That figure wasn’t based on anything; I was just using it for illustration purposes to show that even a small percentage chance of infection can add up over a cummulation of events. Infection by N. fowleri is extremely rare even by people who are exposed to it, but injecting warm, unsterilized water into the sinus cavity is essentially maximizing the potental for infection.
The low concentration of salt necessary to make an isotonic saline solution (~1%) will not harm most microorganisms, and higher concentrations would irritate your mucous membranes.
An incidental spray of water in a shower or splashing in a bath is unlikely to deliver enough organisms deep enough into the sinus cavity to result in infection, and the sinuses are normally protected by a layer of mucous that is continually renewed and expelled. The use of a neti pot or other sinus wash temporarily removes this layer (presumably because it has become encrusted or congested) and leaves the bare sinuses exposed to infection, and the flooding of the sinus cavity with warm, potentially microorganism-rich water maximizes the potential for infection.
The odds of an actual infection are low—people have been using neti pots for hundreds of years with untreated water—but distilled water can be purchased at any large pharmacy or grocery store for under a dollar, and will remain essentially sterile as long as it is capped and not infused with any other substance. Even if the incidence of infection by using water that is not distilled or boiled is very low, the consequence of an infection (even if not N. fowleri, as anyone who has suffered a sinus infection and attendant symptoms can tell you) is severe, so the risk is high by default.
I don’t know, but I doubt it. Most sinus infections are caused by microbes that like to live in mammalian uppper respiratory tracts, not in water. Do you have any particular mundane pathogenic microbes in mind?
Is it “I probably shouldn’t drive because I just drank six beers” risky or is it “I better never go outdoors because I might get eaten by a bear” risky? Both of these are things which have killed some people. And both of these are things which some people have done and survived. But I think most people would agree that one is a sensible precaution and one isn’t. Which one is rinsing your nose with tap water closer to?
neti pot user daily except for the week i recently spent in hospital [totally unrelated, was due to a chemo and radiation side effect] and i have an electric tea kettle in the bathroom that every morning i fill with well water and boil. Let it cool to body temp, rinse out the neti then refill and add the saline packet and use and finish by washing and rinsing out the pot after use. if i have a sinus issue, i may flush my sinuses several times a day, and will boil fresh kettles as needed.
been doing this for what, like 5 or so years now? love the neti pot, have had so many fewer sinus incidents since starting - maybe down to a couple colds a year. ocd cleanliness and person avoidance this past 10 months kept me from getting anything til i picked up pneumonia in the freaking hospital, stupid opportunistic bugs!
Its not the cost of the distilled water, it is the trouble of heating it up every single day. Between getting ready for work and getting the kids ready, mornings are chaos. If this neti pot operation take more than about 25 seconds or more than 10% of my mental capacity, it isn’t going to happen. As the wise oracle once said, “Ain’t nobody got time for that!”
No, I was just wondering- the media and people tend to make a lot of noise about relatively uncommon stuff, while ignoring the everyday things, so I wondered if that was the case here as well- they’re making noise about the amoebas, but ignoring the thousands of other infections caused by using unsanitary water.
Not using one, I didn’t realize you needed to use water with a CPAP machine. On reflection, it would be better to blow moist air up your upper respiratory tract.
From a risk management perspective there are three concerns. Potential cost, likelihood, and cost of mitigation. The potential cost is huge, your life. The likelihood is vanishingly small, and the cost of mitigation is a couple of dollars a year for distilled water. For this reason I use distilled water but everyone has a different risk tolerance.
As Hermitian alluded to above, there’s also a time/convenience cost in using distilled water. I can walk to the sink and adjust tap water to the exact temperature I want in about 5 seconds. How long does it take for a container of distilled water?
You could probably heat it in the microwave in under a minute. If you do it regularly, you could pretty easily figure the exact amount of seconds needed to heat a given volume to the desired temperature.
Microwaves tend to be of similar wattage, between 1000 and 1500 watts. The reason is if they are too powerful or have too little power, the instructions for cooking on the back of frozen meals won’t be valid. Normal power level seems to be 1100 watts.
What I haven’t seen in this discussion is the fact that N. fowleri prefers hot water. The first I ever heard of brain eating amoeba was from signs near hot springs in Nevada warning people to not submerge their heads to to n. fowleri. You don’t need those warnings in most lakes because the lakes are too cold for this organism to be infectious.
IANA Microbiologist, but from this, I would guess the problem is that the normal residential water heater is a near ideal environment for the proliferation of n. fowleri. Especially with the relatively* recent recommendation to lower your water heater setting to 120 F for safety reasons. So even using regular tap water strictly from the cold water side, and heating in the microwave is much lower risk that using water from the hot tap.
What this article doesn’t really address (that I can tell), is how effective are normal water treatment processes are on the cyst form of the amoeba.
Also, how do the new “hot water on demand” water heaters work - would the water not stay in one of those water heaters long enough for the amoeba to proliferate?
since I’m getting into the old fart age range, recently can be as much as before you were born, sonny. Get off my lawn!
Well, if the round trip to the retail establishment to obtain distilled water is 5 miles, you’ve got one chance in 10.6 million of dying in a motor vehicle crash on the way, so anything less than that is quite literally saving your life. Everything has a risk-reward ratio, Anny Middon just wants to know what it is.
Correct. This is one way to avoid such problems. Another way is you use a conventional tank heater set to 140 Fahrenheit or higher, but, critical step! - you install a hot water mixing valve. This is a special valve that automatically mixes in cold water to bring the temperature leaving the heater assembly down to around 104-110 Fahrenheit, which is below the temperature that you get scalds or burns.
Yes but you were going to make that trip anyways to purchase other supplies and groceries. No difference in the odds. Also, tap water can contain chlorine and other irritants.