Brain dead approaches to risk management

Brain eating diseases . Waterborne diseases are real,  but don't panic . ( the list in my old animal health books  is huge ) Several children have died because of protozoa infections in one area of QLD  featured on ABC this week  .

As the excellent review on Aust Story suggests - people in that area should have known.    There is something wrong with the way we do things in health care .
Engineers and contract managers would be surprised to learn that it was often  them and their non ecological non diverse approach to problem solving.


One of the costs of widespread panic about big risks ion our community has been a loss of awareness that most risk is highly localized,  and we used to deal with it that way-- that's why there used to more of us out there looking after your water . Thinking global , not local is distracting  but its the heresy and fanaticism of our age .
The agency that took over my job of identifying high risk areas has a one size fits all approach  ( they try to deny this of course ) which means certified concrete tanks and filters  beds and chlorination  will fix the problem ( they engineer around the issue approach - reactive overengineered and hardly ecological ; not as preventative big picture focused )

As any fool knows there are more ways to skin a cat than that,.--- efficient money saving ways
After all  chlorination may only half kill protozoa and the dying  debris may be worse for you to eat than the living (  the etiology of what killed the children is well known,  but it  is complex with filtering desirable as well ) .
For us to deal with the resulting acidity from chlorination means  the agency pours heaps of slimy calcium and other  salts into your water just so you are safe to drink a mere drop in a million that pour through your house in a day.
Site Specific methods would help both prevent and treat the risks  but no .....we have to have the over engineered one size fits all approach . There is comfort in cost , but it can be false comfort and high cost -- its certainly is in our microbe rich environment so its not really not what makes ecological  - let alone total risk and economic sense :  the agency gets complacent ; we get complacent .

Its true ,,,protozoa are in the water and we mostly live with them by being exposed to them in right context .
Chlorination doesn't solve all problems . If you don't want to oxidize your oats and your throats in the morning,   drink out of a bottle or a jug ( not straight from the pipe ) - residual chlorine  is a sterile  and isolationist way to live your life. You are after an animal that's supposed to living flora in your gut .  

Remember you heard it first at Emperors Academy 

Get onto your polys and stop them trying to be so efficient they leave the efficient place driven consensus ( horses for courses)  of ecosystems out of the equation.
http://ecomia.blogspot.com