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Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

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Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#101

Post by Duladian »

j1elo wrote: post #42
timr wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of folks have no idea what 2-micron filter is, nor is it documented on their consumer-grade water filter that it is/isn't a 2-micron filter. Likewise, a lot of people don't know how to boil water in a way that will kill parasites. They should just say "distilled water", and leave it at that.

Now you intrigued me. I might be one of those who don't know how to boil water in a way that will kill parasites Could you elaborate, please? (I would just bring it to boiling temperature and call it a day)

You usually want to leave the water boiling for a minimum of a minute or longer depending on boiling temperature of your location. Higher altitude (lower pressure) reduces the temperature required for water to boil which means you will want to boil the water longer.

From my understanding, the reasoning behind this is to make sure the entire container of water is at temperature and not just hot spots in the fluid.

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#102

Post by ryanmercer »

cortesoft wrote: post #21
capkutay wrote: post #2

Sounds like she was using a neti-pot. I thought most of the neti-pot products made it pretty clear that you're supposed to use previously boiled or distilled bottled water. Maybe they need to make it more clear that the consequences of using tap water can be pretty dangerous.

They do, but I am never sure how that is supposed to be practical. You need to use warm water, which is easy with tap water, but hard to do quickly with distilled or boiled water. I know it has risks, but I still use normal tap water. From what I have read, all of the cases are from people using well water, never from city provided, chlorinated water. It actually says this in the article, too.

>They do, but I am never sure how that is supposed to be practical. You need to use warm water, which is easy with tap water,

Uh, 30-45 seconds in the microwave in a microwave-safe container.

I have a motorized unit, distilled water goes into a glass in the microwave for 45 seconds. Salt packet goes into the reservoir and a maybe 5 ounces of room temp distilled then the microwaved water.

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#103

Post by QuantumGood »

QuantumGood wrote: post #88
dom96 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you explain why you use a neti-pot? I don't know anyone who uses one and I don't really understand the reasons behind it.

Reduces incidents of mild sleep apnea in conjunction with nasal strips and sleeping on my side. (I determine occurrence of sleep apnea by checking if waking happens between or during sleep cycles.) Also helps with voice work (I am a voice coach), makes for clearer mask resonance.

(An in-hospital sleep study confirmed my self-diagnosis of mild sleep apnea.)

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#104

Post by 8bitsrule »

legohead wrote: post #89
Tharkun wrote: post #87

I don't get the scare mongering in this discussion. People are saying to always boil the water, to not cook with hot tap water, etc. Don't these people bathe in hot tap water? Don't they drink cold tap water? Do they all live in areas with super unsafe tap water? Or is there a specific danger that comes from the water going up your nostrils? (Which can easily happen while bathing) What am I missing here?

109 cases in a little over 40 years.. yeah, this is more of a freak occurrence. also, the article says they never tested the water, so this idea of the neti pot is just a guess to begin with.

There must have been something else involved. Should we not swim in pools, rivers or lakes, or submerge ourselves in hot tubs?

Netis are part of Ayurvedic medicine in India since long before people dreamed of personal immortality.

Remember when people worked outside all summer without worrying about excess UV? Maybe we're overthinking this stuff, we Chicken Little emulators.

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#105

Post by prewett »

deepsun wrote: post #94
shawnz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You shouldn't be using water from the hot tap even just for drinking or cooking, let alone putting in a neti pot. Water from a hot water tank can contain high levels of dissolved contaminants since it sits in your plumbing system for extended periods at high temperatures.

Huh? If tap water is contaminated (by, say, metals or salts from plumbing system pipes), then boiling won't decontaminate it either.

I would have had your perspective except that a few months ago I came back from vacation to find that my hot water smelled like windex. The apartment complex flushed my hot water tank, a whole lot of black sludge came out, and my water has been fine since. I assume that not using the hot water for a few weeks caused everything to collect in a concentration high enough to notice, but it makes me cringe to think of how much low level of windex-smelling stuff I drank previously. (Fortunately my hot water takes a minute or two to arrive, so I probably didn’t consume that much just because I didn’t want to wait long enough.)

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#106

Post by prewett »

I wonder if it’s things like this that make people feel like their tap water isn’t safe and then they buy bottled water or “natural” or “raw” water, instead of understanding that tap water is pretty safe. By historical standards we have superior water, compared to most of history.

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#107

Post by scythe »

olyjohn wrote: post #99
scythe wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No cooking? Even, say, boiling potatoes? I always use filtered water if I'm planning to consume it, but I thought I could get away with the sink if I was throwing it out. That's news to me, I'll have to boil cold water from now on.

The lady in the article got the infection after using a water filter. This leaves 2 possibilities that I can see. 1. The filter didn't do it's job. I thought that a good filter would filter all organisms (or like 99.9%). I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter. 2. The filter does work, but she didn't maintain her filter. Maybe the dirty filter actually was a nice place to…

>I'm told by people that you can drink out of a swamp or mud puddle with a good filter.

"Good filter" is a relative term. Maybe you could do it if you "filtered" the water with a $10M reverse osmosis membrane? The filters I buy all say "do not use with unsafe water" or some similar phrase.

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#108

Post by GhostVII »

shawnz wrote: post #68
cortesoft wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do, but I am never sure how that is supposed to be practical. You need to use warm water, which is easy with tap water, but hard to do quickly with distilled or boiled water. I know it has risks, but I still use normal tap water. From what I have read, all of the cases are from people using well water, never from city provided, chlorinated water. It actually says this in the article, too.

You shouldn't be using water from the hot tap even just for drinking or cooking, let alone putting in a neti pot. Water from a hot water tank can contain high levels of dissolved contaminants since it sits in your plumbing system for extended periods at high temperatures.

Isn't that pretty dependent on where you live? If you are in a newer house I doubt it would be an issue, since you have a personal water heater that gets cycled through pretty regularly.

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#109

Post by dplgk »

chaostheory wrote: post #98
jimmyswimmy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of Neil-Med, the documentation I have retained says to use previously boiled or properly filtered water (they provide some examples) when mixing. And they say not to use tap water. But they don't inform the user of the potential hazard of using otherwise safe-to-consume tap water. Worse, the bottle (mine is a squeeze bottle) doesn't have any reminder not to use tap water, at all. It would seem this would…

Doesn't this company direct you to use their salt packets as well?

Does the salt kill amoebas?

Re: Rare brain-eating amoebas killed woman who rinsed her sinuses with tap water

#110

Post by DougN7 »

capkutay wrote: post #2

Sounds like she was using a neti-pot. I thought most of the neti-pot products made it pretty clear that you're supposed to use previously boiled or distilled bottled water. Maybe they need to make it more clear that the consequences of using tap water can be pretty dangerous.

How is a neti pot worse than steam in the shower? I’m surprised at this.
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