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Comment by mc32 | Hacker News Reader

Is grey water treated enough to ensure we don’t get e-coli from its use?

my understanding is that e.coli contamination (by the harmful strains) is usually an artifact of cross-contamination from industrial farming. gardeners don't typically have to worry about it. just wash everything like you'd normally do anyway.

edit: also, greywater in this case is usually captured from rainfall, not recycled from sewage, like you might be thinking.

Unless surface to capture rainfall is clean, it can be contaminated with animal droppings. Also if it's treated sewage, I'm not sure if it's treated enough against pathogens.

Contaminated crops usually uptake the pathogens from their water intake rather than from "dirty handling" and given it's within the produce itself, you cannot "wash it off". Cooking solves the issue, of course, but not all produce gets cooked.

Any dirt outside is going to be contaminated with animal droppings. It's where animals go #2.

e.coli is everywhere, including inside us, so that's not a fruitful avenue to assessing risk. only a few strains cause sickness, and as i understand it, those are largely found in, and make it into our food supply from, industrial farm settings.

Right, but it’s through contaminated water. Industrial or not, water is the medium.

but the rainwater's not already contaminated... unless you perhaps happen to live directly downstream from a factory farm, but even then, e.coli isn't airborne, so it wouldn't be in collected rainwater. there are certainly no factory farms in south LA to worry about.

> Unless surface to capture rainfall is clean, it can be contaminated with animal droppings.

Your going to have a bad time when you find out what most organic fertilizer comes from.

Heh, sure... but hopefully not with unneutralized disease carrying pathogens.

The only neutralization cow shit gets is the sun beating down on it and the microbes within it decomposing it. Cow and other herbivore shit is unlikely to make you sick though, it is incredibly well digested.

Well, horse shit is incredibly poorly digested, so poorly that it's basically just stinky straw, but I never got sick from using it as fertilizer either :)

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