Once again going from Collision Detection, here’s a bit of good news. Vestergaard Frandsen has prototyped (Can I verb that?) the LifeStraw™, a “straw” that contains a water purification filter. It’s 25 cm long and 29 mm in diameter—about an inch thick, in other words, which makes it less of a straw and more of a tube, but that’s scarcely the point). It appears to work (according to the manufacturers), and it looks like once they get manufacturing it would cost you a couple of hundred bucks to buy a carton which would keep a small village sipping for a year. My, my.
Let’s be clear. I’m not suggesting that the end of cholera is near, nor that this means that there will be no dysentery in Africa. That would be nice, but I don’t think it will happen in this generation. The existence of this thing doesn’t solve the distribution problems, the education problems, or the more basic clean water problems that are really causing the disease. But even if—and I will sound like an evil racist imperialist here, but—even if it’s just part of the Peace Corps kit, the Médecins Sans Frontières kit, the UNICEF kit that goes along with all of our affluent western do-gooders as they bring western relief to non-western folk, that would be an amazing thing. And, you know, what if, say, FEMA had a few hundred cartons of those things in a warehouse in Florida, just in case? I mean, if it wouldn’t interfere with anybody’s tax cut or anything. And look! A gratuitous internal capitalization! It makes me proud to be an American.
chazak, chazak, v’nitchazek,
-Vardibidian.
Excellent. A water filter which doesn’t have any mechanism for telling you when it’s no longer working, with no auto shut-off at end-of-life, and which depends on an internal brake that people will quickly learn to disable after which the filter is no longer effective. It encourages people to drink directly from hazardous water, setting up terrible habits. Backflow into a bowl or cup filled with acceptable water (and you know, some poor people have figured out — or even have ready access to — Stone Age utensils) after use in more hazardous water will make
the acceptable water hazardous. And by limiting itself to drinking water, the LifeStraw forces bathing to be done with hazardous water or with hazardous backflow, and the risks of transdermal uptake are significant for many pollutants. But, hey, it has a cool name and it’s cute!
Well, and I’m no expert, but I imagine the lack of auto-shutoff is a trade-off to make it cheap and electricity-free. They can (and probably will) make $30 ones for American hikers. And I’m not sure what your point is about encouraging people to drink from hazardous water. There are—what—a billion people who have no access to clean water; what kind of nasty habits do they have? And why on earth would you want to purify bath water through a straw?
Look, I’m not saying this is The Answer. This is clearly not The Answer. This is a way of dealing with a few of the symptoms of the problem for a few people while we all work on The Answer. But you seem to be implying that wide access to this thing would be worse than no access to it at all, and I find that … incomprehensible.
Thanks,
-V.
No, I’m saying that a real water filter is better than this thing. Auto-shutoffs don’t depend on electricity, they depend on a small gear.
You don’t want to purify bathing water through a straw. But you do want to purify it, and this thing gives you a tempting and utterly ineffective way to try to do that.
For people who boil their water to make it safer, I’d really rather not encourage them to use this thing instead.
If I were stuck in New Orleans or Darfur, I’d rather have this thing than nothing. But there’s no reason to force that to be the choice, and I do think it’s a terrible idea to give people a product that could kill them in an unknown but small number of months through a false sense of security, and that will displace better products.
This thing vs. nothing is a false choice. It’s this thing vs. a better thing (which doesn’t have to be much more expensive), or this thing which will become ineffective with no warning vs. boiling water which will continue to work, or this thing as a cheap sop to our consciences vs. actual remediation.
How many people has infant formula killed in Africa? But isn’t it better to offer infant formula than nothing?
OK, Michael, fine. The research company is eeeeevil, and they are trying to give everybody cholera. They deliberately removed the shut-off because it would slow down production. They will be handing out leaflets saying “Don’t boil water—sip it!” All of that is possible. None of it would even surprise me. It’s more or less what happened with infant formula, although I’ll point out that the infant formula thing was not coming at a moment when a billion infants didn’t have access to safe breast milk. There is a crisis at this point. But yes, perhaps widespread distribution of this stuff would lead to both the locals neglecting to boil water and the people who are funding research into real answers giving up.
But it’s also possible that is now something that there was not before, that is, a cheap and portable way to drink from a well with a good deal more safety than just dipping your cup in. If there are better products for this to displace, well, then I’m rooting for the better products. I’m sure as hell rooting for a better product to come out next month, or next year.
The question is not this thing versus nothing. But it seems likely to me that it is this thing and nothing while we wait for the better thing, which we hope is coming, too. In fact, it’s wait even for this thing, because it’s only a prototype.
Thanks,
-V.
But it’s also possible that is now something that there was not before, that is, a cheap and portable way to drink from a well with a good deal more safety than just dipping your cup in.
And if that were remotely true, I’d be cheering. Maybe it is, in which case Hallelujah!
But it’s as if portable water filters haven’t existed before now. Maybe I’m missing the big innovation in this product, but I see nothing that would make it cheaper to produce than any other water filter. This depends on suction instead of gravity to move the water. But gravity is essentially free. This has a size filter and an activated carbon filter, just like almost any current filter. This has an iodine matrix, and perhaps it’s a better or cheaper iodine matrix than the ones currently on the market. But there’s no reason that a better iodine matrix, if it is better, has to be part of this particular product.
A friend of mine used to do design and field work in drinking water remediation in third world areas. I’ve heard lots about the horrors of not having clean water, and my objections do not come from a lack of sympathy for people who have no clean water. I don’t think the research company is eeeeevil; I think they had a cute idea (hide the filter inside a straw) that has some serious drawbacks.
(And to correct an earlier statement of mine, I’d prefer to have nothing over this product. I forgot that my shellfish allergy means this product is a very bad idea for me.)