Montezuma's revenge

[Brandi]

Awsome info! My best friend is a microbiologist and she couldn't have said it better!

[withm]

Immodium is great to stop the symptoms..... but does nothing for the bug - so you will still feel like c*** until it runs its course. You just won't have the diarhea. I made it through a week in Mexico only to have a scotch and water with ice on the last day.... mistake! Figured the alcohol would kill any bugs. boy was I surprised. Navigating 3 airports to find bathroom every 10 minutes it seemed.

Granted maybe it wasn't the water and ice, could have been the culmination of all the foods over the week but I was still sick.

I am such a chicken after that that I got all the shots I could possibly get when I went to Roatan a couple years later - all the hep series A& B , typohid, tetnaus and probably a few extras.

Good luck and be careful,
Martha

[Duck on Wheels]

Definitely water filter! Definitely not bottled water (unless you also filter it). Even in Norway, where you can safely drink water straight from the tap and where food industries are quite tightly controlled, tests of bottled water show that it has more bacteria than tap water or water from fast running streams. In poorer countries I would imagine that many would be tempted to simply fill up bottles from a stream or faucet somewhere and sell them. After all, people have got to make a living! But I'd rather buy (peelable) fruit from them and filter my own water, or buy their water and filter it before drinking. We did that in China. Filled up some Nalgene bottles every morning and drank our own; carried along the little filter pump in case we needed refills.

[Grog]

On the topic of Giardia:

you become immune in the sense that you may not develop the symptoms again (although you also may develop them, it can take a while for them to disappear completely) but you may still carry the disease, and that's not very good, because you could transmit it to others, unless you have 100% foolproof sanitary conditions at your house and everywhere you go, which is probably not the case for most of us (and thank God for that, in a way).

[gromit68]

last year with minimal problems. We stayed at a lodge that used to be a cattle farm and had all our food prepared for us. We couldn't reguarly get bottled water and drank unfiltered from the lodge kitchen. I had to use a little immodium but that was all. I'm still not convinced it was the water and not the black beans 3 meals a day for 8 days.