playstation60

I am searching for a common microbe or natural organism that is found in both a city's water supply and also the human body. The purpose of the organism is to be nothing more than food for a viral agent to be introduced into the water supply. The viral agent is going to be made up, so I don't neccessarily need anyone to tell me if it is currently possible or not. Just a common link between water and the human body, if you would.



Ben

Ilan Bouchard

Well... water supplies generally have water, and the human body definitely does. I guess that's a link.

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Nimbus1944

E. Coli and cryptosporidium are commonly mentioned hazards.

Try http://www.home-water-purifiers-and-...ntaminants.php.

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teflon

Many bacteria have wind-borne spores that could be blown out of manhole covers.

Of course your peotic license can have a bacteria engineered to be resilient to one thing in particular but then it mutates in an unpredictable way and survives the aeration process at the waste treatment plant. The spores could be wind-blown to the nearby city, or picked up by crows. Or the bacteria could be delivered by a flood, a tornado, etc The imagination is endless.

river-wind

Bacteria usually need a specific environment to survive - that environment is specific to the species. A bacteria that has evolved to live in a fresh-water stream will die in seconds if placed in the open ocean. Bacteria living deep in a cave will die if presented to the sun.

Even if a bacterium can live in an animal or plant, *and* it encounters one, most bacteria can only live in a certain species - most cat illnesses can't transfer to humans, and vise-versa.
Extremeophiles are a group of bacteria species which thrive in high heat, or in high chemical consentrations (like the dead sea's high salt consentration); in environments where most other bacteria would die.
The downside to this is that these bactria die when placed into a 'normal' environment.

For the most part, bacteria that like to live inside the human body (constant, warm, saltwater mixture), will have a very hard time surviving in a city water supply.
However, certain bacteria can go into a hibernation mode(spore); most of the water is expelled from the cell, the cell memberane folds up on itself, and the metabolism is reduced to near 0 - the bacterial cell becomes like a rock. Some species of bacteria have been revived after a few hundred years buried in an archeological site, and are now alive and kicking...

When species like ecoli, etc, are mentioned in "water contaminents", it is usually because the bacteria is still living in some sort of biological medium - tissue, fecal matter, etc, which is in the water supply. A single ecoli cell would not survive in open water, but a thousand ecoli baterium in a chunk of fetal runoff from a farm will survive quite nicely.
This is why flooding is such a dangerous thing - not only can it drown people and destroy buildings, but it can backup sewage lines, dump raw waste and dead animals, etc, all over the place. Even after the water is gone, illness dangers can remain for weeks, if not months.

So if you want a bacteria in the water supply that can then also survive in a human body, you would most likely need to go with one of the following options:
1)bacteria that is able to go into a VERY strong spore sleep.
2)contamination of the water supply beyond the point that normal sanitation measures can cope.
3)sci-fi level of a 'mutated super bug' that avoids being killed by chlorine/floride/any other additive to the water supply

teflon

Also check out the episode of The Twilight Zone where anthrax is carried in goat's wool in the major suburban area.

I think you have limitless options as to the carrier, to the capability of the strain, that of the new, mutated strain, of the human reaction or inertia and political assumptions playing into preventive efforts.

But most of all, Google "bacteria" in conjunction with "vector" or "exotic" "resistance" "strain" "type"

mammamaia

the human body is actually something like 80% water, so if that's not enough of a link, i don't know what would be!

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Philo

It sounds like you're looking for something the made up viral agent is going to consume and presumably its doing that in the city water supply buut once it gets into the people it continues to eat up whatever that common link is and therefore threatens the population.

I think you first have to figure out what viruses live on, although I think as others have said, it may be hard to find a virus that can live outside a host. So you may be dealling with a bacterial agent and again I don't know what they feed on.

A link between water and humans makes me think of cholera which is a disease I believe caused by bacteria in the water supply.