Surviving Tips for Traveling to Areas Where Visitors Shouldn't Drink the Water

In planning our trip to China, my husband and I started where we normally begin, at the bookstore in the travel section. One of the first things we read was don't trust the water even for brushing your teeth. This is not the first trip we've taken where this advice was given.

So what should the wise traveler plan to do to deal with the situation of bad water? I'm rather fanatical on this topic because I hate being sick. Our first measure is to visit our doctor and make sure that all of our inoculations are up to date. We've visited the UW Travel Medicine office on previous occasions, but since most of our inoculations were up to date, we chose to use our family doctor for this visit. When we visited South Africa, we found that polio was present in fresh water and in seawater along the coasts. We took the polio vaccine.

At the same time we had our inoculations, we were told about diarrhea. The doctor prescribed a small number of a very strong antibiotic, Darth Pill we called it, that were guaranteed to kill any bug in twenty-four hours flat. This is a potential backup plan for what to do if all your other precautions fail. When I spent three weeks on an Earthwatch trip in Turkey, one of the ladies on board suffered for days, never leaving her room and not seeing any part of the country.

Here are some of the simple precautions we take. First, drink bottled water. Even when we travel to Florida, we've found that if we drink bottled water, we are less likely to have bowel troubles. Constipation is almost as bad as diarrhea. Don't forget to bring a stool softener and or laxative in your first aid kit. I also bring powdered Gatorade or similar sport drink mix. Sports drinks help prevent dehydration, the main side effect of diarrhea by ensuring the body has enough potassium to retain your bodies essential requirement of salt. Boiled tea and coffee are an alternative-but make sure that the water was never left sitting out after it was boiled.