ABSTRACT
When three-year-old Becky Furmann got the “poopies” and became dehydrated, her doctor urged her to drink water. He had no way of knowing that water had caused the rare illness that would kill her. As the chubby blond child grew thin and pale, her sufferings were finally confirmed as the ravages of Cryptosporidium parvum, a parasite almost unheard of until April 1993, when it slipped through one of the two modern filtration plants in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and entered the city’s water supply. Becky had been born with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which weakened her immune system, yet she had seemed otherwise healthy until then. Cryptosporidiosis sealed her fate. “She tries to ask us to kiss it and make it better, and we can’t,” said her father, near the end.
