This Troper drinks from clear water streams based off of the benthic macroinvertabrates (lil' bug thingys) that reside in the water in the Pacific Northwest, because there are many bugs that can't survive in anything but the purest water.

Good luck. You can still get giardiasis from water that supports all kinds of benthics. (This troper's dad used to be part of a large environmental research team, and has a bad habit of talking about work at the dinner table.) A decent filter system is pretty cheap, and pretty portable these days.

I agree with the commenter above. As an ecology student, it seems to me that good benthic macroinvertebrates indicate good water quality, but water quality ≠ drinkability.

This troper recalls being encouraged to drink the water many places when she lived in Norway and went hiking. Delicious cold non-dysentery water.

The lakes at the top of Norway's Mt. Floyen are safe to drink from, as this troper has done with no ill effects.

...yet.

Real life example (and subversion of sorts), the water in most New Zealand lakes is clean enough to drink, but this Kiwi troper has seen a Japanese tourist totally freak out when they saw someone take a sip.

Real life example: the dangers of drinking 'wild' water are greatly exaggerated. This South African troper grew up on a small farm, where for several years, we pumped all our household water out of a nearby creek, and used it unpurified for everything from drinking to washing, without ever getting sick. Our cattle also used this creek for everything from drinking to defecating. The water in such streams is generally quite safe to drink. After all, our ancestors lived for thousands of years without the benefit of chlorine tablets, and the fact that we are here tells us that by and large they survived their drinking water.

Since you drink from it all the time, you're not going to notice the side effects because they're normal to you. On the other hand you probably need abnormally many calories to maintain weight because your intestines house roundworms. That's O.K. They're much more harmless then tapeworms. Speaking of roundworms my caloric intake is about 4,000 calories a day, and I'm having trouble maintaining 150. Maybe I should get a parasite check?

That troper got lucky. Until the AIDS epidemic struck with a vengeance, the leading cause of death among children under the age of five on the African continent was dysentery, caused by contaminated water supplies. Maybe the raging cholera epidemic that's entered South Africa from Zimbabwe has changed that troper's view on the subject.

Making this an inversion. From the World Health Organization's website, "Out of the total number of cases, 50% have been reported from Budiriro, a high density suburb of the capital city, Harare. Beitbridge, a town bordering South Africa, has reported 26% of all cases." So at least 76% of the sickness is from ''bad city water''.

Our ancestors also discovered thousands of years ago that the products of fermentation made water safer to drink, by killing most of the other stuff in it. There's a reason why beer has been around pretty much since before recorded history began.

This Troper not-so-fondly recalls an article she saw in her local newspaper; apparently, a bike rider got very tired while biking in the early morning. The teen genius forgot to pack enough water, so he drank from a nearby stream. Guess what happened.

Part of this troper's job while in the United States Army was training and educating troops in water discipline, making sure that troops were informed only to drink water that was safe to drink. For most wars until WorldWarII, far more men during wartime were killed by disease than in combat, and the most common diseases were caused by contaminated drinking water. Modern military organizations take great pains to ensure not only that troops receive safe drinking water, but make sure that potential sources of drinking water aren't contaminated in the first place. It's been almost twenty years, but this troper can still do a three-hour lecture on how to properly dig a latrine...

This troper remembers from a childhood vacation trip to a cave the guide specifically pointing out that the clear water dripping into small basins in various places is so mineral rich it would immediately give you diarrhea.

In the Appalachian mountains, This troper's water came from a spring which was brought by a PVC hose to a reservoir then pumped into the house. There are still some who get their water using buckets.

In this Troper's town, there a little spring everybody goes to to fill bottles with water. Nobody that I know of has ever been sick.

This troper, when on vacation in Greece, went to a small island resort town to go swimming on an isolated beach. The water was BEAUTIFUL. You could actually see the ocean floor!

This troper knows better than to drink unfiltered water. Tap water is fine, since it's required to be clean by law. Bottled water? Pulled from a volcanic spring in france? Filtered by rocks? Who knows what's pissed in that, this troper will happily drag a liter or so of water all the way from home to avoid commercial bottled water.

Or the tap water in london. Last time this troper drank any of that, he ended up with a pair of mouth ulcers.

This troper lives in the middle of nowhere. My water comes from a groundwater well. And it tastes cleaner than the rain.

This troper is confused by the prior troper's use of the rain as something that would be clean. Having lived in built-up areas all his life, this troper finds rain to be oily, salty, or bearing particles of things like sand.

Out here there isn't much to pollute the rain. But it still tastes more metallic than our well water.

This troper and her twin sibling took a couple of sips of water while swimming in Lake Tahoe. The water was a godsend compared to the pee and chlorine saturated water of their public swimming pool.

This troper has drunk a couple of glasses of Alpine water, straight from the stream. It did her no harm at all.

From all the above, it seems that this troper was the one hit by the one-in-a-thousand chance of waterborne illness. Camping trip in the Sierra Nevadas, clear mountain stream miles from civilization and possible contamination, heavy backpacks, and the entire group was filling up their canteens - couldn't possibly be bad, right? This troper ended up with diarrhea from said mountain stream, and from that trip onwards his Scout troop has maintained a very strict filter policy.

This troper's eighth grade US History teacher has told tales from when she lived up North and how the streams were so clear and clean you could drink out of them. I then questioned these stories because of the risk of beaver fever and all that. I forgot what she said to rectify this argument, but you get the idea.

Once when this troper is in Boy Scouts, I once drank water that is in a pond and it looks safe without any purification procedure. Big Mistake. Fortunately, I did not drank it too much and I quickly threw up due to the foul taste. That experience, plus my Scout Master's scolding, taught me that drinking water straight out of a pond, without any tablets or pumps, is a very bad idea.

I once drank water from the Ein Gedi spring in Israel's Judean Desert. It was quite good, even though it didn't look very good at first.

When I played outside as a kid, I would occasionally clean mud and dirt off my hands using water on the ground that would still technically be considered "mud."

This troper lives in a building where they put way too much chlorine in the tap water. It's perfectly clean, as far as microbes, but it probably bleaches your innards for all he knows.