Clean Water

A path breaking research by Dr Theresa Dankovich has led to the development of a book that is capable of filtering and cleaning murky waters to achieve 99.9 percent purity. Post doctoral student Dankovich from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh came up with the idea when she was pursuing PhD at Mcgill University in Canada while studying the properties of paper.

All a person has to do is tear a page from the book and place it in a filter holder. Whenever one pours water through it, the paper filters the dirt and bacteria and releases clean water. The page can filter up to 26 gallons (100 litres) of drinking water. The book on the other hand can filter a person’s water need for four years.

The book has been tested for purity in South Africa, Ghana and Bangladesh. The results of the trials were announced at the 250^th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society in Boston. In these trials the bacteria count in water samples came down by 99 percent on an average. The pages of the book consist of bacteria killing silver and copper nanoparticles. The book is highly inexpensive and it will be a boon for countries with high levels of impure water. 88 percent cases of diarrhoea around the world are water borne which results in 1.5 million deaths annually.