It sounds like the organism was growing in the pipes in his house somehow.Slartybartfast wrote:GrumpyOne wrote:The problem was confined to the house; it wasn't found in city water samples, said Dr. Raoult Ratard, Louisiana's state epidemiologist.
It sounds like that house might have been on a shallow well that became contaminated by surface water. That shouldn't have happened if the house was connected to a municipal water system. Didn't we read recently someone got very sick/(died?) from bacterial contamination of well water that was used for bathing and a humidifier?
City water supplies are not usually treated strongly enough to kill all possible organisms. They monitor it and watch for levels of a number of organisms and adjust the chlorine and other treatments up and down to kill off a sufficient number of each kind of organism to be reasonably safe.
City water isn't necessarily sterile and it's not necessarily chlorinated enough to keep something from growing in the pipes somewhere in your house.
It's a balancing act. More chlorine costs money, makes the water taste bad, and actually poses some risks of its own when the chlorine mixes with other chemicals.