GLOBAL: LifeStraw water purifier grows into family size

NEW YORK, 4 February 2008 (IRIN) - LifeStraw began when a young Danish graduate, whose family owned a small textile company, took a trip in the 1990s around Africa, where contaminated water claims hundreds of thousands of lives each year. Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen started to think how he could put the family company to good use for the people of Africa. The result was LifeStraw, a cheap, portable personal water purifier, cited by Forbes Magazine in 2006 as “one of the 10 things that will change the way we live”.

Made of polystyrene, the 31cm long, 2.9cm diametre, 150g tube, which looks like a flute and can be hung around the neck, uses filters to kill or remove 99.9 percent of waterborne bacteria and 98.7 percent of waterborne viruses, and requires no electricity or spare parts during its year-long lifetime, powered by sucking alone. It costs about US$4 and has a purification volume of 700l. The product contains a special halogenated resin that kills bacteria and viruses on contact.

“It turned out to be a giant hit and we ended up selling 23 million of these pipe filters to the Carter Center,” Vestergaard Frandsen spokesman Peter Cleary told IRIN by telephone.

Now the Vestergaard Frandsen Group will start rolling out a stationary LifeStraw Family version that will provide clean drinking water for up to 18 months.

It is estimated that 1.1 billion people lack access to safe drinking water and that 1.8 million die annually from preventable water-borne diseases such as diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid and e-coli.

There are 200,000 LifeStraw units in use in dozens of countries in Africa, the Middle East and Asia today, purchased and distributed by partner groups such as the Red Cross, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), Rotary International and IMA World Health, a Protestant Christian organisation, according to Cleary.

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