Raise your hand if you’ve ever experienced food poisoning. If you’re one of the spared Americans who hasn’t, let me describe it to you:  You wake up in the morning. The sun is shining. All is good in the world – until you eat or drink something tainted with an unwanted pathogen. At first, you may not even notice. But within a few days or even hours, you start to feel a few cramps and experience just a tad of diarrhea. Then, the diarrhea comes on full force, moving through your gut like the Amtrak Acela speeding from Boston to New York City. At this point, you are seat belted to the toilet bargaining with a higher authority to make it stop.

All this could happen simply because you drank some raw water, or water derived from sources in the environment like underground springs that hasn’t been treated to remove dirt, debris and foodborne-illness-carrying pathogens.

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