As an aside: if anybody is planning to travel extensively in the third world, I would highly recommend getting the entire hepatitus series of vaccines. As one nurse told me: if AIDS worries you, hepatitus should scare you to death.
Oh, good. I’ll drink to that. And lose weight, too.
Obviously, you’re not a doctor - but would you care to elaborate a bit? My understanding was that hepatitis is generally less fatal than HIV.
Yes, but much more infectious and easily as debilitating. A quick web check shows this (bolding mine):
Common risk factors include:
•Intravenous drug use
•Overdosing on acetaminophen – the dose needed to cause damage is close to the effective dose, so be careful to take it only as directed – ask your doctor what amount of acetaminophen is safe for you; if your liver disease is severe, your doctor may also tell you to avoid certain anti-inflammatory medicines
•Engaging in risky sexual behaviors (like having multiple sexual partners and unprotected intercourse)
•Eating contaminated foods
•Traveling to an area where certain diseases are common
•Living in a nursing home or rehabilitation center
•Having a family member who recently had hepatitis A
•Using or abusing alcohol
•Being an organ transplant recipient
•Having HIV or AIDS
•Having received a blood transfusion before 1990 (hepatitis C blood test was not available)
•Being a newborn of a mother with hepatitis B or C (can be transmitted during delivery)
•Being a health care worker, including dentist and dental hygienist, because of blood contact
•Receiving a tattoo
I am a frequent visitor to Brazil. I NEVER drink tap water there-bottled water, beer, or beverages that have been boiled (tea, coffee, mate). Same with food (always hot, no salads or fruits that I haven’t peeled).
the only time I got sick was when I broke these rules (I ate a pastry from a vendor on the beach). I was sick as a dog for 45 minutes (vomiting, diarhea, etc.)
In any tropical region, there are lots of bugs that can make you sick-so observe the rules, and wash your hands a lot.
A question: many of my Indian friends insist that the spices used in hot curries are germicidal-any truth to this?
Bottled purified water is a very big and profitable business in México. I have a friend who was lucky enough to possess a large spring on his property in a mountain range here in Jalisco. He has done very well financially. He sent his children to the best universities and they now operate the business using modern business practices they learned in school.
All of the bottling plants, either beer or soft drinks purify their own water at their sites. Since there is so much profit they all now offer bottled water delivery to homes and businesses plus small bottles of water for retail sale in stores of all sizes.
In my home our water is delivered by a company called Santorini. It is owned by Pepsi. Coca-cola has their brand, Ciel, available for home delivery also. I installed a small purifier to supply the ice maker in our refrigerator. In several homes I’ve built the owners requested full house systems. The water at any outlet is safe for drinking. These systems cost the equivalent of 1200usd.
There are many municipal water systems here that produce drinkable water. That is not where the problem lies. The delivery system is where most contamination comes from. Old systems with leaking pipes allow contaminates to enter the water. Plus in most homes water storage is a problem. Because the pressure on a city’s system may not be sufficient or there is erratic service where water isn’t delivered constantly we use a system that has a below grade cistern for storage and this water is pumped to another holding tank on the rooftop. This also allows many possibilities for contamination.
All food that requires washing in our home is cleaned with bottled water. We also use it for cooking and for the coffee maker, etc… But I wash my teeth using the tap water.
Remember that before the 1960s and 70s, there were far less travellers in those areas - no masses of charter tourists, only high-end. So with smaller numbers of richer tourists, it was easier to boil the water for tea for them than it would be today for the thousands of tourists on cheap budgets.
Frosted beer mugs? Because people have no class!
CBEscapee nailed most of it, but he’s a native Mexican. I’m not, and I say that because I’m certain we have different resistances.
MOST municipal water systems in Mexico are chlorinated, and provide potable, sanitary water. BUT also in most parts of the country, cisterns and tinacos (a smaller, holding tank type of cistern) are used.
When I lived in Hermosillo, I used tap water for everything. Of course, I disinfected my tinaco every couple of monthd, because they’re somewhat open systems. Clorox bleach did the trick, just as it does for people with wells in the USA.
Most resorts purify their water and have closed systems, so they’re okay. I’m on vacation in Punta de Mita right now, and the water isn’t purified, but they tell you that.
Where I live in Mexico City, we have purified water which I use for cooking, bathing, teeth brushing, but I won’t drink it alone because there is a lot of seismic activity that makes me not trust the integrity of the delivery system. Kind of the same thing happens in Micihgan after a main break. They advise you not to drink the water until the mains are tested.
At my in-laws, the city water is good, but their house has a huge, underground cistern that’s not necessarily closed, and so while we brush our teeth and cook with it, we drink bottled water there.
In genersl, 20 liters of bottled water costs less than two bucks, so it’s widely drinked.
So, can you become used to it? In muni systems, probably. Well water is probably just as safe as in the USA. Food is always what gets to me eventually, especially salsa asada.
This is utterly anecdotal but… my partner’s step mom got both HIV and hepatitis from a blood transfusion during an operation years ago. Her HIV status is kept pretty well under control, thanks to new discoveries in AIDS treatment/medication over the years. The hepatitis, on the other hand, has caused her some serious health issues. From conversations with her, I know she and her doctor have struggled far more with managing the hepatitis. If I had to wager, it will be the hepatitis that kills her long before the HIV does.
Mexican water is fatal if drank in even very small amounts, even drops if your system is under stress or immunodeficiency and older people. Dysentery is the most common illness…or Montezuma’s Revenge. This is just one of the potentially deadly diseases that enters the system or 30% of all foreign visitors with a stay in Mexico of 2 weeks. It is in the system of over 50% of all full time residents in Mexico. Most do not even know they have it, many don’t care.
One cyst in a drop of water can reproduce 30,000 more.
It can lay dormant in your system until you have another illness and then wreak havoc on your system. Their are two types inter intestinal and extra intestinal.
The treatment is the same, a commonly prescribed drug Flagyl - Metronidazole is used. Some forms of this drug are available in Mexico and are HIGHLY CANCEROUS, in the United States the cancerous versions are only distributed by the CDC.
Their are other medications that are less dangerous.
If the illness could pass thru your intestinal wall it can be fatal if not treated and most likely has destroyed or has caused permanent damage to some internal organs fast. It can pass the brain barrier and become fatal. Symptoms by that time will be evident as you will be quite ill.
Some medications state that if you take them once every two months you will be parasite free. THis to an extent is somewhat true…IF YOU TAKE THE MEDICATIONS BEFORE YOU ARE IN CONTACT WITH CONTAMINATED WATER.
First evidence of possible infection are vulgar and very strong flatulence that is unmistakable.
Once you have gotten this a regimen of a week minimum of medication is needed.
It is highly unsafe to consume any street foods of Mexico, no health standards are enforced whatsoever and food poisoning, dysentery and salmonella are highly common. Salmonella can be as much as 100% more probable from buying rotisserie chicken where you can attain several strains at once…just by buying one chicken. This is a ticking time bomb that can cause prolonged illness and not be discovered for a long time.
Trick to even attempting to buy rotisserie chicken from Mexico street vendor.
Bring you own bag and large fork, do not allow the vendors to touch it with their tools. Pull the chicken off the rotisserie with you fork and place in your bag. If they take you chicken and put it on their table and cut it up you are highly likely to get ill.
I have had salmonella five times in 8 years. I have gotten as many as three strains from one chicken after not buying street food for two years. Mexico is not a place for retired people who cannot afford imported foods or afford high quality preparation on a daily basis.
The main reason beer’s safe is because the wort (water + malt sugars and other stuff) is boiled after being kept at around 150 degrees for a while. So it’s pasteurized then boiled.
Post-boil, everything has to be well cleaned and sanitized for the beer to have anything approaching a shelf-life, and the beer itself has a pH and an alcohol content that tends to discourage pathogens, if not lactic acid bacteria.
In my first visit to Mexico, traveling with an American friend, we ate more beans in one week than most people eat in a month; that alone would be enough to cause variations in the behavior of the digestive tract (do I have a fancy vocabulary or what?). But we also drank exclusively beer and lemonade, and by lemonade I mean the local one which had enough freshly-squeezed lemon juice you could use it to clean rust off hinges; that pH alone counts as an anti-bacterial (not an exaggeration: I had a job where most products included biocides and those with no biocide were preserved by their pH: for one of the lines of biocide-free products, the pH was similar to what that lemonade had). No digestive troubles were had, where different food/drinks combinations would have led to them.
I’m always careful with my food and water sources when traveling in tropical countries: of all the ways it’s possible to get sick, “dysentery from the ice cubes” ranks pretty high in the list of easily-avoided ones.
My (American) aunt married a Mexican guy and moved to Mexico City. Their three kids were born and raised in Mexico City. When my youngest Mexican cousin had his bar mitzvah, his older sister was going to college in the US and while we were all there for the bar mitzvah, she drank some tap water at some point and got herself very sick as a result. My aunt was kind of rolling her eyes at it - “what the heck was she thinking? Born and raised in Mexico and she thinks she can drink the water? She’s been in the US for too long!”. That sort of thing.
So anecdotally, it’s not just something you can get used to.
You can used to anything. Get used to it (use it )or …
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sends missionaries all over the world. And it sends doctors all over the world to keep these missionaries healthy. One thing the Mormons do is they test the water. I can tell you: Mexico is not the problem. There are places in the USA that have worse water than Mexico. Some of the greatest cities in Europe have dangerous water. The church issues water filtration systems to missionaries in places where they thing the water is bad. There isn’t a Mormon Missionary Fact Book like the CIA Fact Book, but missionaries and local leaders know the score. There is nothing that church leaders hate more than telling some parents their kid is coming home with amoebic dysentery. Or worse, in a box.
Missionaries who come from the area often think they don’t have to follow the sanitation rules because they have developed an immunity to the bad water. And then they get “the amoeba,” or some other disease, and some of them end up going home early.
Bottom line: no. You can’t get used to contaminated water. It will make you sick, even if you have lived there all your life. I’ve seen it all too often.