faflys
November 2, 2002, 08:06 PM
This is an excerpt from CNN Travel NewsWire - 11/3/02
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FOR YEARS, FLIERS have worried about everything from stuffy cabin air to bad meals. But what about the water? While airlines insist it’s safe to drink, some little-noticed studies from Japan to the Netherlands have turned up some unfriendly bacteria in the tank water, including E. coli and the germ that causes Legionnaire’s disease. U.S. researchers have tested it, too, with mixed results that suggest you don’t know what you’re drinking.
The results of our water-quality snapshot: a long list of microscopic life you don’t want to drink, from Salmonella and Staphylococcus to tiny insect eggs.
But we do — because we tested it. We packed sample vials and took to the skies, hopping on 14 different flights everywhere from Atlanta to Sydney, Australia. On each, we collected water from the galley and lavatory taps, sealed them up and sent them to a lab for analysis. The results of our water-quality snapshot: a long list of microscopic life you don’t want to drink, from Salmonella and Staphylococcus to tiny insect eggs. Worse, contamination was the rule, not the exception: Almost all of the bacteria levels were tens, sometimes hundreds, of times above U.S. government limits. “This water is not potable by any means,” says Donald Hendrickson, the director of Hoosier Microbiology Laboratories in Muncie, Ind., which tested our samples.
The good news, of course, is that this water isn’t the main drinking supply for passengers, who usually get bottled H2O from the beverage carts. But plenty of people depend on the plane’s taps to wash their hands and brush their teeth. And while the airlines say they rarely serve tap water, many flight attendants say it isn’t that uncommon: When the bottled water runs out, they turn to the tanks — which, under federal regulations, are supposed to provide drinkable water. “It’s the way our service works,” says Sara Dela Cruz, a spokeswoman for the union of United Airlines attendants.
For their part, the airlines say they closely follow federal guidelines for drinking water, and say no passengers have ever complained about getting sick from it. “It’s absolutely drinkable,” says a United spokesman. They called our water tests unscientific, and said our own samplers could have contaminated the results. “Someone with dirty hands must have used that sink,” said a spokesman from National Airlines, where the lavatory sample came back positive for coliform.
But our experts said human contamination wouldn’t explain all our results. Some of the water we collected on a short flight to St. Louis, for example, contained Pasteurella pneumotropica, a bacterium primarily carried by rodents. Similarly, our Chicago-to-Los Angeles trip turned up Pseudomonas, a highly resistant bacterium associated with a range of infections. And while the U.S. government sets a maximum bacterial level of 500 “colony-forming units” per milliliter for municipal drinking water, our lab counted more than four million per milliliter in a single sample alone. That’s roughly the same bacterial concentration you find in a tainted raw hamburger, Dr. Hendrickson says.
‘If I were the airline, I would worry about what these results say about the sanitation in their galleys.’
— ABIGAIL SALYERS
American Society for Microbiology “If I were the airline, I would worry about what these results say about the sanitation in their galleys,” says Abigail Salyers, outgoing president of the American Society for Microbiology and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This isn’t the first time, of course, that airline cabins have raised a health issue. Travelers have worried about everything from the quality of recirculated air to the potentially fatal blood clots associated with “economy-class syndrome.” But airlines’ tank water may fly beneath the radar, health experts say, because travelers wouldn’t think of linking it to any bugs they might pick up. “People blame it on where they’ve been,” says Arthur Forni, an infectious-diseases physician at Westchester Medical Group in New York.
images/icons/tongue.gif images/icons/shocked.gif images/icons/frown.gif images/icons/blush.gif
FOR YEARS, FLIERS have worried about everything from stuffy cabin air to bad meals. But what about the water? While airlines insist it’s safe to drink, some little-noticed studies from Japan to the Netherlands have turned up some unfriendly bacteria in the tank water, including E. coli and the germ that causes Legionnaire’s disease. U.S. researchers have tested it, too, with mixed results that suggest you don’t know what you’re drinking.
The results of our water-quality snapshot: a long list of microscopic life you don’t want to drink, from Salmonella and Staphylococcus to tiny insect eggs.
But we do — because we tested it. We packed sample vials and took to the skies, hopping on 14 different flights everywhere from Atlanta to Sydney, Australia. On each, we collected water from the galley and lavatory taps, sealed them up and sent them to a lab for analysis. The results of our water-quality snapshot: a long list of microscopic life you don’t want to drink, from Salmonella and Staphylococcus to tiny insect eggs. Worse, contamination was the rule, not the exception: Almost all of the bacteria levels were tens, sometimes hundreds, of times above U.S. government limits. “This water is not potable by any means,” says Donald Hendrickson, the director of Hoosier Microbiology Laboratories in Muncie, Ind., which tested our samples.
The good news, of course, is that this water isn’t the main drinking supply for passengers, who usually get bottled H2O from the beverage carts. But plenty of people depend on the plane’s taps to wash their hands and brush their teeth. And while the airlines say they rarely serve tap water, many flight attendants say it isn’t that uncommon: When the bottled water runs out, they turn to the tanks — which, under federal regulations, are supposed to provide drinkable water. “It’s the way our service works,” says Sara Dela Cruz, a spokeswoman for the union of United Airlines attendants.
For their part, the airlines say they closely follow federal guidelines for drinking water, and say no passengers have ever complained about getting sick from it. “It’s absolutely drinkable,” says a United spokesman. They called our water tests unscientific, and said our own samplers could have contaminated the results. “Someone with dirty hands must have used that sink,” said a spokesman from National Airlines, where the lavatory sample came back positive for coliform.
But our experts said human contamination wouldn’t explain all our results. Some of the water we collected on a short flight to St. Louis, for example, contained Pasteurella pneumotropica, a bacterium primarily carried by rodents. Similarly, our Chicago-to-Los Angeles trip turned up Pseudomonas, a highly resistant bacterium associated with a range of infections. And while the U.S. government sets a maximum bacterial level of 500 “colony-forming units” per milliliter for municipal drinking water, our lab counted more than four million per milliliter in a single sample alone. That’s roughly the same bacterial concentration you find in a tainted raw hamburger, Dr. Hendrickson says.
‘If I were the airline, I would worry about what these results say about the sanitation in their galleys.’
— ABIGAIL SALYERS
American Society for Microbiology “If I were the airline, I would worry about what these results say about the sanitation in their galleys,” says Abigail Salyers, outgoing president of the American Society for Microbiology and a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
This isn’t the first time, of course, that airline cabins have raised a health issue. Travelers have worried about everything from the quality of recirculated air to the potentially fatal blood clots associated with “economy-class syndrome.” But airlines’ tank water may fly beneath the radar, health experts say, because travelers wouldn’t think of linking it to any bugs they might pick up. “People blame it on where they’ve been,” says Arthur Forni, an infectious-diseases physician at Westchester Medical Group in New York.