Microbes

I was in Ecuador and there was a warning posted in the airport that people should boil or treat their water before drinking it. The warning was in Spanish and I don't speak Spanish, but my travel companion noticed and told me. Later in the trip we stopped at a farm that grows sugarcane and coffee. The farmer had a small still that he would used to make sugarcane moonshine. For some reason we were talking about the water boil notice, and the guy at the still told me that if I got a stomach bug all I had to do to cure it was to drink a cup of his moonshine and then eat a spoonful of sand. I questioned how this could possibly work, and he told me that the microbes in your stomach all get drunk off the moonshine and then throw rocks at each other.