[pct-l] Giardia strikes the thru's!

[brick at fastpack.com (brick@xxxxxxxxxxxx)]

At 11:57 AM 7/1/03, you wrote:
>It depends on the individual but the generally agreed average incubation 
>period for giardia is one week. It can however range from 2 days to over 2 
>weeks.
>
>I am not sure where you got the two weeks from.

I am not an MD, but the guy who wrote "Trekking In Nepal" is: Dr Stephen 
Bezruchka, MD.

He wrote "It generally takes a longer time to acquire this infection than 
the bacterial ones, usually two weeks and sometimes longer after ingesting 
the cysts."

A literature search showed numbers from 2 days to 30 days for the listed 
incubation period, but I did come across a bunch of CDC reports where a 3-4 
day incubation period was considered by the investigators to be too short 
for Giardia.

So I stand corrected. A week is possible.

This really is moot for this particular discussion for the reasons hashed 
over in this list. The thru hiker experience has pretty well shown that 
some folks will get sick even if they always filter their water carefully, 
and some who never filter will never get sick.

http://www.yosemite.org/naturenotes/Giardia.htm makes good arguments that 
proper hygiene will make more of a difference than water filtering