I brought up my co-worker simply because her illness showed me how uncomfortable a true case of giardia can be. She contracted hers by mistakenly drinking from a hose connected to a 'closed' well on a farm. Interestingly, that impled that the dirty water was being used for landscape and livestock...ensuring a continuing animal infestation and cycle of probable reintroduction of the cysts into the watershed.

You're right, though. Personal hygiene is probably the most important preventive, on or off the trail.

FB