[pct-l] digestive upsets

[Jeffrey Olson]

I've been hiking apart from parents since the late 60s. mostly in the 
Sierra and Washington cascades and Rockies.  I have only treated water 
with iodine if the source was a lake or felt wrong.  I never got 
giardia.  Until this summer when I hiked for a couple weeks in the 
Collegiates in Colorado.  I religiously treated the water because of the 
presence of cattle at almost all creek headwaters in the Rockies,(hiking 
the CDT near Lake City is a good example - every spring has its little 
herd of cattle) except for a spring I thought was ok.  Maybe it was bad 
hygiene, but I choose to think it was the spring.  I took flagyl and it 
was gone in three days.

I remember when the water filter craze hit.  Even then it seemed like 
corporations were creating a market by use of fear - fear of giardia.  
Now it seems like "common wisdom" and normal to filter water.  
Apparently some people are "carriers" of giardia and can spread it.  My 
hiking buddies so accused me.  Now I know I'm not after having gotten 
it.  Almost 50 years of backpacking, seldom treating water, my luck ran 
out.

I'm still not going to carry a filter in the mountains of the West, and 
will seldom use iodine.

Jeff...

On 9/10/2018 10:29 AM, David Hough reading PCT-L wrote:
> Jeff wrote:
>
>> Perhaps the funniest experience was both of us getting explosive
>> diarrhea for an evening.   Talk about another level of intimacy.
> A couple of years ago I wrote about my own digestive upsets.    They always
> started on the third day of a trip and ended within a few hours after getting
> back to the car.    I had all kinds of hypotheses.   Obviously it was
> something specifically to do with backpacking, and something specific to me -
> other people eating the same food, drinking the same treated water, getting
> the same exercise - never had any symptoms.    Imodium seemed to have no
> effect until the trip was done, when I didn't need it any more; then too
> much effect.
>
> This year I thought I'd figured it out - I'd been using Polarpure elemental
> iodine solution since 2001 as an aftertreatment after pumping through an
> MSR filter.   It had the advantage of cleaning up everything along the
> way from the bottle I pumped into the bottle I drank out of into the cooking
> pot and into my eating cup.    And beyond that - but I grew to like the
> sharp taste, at least when the water was cold.
>   
> Of course there had been several long trips over the years when
> I did use the iodine and had no symptoms, but they commonly did arise on
> the third day, starting around 2008.
> But not on the third day of car camping/day hiking, when
> I did not need a water treatment.     Finally this year I remembered a chemist
> hiker who had warned me to always follow the iodine treatment after half
> an hour with half a vitamin C tablet to bind and neutralize the iodine.
> And this year I met a hiker in the Russian wilderness who had used Polarpure
> religiously for years and now had thyroid problems.
>
> I got a new water treatment and had several symptom-free trips:
> a Steri-pen with a prefilter.   All looked good, including a
> five day trip, but then over a Labor Day trip I had symptoms again - this
> time on the fourth day.    But this time Imodium worked in about 24 hours -
> this was the first time I had stopped the action while I was still hiking.
>
> My conclusion is that my bowel is sensitive to various kinds of chemical
> and physical disruption, and I'm just as well done with the iodine.   But I
> still need to carry plenty of extra TP and witch hazel wipes and Imodium
> just in case.    I've tried adding metamucil and adding probiotics, and
> cutting out Vitamin I, but none of these were consistently effective.
>
> But my years of dreaming about a through hike have been over for some time,
> so that's not a problem I have to solve.
>
> http://pcnst.oakapple.net/bits/resources.html
>
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