"Cynic" wrote in message
...
When I was a child the main drainage dyke from the nearby town ran past
our village into the tidal river. Many houses along the way simply piped
wc effluent straight into the dyke, as did most of the houses in the town
although a lot of houses had chemical toilets still.
As children we donned Wellington boots and caught sticklebacks in jam jars
in the dyke. Even at that age we knew what the bits of paper and brown
lumps were. We avoided them. Somehow no one caught any interesting
diseases despite the dire warnings from parents. We built up immunity.

And yet clean water saved countless infant mortalitys.