Water and hand sanitization: some thoughts about technology and hygiene and how not to get sick or make other people sick.
This summer has been full of adventures in and around water, alongside people with and without disease caused by infectious intestinal organisms. It's been lots of fun, and I dearly yearned not to be slowed down by explosive vomiting and diarrhea. Because of this intense yearning not to feel like crap, I have been doing lots of studying and thinking about both hand hygiene and water purification and have been experimenting with various techniques and technologies. Most infectious ills of the gut are transmitted by the fecal-oral route. The bacterium, parasite, virus or other unspecified microorganism must make its way from the feces (or sometimes vomit) of the infected person to the mouth of the new host to be ingested, thence to infect and cause disease. For many conditions it does not take many organisms to cause infection, and some of the causative entities can survive outside of a host in pretty unfriendly environments for various amounts of time (up to around 2 weeks for n...