Flying? Don’t drink the tap water

The Canadian Water Quality Association “Communique” reports that tap water on airplanes is often teeming with unfriendly microscopic life. Researchers in the U.S. took samples of water from the galley and lavatory taps on 14 different international flights and found that contamination was the rule not the exception. Tests showed high counts of bacteria such as pseudonomas and salmonellaa.
According to the Communique, laboratory tests for “colony-forming units” of pseudonomas counted more than 4 million per millimeter in a single sample from a Chicago-to-Los Angeles flight. That corresponds to about the same bacteria contamination you’d expect in a tainted raw hamburger.