Water filter? Tick.
Hand sanitiser? Tick.
Water issues sorted?
Not quite. It’s more complicated than that.
Okay, sanitiser kills most common bacteria that cause gastrointestinal or skin infections, like E. coli, Salmonella, strep species, etc. These are fragile species that don’t tend to live long outside a human host, lasting anywhere from hours to two days in dry conditions (though they can last for weeks in damp hut sponges).
But hand sanitiser is ineffective against Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and Norovirus. It just smears those pathogens around.
An infected tramper can shed these in the millions or billions, and it takes only a few pathogens to infect someone else. On Te Araroa, trampers sometimes leave the trail to recover from Giardia, but they can still shed the infection for weeks after their symptoms have resolved.
The most obvious areas of concern for all pathogens are the inner door of the long drop and the toilet lid. Someone does their thing (which can get messy when they’re sick), closes the lid, and touches the latch with unhygienic hands. Then they walk over to the rainwater tank and touch the tap. Even if they wash their hands properly, the next person comes along, touches the tap to brush their teeth or fill a pot, carries those pathogens to the hut door handle, and soon the whole hut is sharing the illness.
Soap and water deal with all of these.
Soap breaks down the skin oils and dirt where microbes hide. Rubbing soapy water around your palms, between your fingers, and under your nails for at least 20 seconds loosens them up. Rinsing under running water washes them away. Soap doesn’t actually inactivate the pathogens; the lather just helps lift and remove them.
Done thoroughly, it’s 100% effective, as long as you don’t immediately touch an infected tap to turn it off. Boiling water for a full minute also kills everything.
Standard hollow-fibre water filters handle Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and larger bacteria like E. coli, but they won’t stop viruses like Norovirus. Norovirus is relatively rare on the trail because its onset is fast and debilitating, limiting a person’s movement; still, it’s highly contagious and can be carried from one hut to another before the symptoms kick in. Just remember: never let a hollow-fibre filter freeze. Freezing destroys the micro-tubes inside, rendering it ineffective without you ever realising it.
Away from the contamination of a hut, most microbes don’t last long. Desiccation (drying out) and UV radiation quickly render them inactive if they don’t have a host.
The exceptions are Giardia and Cryptosporidium. They have a hard outer shell that hand sanitiser can’t penetrate, and they can reside in feral mammals roaming the hills: deer, possums, pigs, and stoats. When heavy rain washes contaminated animal faeces into streams, getting drinking water downstream carries a risk.
That risk is higher in slow-moving water where waste isn’t tumbled and dispersed. Mitigating factors include low animal numbers, heavy dilution from swift, turbulent flow, and high UV exposure.
On the other hand, Giardia in a cool, damp forest track can linger for weeks. Step in faeces on the track, and now it’s smeared on your boots.
When it comes to clean drinking water, it’s better to be safe than dealing with a ghastly infection that causes foul-smelling diarrhea for weeks.
Where crowds gather, with some having questionable hygiene practices, filtering water becomes obvious.
Busy huts and campsites are where pathogens concentrate: toilet doors, lids, seats, water taps, door handles, and bench tops. Your footwear gets splashed, and those pathogens transfer onto your hands when you tie your laces.
Bring your own dishcloth and soap, and try to dry it out. Those damp, grotty hut rags are a Petri dish.
Soap, scrubbing, and running water work against all pathogens if you do it thoroughly. You don’t need to be paranoid out there; just take sensible precautions to cut the chain of infection.