Back in the early 90s I was working on the Houston sewers, and got really sick. I was like that for a couple weeks, and finally went to the doctor. When I told him the symptoms and the exposure, he prescribed flagyll, which is a potent antibiotic that will wipe out just about every wee beastie in your digestive system. I took that, ate a couple gallons of yogurt, and all better. The doc said I most likely had caught giardia.

I saw a poster a while ago of a coyote [censored] urinating in a "pristine" stream, the kind you see up in them thar hills... below it was the caption "Do you really know how clean your water is?" or something to that effect. Yep, distillation and/or reverse osmosis is my hands down winner. I've seen migrant farm workers bathing and washing their clothes in the Columbia, Snake and Yakima Rivers in the summer, by the dozens, while the kids were swimming around downstream, while upstream the cattle feed lots were being washed down and the runoff was going straight into the river. This was Washington State, not some Amazonian tributary. Makes you think, don't it?