Problem is that there doesn't seem to be any indication of airline passengers having health problems. While it's true that it might be hard to correlate passengers who get sick with bad water on a plane the fact that there is no news buzz about it at all should be a warning sign that perhaps the airline water isn't actually lethal.
The first thing to note is that when you actually look at the numbers something like 4.1% of plane water tested positive for E. Coli. More tested positive for a "safe" bacteria which is a possible indicator of E. Coli but that could have been due to cross contamination in at least one study because they collected toilet water samples at the same time.
The second big warning sign is that the metric the latest "study" used 10 criteria including:
"fleet size, ADWR violations, positive E. coli and coliform water sample reports and cooperation in providing answers to water-quality questions."
Note that 2 of these criteria have no actual bearing on water safety. Interestingly I was unable to find what the other criteria were since they weren't actually listed in the "study's" web page.
The "study's" conclusions are scary:
The "study's" conclusions are scary:
- NEVER drink any water onboard that isn’t in a sealed bottle,
- Do not drink coffee or tea onboard,
- Do not wash your hands in the bathroom; bring hand-sanitizer with you instead.
The bad thing is that because there are so many "studies" like this that turn out to be questionable people stop listening or they just worry about something that really isn't that bad.
Even worse it's possible that I missed something in this study that would have indicated that the problem is real. I doubt that since if that were the case instead of painting word pictures of the problem the "study" would have led with the % of infected water. Similarly how does the airlines willingness to answer questions have any relationship to the quality of the airlines water? Airlines are low margin companies who have better things to do than spend money answering questions from people whose intent is to disparage them. Sadly a common problem among academics is their belief that other people should spend money helping academics get promotions.
In Canada very low results did prompt a government warning for people with suppressed or low immune systems. That in fact makes sense since for them what would be at worst a stomach bug for most of us could result in a major illness or even death. But that will be lost in the hype about the "horrors" of airplane water.
The bottom line is that it's unclear if there really is a problem here or if this is just one more "you're going to die everything is unsafe" scare stories that we read on a regular basis.
That's bad because sane people start filtering these stories out and credulous people either worry or deny themselves something that's in fact safe so that the only "winners" are the people who wrote the study and got their 15 minutes of fame.
This is in part why we the people aren't buying into the climate change scam; we know we've been lied to about so many things by scientists that we no longer trust them.
That alone is good reason for the media to stop unquestionably hyping this sort of study.
So I'm not going to say that the study is bogus; there's not enough readily available data for me to prove that.
If you're the worrying type or if you're suffering from some other illness sticking to bottled water on planes won't kill you; unless they run out of it and you die of dehydration.
On the other hand I'm not going to worry about this particular problem myself.
If you do drink airplane water and die a horrible lingering death don't sue me; I've put in enough weasel words to protect myself. :)
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