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, has come up with a new invention meant to render dangerous water drinkable.

The invention is called Life-straw, 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 per cent 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. It does not filter out metals like arsenic, and it has a slight iodine aftertaste (not necessarily a bad thing in the large stretches of the globe where people have iodine deficiency).

Source and more info: thestar