katadyn Micropur Forte
 

Just to go one bigger, i have 500grams of this in powder form (MF 50000P) recently purchased from a local French chemist (around 3 week order time) which cost 84euros and treats 50000 litres! Even cheaper than the liquid per litre if you can use it within its shelf life, can't leak/evaporate like the liquid may. This is mainly a good idea for me in my campervan, to both pretreat water added to the camper tank, and keep the tank in a good condition without using a strong bleach type treatment. This is for all the water to be used, not just for drinking, and should last ages in a tub the size of a big coffee mug.
The downside is dosing. The measurement spoon is 10grams sufficient for 1000l obviously, unless I put a big water tank on the roof to fill the campers tank from when it needs a top up ;) I'll only need a fraction of this depending how much water I put in at a time.
My solution is to put 10grams in a litre nalgene filled with clean water. If i put 200l in the watertank, I need to add 200ml of micropur from the nalgene. Since I only got the stuff today, I don't know if this will work, will 1 litre carry 10grams of the stuff fully dissolved, will it eat into the nalgene? We'll see. I doubt there will be a problem since chemical strengths for purification are a lot lower than for cleaning bleaches which I could also be using.
As long as I know how much water I put into the tank though!?! :)

Overland Journal just published what I believe is our finest technical equipment test yet: a review of 12 water treatment systems. We obtained clinically contaminated water (E. coli) and had the treated or filtered water lab tested to ascertain the efficacy of each unit. The issue (Fall 2009) is out now. Some interesting results, and a tutorial that should be of value to anyone shopping for a treatment system, even one we didn't cover.

Katadyn
 

Hi There,

We got very sick by drinking supposedly safe tap water in Bulgaria.. After that incident which took us several long weeks to recover from we pumped ALL water that we took using a katadyn pocket filter. The tool is brilliant however i would give you two pieces of advice..

1. bring some good quality fine cloth to filter the water going into a "dirty bottle".. take out as much fine dust as possible. Coffee filters are great but they are paper and hard to get new ones when they get totally clogged up in remote areas..
2. Once you have the dirty bottle you can pump the water from that into a clean bottle which you can then drink without any issues.

After 6 months on the road we didn't get sick again and the water was always good..

The link to the filter is
Products - Katadyn Products Inc.

back to iodine
 

Since this discussion started the EU have banned the sale of iodine for water disinfecting purposes.

More here, among other places.

An 'EU ban' can lead to a certain amount of scoffing of course, but if iodine gets hard to buy, that may explain it.

Ch

for drinking water i go down the few drops of bleach per litre route, then wait a while and put an efervescent orange flavour vitC tab in it, drinking out of an old evian bottle cos i is posh dont ya know. i had one of those collapsible water bottles from aerostitch and it was great but when it wore out i kept the bottles from water i bought, they are surprisingly strong and last a long time, waisted ones can be tied onto luggage or handlebars easily.

bear in mind this does absolutely nothing to get rid of all the skanky bits of mud, faeces and larvae that might be clouding up the water!

about the food, and poor cooking/personal hygiene issues in eateries, was it sam manicom who wrote that fresh vegetables are nearly always safe to eat, and best to cook for yourself? that makes sense to me, although not being a vegetarian i do have to play salmonella roulette occasionally