A $3 Water Purifier That Could Save Lives

By Donald G. McNeil Jr.
The New York Times

Tuesday 10 October 2006

In very poor countries, the family that has to walk miles to fetch drinking water from a well or a stream may be the lucky one. In many villages, the water source is a filthy pond trod by animals and people, or a mud puddle out next to the yam field.

As a result, about 6,000 people a day - most of them children - die from water-borne diseases.

Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish textile company that supplies water filters to the Carter Center guinea worm eradication program and mosquito-killing plastic tarps to refugee camps, has come up with a new invention meant to render dangerous water drinkable.

The invention is called Lifestraw, a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.

Lifestraw isn't perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 percent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea.

It is less effective against viruses, which are much smaller and cause diseases like polio and hepatitis, and it wouldn't protect American backpackers against the parasite giardia.

Nor does it filter out metals like arsenic, and it has a slight iodine aftertaste (not necessarily a bad thing in the large stretches of the globe with iodine deficiency).

It can be manufactured for about $3, but it needs more field-testing. Only about 100,000 have been handed out, 70,000 to earthquake victims in Kashmir last year.

Already in the works, however, is a Lifestraw toddler version - which will be squeezable.

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Rising Seas Could Leave Millions Homeless in Asia
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/101006EA.shtml
Millions of people could become homeless in the Asia-Pacific region by 2070 due
to rising sea levels, with Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, China and Pacific islands
most at risk, says Australia's top scientific body. Global warming could cause
sea levels to rise by up to six inches by 2030 and up to 19 inches by 2070.

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George Monbiot | Our Rivers Are Starting to Run Dry
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/101006EB.shtml
Monbiot says that a new report on rainfall and evaporation under global warming
may be the most important science report of the year. While climate scientists
have been predicting that the wet parts of the world are likely to become wetter
and the dry parts drier, they had assumed that overall rainfall would rise, as
higher temperatures increase evaporation. But the new paper's "drought index"
covers both rainfall and evaporation: overall, the world becomes drier.

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Earth's Ecological Debt Crisis
http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/101006EC.shtml
Evidence is mounting that rapid population growth and rising living standards
among the Earth's six billion inhabitants are putting an intolerable strain on
nature. For the first time, a British think-tank has sought to pinpoint how
quickly man is using the global resources of farmland, forests, fish, air and
energy.