetter with PUR, a company that leads in portable outdoor purifiers.
Purification product pushers are counting on customers' growing fears of viruses and bacteria to keep that sales momentum. For now, most people worry about common oral-fecal protozoa; giardia, which is wiped out by simple filtration. In the clean water business, it's purification versus filtration.
PUR has led the industry with a $60 hand pump, but a new squirt bottle product by Exstream Water Technologies is easier to use, less expensive ($39) and offers a higher level of hydro-sanitation, though it is slow, producing a skinny squirted stream.
Manufacturers divide water-cleaning products into three categories: purified, microfiltered and filtered.
1. Purification — Perfect water. A purifier is the top-level H20 home-brew kit, best suited for the traveler and the person who may drink from rivers so vile they carry the kind of diseases you cannot pronounce. Purification is achieved through filtration and then by straining through iodine capsules, which grab the impurities (neutralizing pathogens). Water from a purifier can have a slight iodine taste. The iodine capsule system was originally invented for NASA and banishes Ebola, cholera and hepatitis A.
In order to advertise at "purification" level, products have to pass strict Environmental Protection Agency standards.
2. Really good filtration — Called "microfiltration" by the industry, this high-level filtration stops all the nasty little swimming animals; protozoa and bacteria, in addition to the larger baddies, such as giardia. It doesn't stop viruses like Ebola and hepatitis.
3. Pretty good filtration — Called simply "filtration" by the industry, this level's claim to fame is being "much better than a tube sock." This level gets rid of a few common evils and visible wigglies, and can be used to pan gold. Mosquito larvae, nightcrawlers, crawfish, and sturgeon don't stand a chance. All right, it won't pan gold, but it will oust the two most common nemesis of open water sources, giardia and cryptosporidium, because they come in large cyst packages. But plain old "filtration" gives lots of other aqua-cooties a free hall pass. Giardia is the most common aquatic demon known to hikers. And cryptosporidium? Well, the first five letters spell "crypt," and like, giardia, it has a fecal-oral transmission path.
For crypto there is no cure. The disease runs its course in 7 to 10 days, according to the national Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, according to an article in Backpacker magazine. Crypto likes city waterways, too, and in April of 1993, 400,000 people in Milwaukee were infected, and suffered giardia-like intestinal disease.
Most hikers feel safe with basic filters that strip large protozoa such as giardia and crypto, which dwell in cyst capsules until ingested. That could be a mistake.
"Not everyone is getting sick from giardia. It's more bacteria and viruses now," says Hostetter.
If people were tougher, we wouldn't need this filtration business. In the old days, the best time to drink the water was when the wiggly things slowed down. Giardia was already in everyone's system, said Ann Moran with Exstream, makers of the Extstream squirt bottle.
"People are losing their immunities," she said.
Chlorinated city water killed people's powers of resistance. The same reason tourists get sick on water locals live on. Good old giardia is more rampant than ever in Western streams. The same Backpacker article quoted a noted Colorado State parasitologist as saying "we didn't find a single stream in Colorado, not one, without giardia."
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