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Orcs gotta drink, don't they? Perhaps they had a higher tolerance for e-coli, dysentery, cholera and other waterborne diseases. Perhaps Tolkien was thinking of the Thames, which supposedly looked black and sorcerous until health reforms reduced dumping of human waste, animal offal and manufacturing slag over the last 100 years:
"The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid...surely the river which flows for so many miles through London ought not to be allowed to become a fermenting sewer." -- Michael Faraday, The Times, 1855
'...a dank, stinking sludge, the scene of murders and crime'. -- Charles Dickens
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And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously into her geography revision.
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